Adam Bell has a question that sounds almost too plain for a boardroom: Is this a good company to do business with? The twist is that he wants marketers to ask a machine. Type the company name into an AI engine, pose the question a prospective customer actually cares about, and study the verdict. The answer may be assembled from a corporate site, a skeptical review, a press clipping and somebody's LinkedIn post. It may be fair, flat or simply wrong. It will still shape the introduction.
That is the contemporary edge of Bell's job as Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer at Arbor Realty Trust, the New York-based multifamily and commercial real estate lender. Arbor's business runs on large numbers, long relationships and consequential decisions. The smallest loans it advertises begin around $1 million. Its offerings stretch from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agency programs to bridge lending, construction finance and single-family rental portfolios. A stray adjective in an AI answer can carry more weight here than it might for a sneaker or a soda.
This also makes his story less about a single campaign than about the changing shape of the profession. Bell has watched the corporate website go from destination to one input among many. He has watched customer data become abundant, personalization become automated and reputation become something software can summarize on demand. Each transition promises speed. Each creates a fresh need for judgment.
Bell arrived at Arbor in 2024 with more than 25 years in marketing. His mandate connects the language of brand to the arithmetic of originations: lead marketing and communications, expand industry presence, improve acquisition and retention, and help the organization grow. That is a remarkably concrete description of a CMO's work. Attention matters, but it eventually has to become a relationship and, sometimes, a loan.
The web was once a project
Bell's career began when companies could still treat the internet as a discrete assignment. He worked in internet project management at Texaco and did consulting work connected with IBM and Computer Graphic Resources. He later moved through web development and technology leadership at St. John's University. The progression matters because it placed him close to the machinery before “digital” expanded into a catchall strategy word.
A former colleague, Larry Roth, remembered Bell at Texaco and St. John's as an operator who defined deliverables, gathered supporting data and set a long-term strategy. Roth also described him managing dozens of concurrent, sometimes interdependent projects while building consensus among people with different needs. It is a portrait of the job beneath the job title: marketing leadership as organized cooperation.
At Mastercard, Bell's scope became global. He held senior roles in digital communication and global digital marketing during a roughly decade-long chapter. The institution was different, but the central puzzle remained: how do you make an enormous and technical system feel legible to the person using it? He later worked with data-trust company Trūata, then joined Customers Bank in July 2021 as Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing. He would become the bank's CMO.
Data with a pulse
Bell joined Customers Bank during an unusual passage. The pandemic had forced small businesses to change quickly, and the bank had become deeply involved in the Paycheck Protection Program. It was processing enormous volumes of loans and learning about borrowers whose circumstances could shift between one data refresh and the next. A customer record had stopped looking like a permanent fact. It was a moving picture.
In a 2022 discussion about customer-data platforms, Bell argued for continual refinement and cleansing. A business that had its lights on yesterday might be fighting for survival today, or ready for a new opportunity tomorrow. The bank's job was not merely to collect more information. It was to understand the customer's current predicament well enough to offer something useful.
“Empathy is about trying to understand your customers and building trust with them.”Adam Bell, on personalization
His metaphor for the work was a Disney story: begin with the protagonist's difficulty, understand what they are going through, then help them move toward a better outcome. The comparison is playful, but the operating principle is rigorous. Data supplies the details. Empathy gives them meaning. Technology delivers the experience. If one piece is missing, personalization becomes a mail merge wearing an expensive suit.
The same approach informed Customers Bank's brand work. Bell's team did not start with a logo debate. It asked whether employees cared about the bank, why outsiders should care, what people said about it and whether the institution felt inspiring. The research collected conversations and stories before it tested colors and marks. Bell summarized the posture with a compact line: “We may be small, but we have punch.”
Keep the customer record current. Circumstances change faster than static segments.
Find the human predicament inside the data, not just the next available attribute.
Build the journey and its measures before reaching for the keyboard.
Send something relevant enough to strengthen trust, not merely prove the tool works.
The algorithm at the handshake
At Arbor, Bell is applying that instinct to a new intermediary. Search once organized links; generative engines now compose answers. A customer can ask about a lender's reputation and receive a confident paragraph before visiting the lender's site. The machine has effectively stepped into the first handshake, carrying a synthetic summary of everything it found.
This is not a tidy extension of search-engine optimization. A financial brand has compliance obligations, complicated products and a reputation that can change the temperature of a deal. The CMO cannot simply stuff the desired adjectives into a webpage and wait. The answer is produced from a wider public record, where favorable corporate language sits beside employee commentary, media coverage and one-star complaints.
Bell's recommended test is useful because it refuses the comforting question. Do not begin by asking whether the engine can repeat the company description. Ask whether the resulting answer would make someone want to work with the firm. Then investigate why the machine reached its conclusion. Accuracy is the floor; trust is the actual issue.
“It's frightening to be in front of a board and have to say, ‘Well, the engines didn't get it right.’”Adam Bell, at INDEX '26
The line captures the new accountability. A machine's error may not belong to marketing, but the consequences can land there. Bell's answer is neither denial nor magic prompt craft. It is an audit: find where the brand's trust lives, examine the material machines are reading and make the public narrative more accurate and coherent. This turns AI visibility into an operating discipline that touches communications, customer experience, recruiting and leadership.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the arc. Early in Bell's career, the internet was a project that needed a manager. Now the internet is an ambient witness, and its machines have begun writing the introduction. The skills that survive the change are less glamorous than the technology: define the outcome, clean the data, understand the audience, coordinate the institution and measure what follows.
A marketer in the loan business
Arbor's product catalog can sound like alphabet soup: DUS, Optigo, FHA, CMBS, mezzanine debt. Bell's role is partly translation, but translation alone undersells it. The buyer is making a high-stakes financial decision. They need clarity about the product, confidence in the institution and evidence that the people across the table understand the asset and the moment.
That is where Bell's varied path starts to look coherent. Energy companies taught the web-project discipline. A university demanded consensus across constituencies. Mastercard brought global scale. Customers Bank made changing customer data immediate. Adro, where he serves as an advisory board member, keeps him connected to a fintech product designed around the practical needs of international students. Arbor brings those strands into a relationship-heavy corner of finance.
His stated passion joins customer experience, design thinking and technology in pursuit of growth. Many companies split those ideas into different teams and calendars. Bell's career suggests they are one system. Design gives the experience shape. Technology carries it. Data shows who is there. Empathy decides whether the result deserves attention.
The modern first impression may be generated, but it is still built from human choices: what a company publishes, how it serves, what its employees say, and whether its claims survive contact with experience. Bell's work sits in that chain. He is not trying to make a machine sound enthusiastic. He is trying to make a complicated institution clear enough that the machine, and the customer behind it, can reach a fair conclusion.