Brand Building and Customer-Centric Marketing at Attentive

·49 min·4 clips

Keri McGee reveals how forgetting the customer during Zillow's hypergrowth led to costly marketing failures.

This episode features host Jeremy Bergeron interviewing Keri McGee, the Chief Marketing Officer of Attentive, a company specializing in personalized mobile messaging and email for brands. McGee discusses her marketing philosophy and leadership lessons drawn from her experience at high-growth companies like Zillow and Attentive. She emphasizes that the core of effective marketing is consistently prioritizing the customer's perspective in all strategic decisions. McGee shares a key lesson from her time at Zillow, where rapid growth sometimes led teams to follow the loudest voice instead of customer needs. She advocates for using detailed customer personas, like "Beth the buyer," to anchor product and marketing discussions. As a CMO, she balances immediate revenue demands with long-term brand building, noting brand budgets are often the first cut during economic downturns. McGee explains that building trust with other executives requires deliberate one-on-one relationship building and aligning marketing goals with company-wide objectives. A surprising insight is her deepened partnership with the finance team to build predictive models for customer retention, a non-traditional marketing metric. McGee stays current on tech trends by following industry publications, LinkedIn, and internal blogs, and she consults closely with her CTO. Attentive is expanding from its retail and e-commerce core into food, beverage, travel, and sports, like serving MLB teams. She argues that AI, when fed proper data and brand voice, can replicate the personalized feel of an in-store salesperson at scale. McGee uses AI tools like Riter for copy generation and LLMs to summarize meetings and draft communications, saving significant time. She believes AI augments human creativity rather than replacing roles, freeing teams for higher-level strategic thinking. Her personal drive stems from a competitive athletic background and a curiosity for continuous learning instilled by her father. McGee actively practices disconnecting from work to maintain balance. The tone is conversational and educational, blending a high-level strategic discussion with practical leadership advice. Marketing leaders, CMOs, and business owners interested in customer-centric strategy, AI implementation, and executive leadership would find this episode valuable. Listeners seeking technical deep-dives into AI algorithms or critiques of marketing technology might find it less relevant.

As heard by us

A grounded look at AI-powered personalization and the human touch behind it.

Keri McGee frames the core tension in modern marketing well: AI, brand voice, and customer data only work together when they feel coherent on the consumer side.

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Why you'd press play

If you want AI marketing that still feels one-to-one, start here.

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