Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins
Each week, marketing maestro Seth Matlins is joined by the most influential thinkers across business and culture for unvarnished, actionable, and frequently irreverent conversations on the forces that shape how value is either created or destroyed. From product decisions, supply chain, and capital allocation, to cultural and economic shifts, competitive dynamics, technological disruptions, and internal structure – each one is a marketing force, affecting whether value is created or not, and whether a customer stays or goes. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Create or Destroy is the show that argues they’ve always been the same thing. From the V...
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen on The True Math of Value Creation
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen calls herself a "painter with an abacus"—which might just be the most perfect shorthand for what a modern marketing leader should be. She grew up writing advertising jingles at the kitchen table with her father, a creative director at DDB, and her mother, a speech and language teacher. This unique combination of rigorous quantitative training and a deep passion for artistic expression runs through Jessica's leadership journey across six massive companies—BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and LinkedIn—and informs every part of this conversation. Jessica observes that the fastest path to value destru...
Gary Vaynerchuk: Fighting Your Customer Never Creates Value
Gary Vaynerchuk was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Coinbase, and Uber, founded VaynerMedia, and is one of the most recognizable voices in marketing and business. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and Seth get into what Gary has learned from sitting across from hundreds of founders about the patterns separating value creators from capital destroyers (including the answer he rarely gives publicly about what connects every investment decision he's ever said yes to), what nine years of stagnation at Twitter reveals about how enterprises destroy value, why Apple's run under Tim Cook is both a masterclass and a...
Zoe Scaman on The Unseen Source of Value Destruction
For this episode, Seth sits down with strategist Zoe Scaman, who has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga5, Lego, Netflix, L'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic. Their conversation covers a lot of ground from why brands don't create meaning but rather create the conditions for it; why misaligned incentives are the single biggest source of value destruction; why she believes executive leadership is good at spotting what could create value but almost universally unwilling to examine what's destroying it; and Zoe’s perspective on why the current race toward AI adoption is ho...
Kraken's Mayur Gupta, on Creating Value When Product Isn’t Enough
Mayur Gupta is an engineer who spent eight years writing code before he ever touched marketing, and that beginning shapes everything about how he thinks about value. Across 26 years at Spotify, Kimberly Clark, Gannett, and now as Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kraken, he's lived the same inflection point repeatedly, the moment a product-led company that grew to enormous scale without traditional marketing finds growth slowing and has to build a function the enterprise never needed before, justify the spend to people who have evidence they can grow without it, and prove that every dollar creates value on...
Qualcomm's Don McGuire, on How A Narrative Shift Created 89% More Value
In Silicon Valley, value can be created or destroyed with every new technology and product innovation. Over his career, Don McGuire, EVP and CMO of Qualcomm, has seen waves of value creation and destruction.
From Don’s POV and experience, the most significant destructive force in tech comes from complacency – companies wary of disrupting short-term profits trot out the same gameplan quarter after quarter. As a result, they stop innovating, fail to adapt outdated product strategies, and miss critical technological inflection points. Former industry leaders like Blackberry and Nokia are case studies in how market dominance can slip...
Adobe's Lara Balazs On Orchestrating Value Creation
This week, one of the central ideas of Create or Destroy gets flipped: namely, that product is marketing. Every single product decision is ultimately a marketing decision, and it either contributes to value creation or value destruction.
Lara Balazs, Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, agrees with that thesis, but says we need to think of marketing as product too. And like a physical or digital product, you have to "ship" your stories and narratives to create true meaning and relevance with your customers. Lara speaks from a heralded track record of driving...
Paulie Dery on Why Every Decision is a Brand Decision
From Yeti to Uber and now as CMO of global wellness company AG1, Paulie Dery has built value for companies whose products could easily be commoditized, but weren’t. Having started his career on the agency side as a copywriter, Paulie understands that to stand out in a sea of competitors, you need a strong brand and creative, to maintain customer trust and to instill pride in the building. A strong brand allows performance to take care of itself at a much lower investment. And failing to maintain the brand destroys value, diminishing the product, and diminishing the pricing po...
Soyoung Kang on the Architecture of Value Creation
Well before she was CMO, and now President, of eos Products, Soyoung Kang was an architecture student at MIT, where, she tells Seth, she learned less about buildings and more about how people move through space. She's been applying that same lens to building value creation systems ever since, across a career taking her from BCG to retail operations at Victoria’s Secret and Bath and Body Works, to leading a brand and business turnaround as eos's first CMO. The throughline is her conviction that value gets created when you design every decision around how your customer experiences what yo...
David Axelrod on How to Rebuild the American Brand
Fundamentally, a political campaign isn’t all that different from a business – it’s an enterprise where every decision either builds value with voters or destroys it, and the voters are customers who only get to buy what you're selling, on just one day.
This week’s guest is legendary political strategist David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s chief strategist and senior advisor. Currently he’s a senior political commentator for CNN, and the co-host of the Hacks on Tap podcast. In over 140 elections, Axelrod has shaped the story of a candidate and the choice voters face in the...
Nick Tran on How One Marketing Decision Created More Value Than Any Campaign
Nick Tran has been one of global marketing's most influential voices for over a decade, from Taco Bell to Hulu and serving as TikTok's first Global CMO when it became Ad Age's Marketer of the Year. Now, as both President and CMO of the joint venture relaunching Cîroc Vodka and Lobos 1707, he's rebuilding a brand whose defining association became a liability while scaling another. For Nick, the value creation equation can look different from the CMO's and President's seats, even if maybe they shouldn’t, and often requires unlearning and breaking old models.
From W...
Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins
It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing is the show that argues they’ve always been the same thing. Coming Tuesday, May 12.
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