Chad Sollis has a theory about marketing, although he tends to phrase it like an operator: find where the journey breaks. A campaign can be clever, a product handsome, and a dashboard green. If the customer cannot finish the job, the rest is expensive scenery. This idea has followed him from Overstock.com's early e-commerce machinery through Omniture and Adobe, into smart homes and connected grills, and now to AudioEye, where the broken journey is often one that a marketer never thought to test.
Sollis is the chief marketing officer there, responsible for brand, product marketing, growth, revenue operations, and customer engagement. It is a wide brief, but wide briefs are something of a specialty. Over 24 years he has moved through creative direction, analytics, demand generation, revenue operations, product experience, and technology leadership. His résumé has fewer walls than the average org chart.
That matters because digital accessibility is routinely stranded between departments. Legal sees exposure. Engineering sees tickets. Design sees standards. Marketing may see a line at the bottom of a launch checklist. Sollis sees a customer who arrived, encountered a door that would not open, and left. Put that way, accessibility stops sounding like administrative weather and starts sounding like a familiar business problem.
“The single most important thing you can do is understand your audience - understand your buyer.”Chad Sollis
The attribution habit
His appetite for whole journeys showed up early. At Omniture, where he led global interactive marketing and revenue operations, Sollis and Mikel Chertudi developed a system for measuring marketing across channels. The patent describes first touches, last touches, retouches, and the aggregated influence of every campaign attached to an account. Filed in 2008 and granted in 2017, it attempted to replace the marketer's hopeful shrug with evidence that could survive a conversation with sales.
The document is dry in the noble tradition of patents, but its premise is lively: outcomes rarely have a single parent. A customer may see an ad, read a white paper, attend an event, ignore three emails, and finally talk to sales. Giving all the credit to the final click makes for a clean chart and a poor explanation. Sollis's later career kept widening the frame in much the same way.
Overstock
Omniture / Adobe
Vivint / Domo
Pluralsight / Traeger
AudioEye
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009, and Sollis continued the work inside a larger machine. Then came Vivint, where he has said the digital business grew to 35 percent of overall revenue. Domo and Pluralsight brought senior demand and revenue-operations roles. At Strala, a marketing-data startup, the title moved into product and technology. At Traeger, the remit became global digital product and experience, including connected consumer products and the app around the grill.
The corporate ledger is tidy enough: experience at companies ranging from roughly $30 million to $3 billion in annual revenue, leadership during four growth-stage IPOs, and work spanning business software and consumer goods. The more revealing achievement is fluency. Sollis can move from a campaign's economics to a product's interface without waiting for a translator.
The rhino has entered the meeting
Then there is the rhino. In Oceanside, California, amid an open-air market, live music, and an abundance of food, Sollis spotted a tank top declaring that “Chubby Unicorns need love too.” The image stuck. He borrowed it for Chubby Unicorns, the advisory practice he ran between Traeger and AudioEye and still identifies as his own.
It is a rare executive brand with both a joke and a point. Technology keeps the unicorn as its imaginary mascot; the rhino is what turns up after the pitch deck has met gravity. Sollis describes the name as part startup folklore, part “dad bod” truth, and part insistence that memorable experiences require some personality. He uses a rhino emoji in his LinkedIn name. His consulting site promises expertise for boards and operating teams, then warns that its contact form may receive a leisurely reply. LinkedIn, it says, works better.
The playfulness does not soften his opinions. In a recent note on the fashionable title “GTM Engineer,” Sollis argued that experienced operations teams had built programmatic workflows, enrichment, personalization, and cross-platform integrations for years. Better tools have widened access to that power, he wrote, but power enlarges the blast radius. “Experience still matters. Context still matters. Judgment still matters.” It is the view of someone who likes automation and has also cleaned up after it.
A larger definition of conversion
Sollis's route to AudioEye was not purely theoretical. He has described watching a large commerce brand deal with the impact of a digital-accessibility lawsuit. The episode changed the category in his mind. Accessibility was still a matter of standards and risk, but it was also evidence of a failed experience. The marketing team had paid to bring people to a place some of them could not use.
His public case now begins with customers. Someone navigating by keyboard can reach checkout and still be unable to complete it. A screen-reader user can encounter a product image without a useful description. A form can look perfectly ordinary while withholding its purpose from assistive technology. These are technical defects, legal risks, and conversion leaks at once. The departments may be separate; the person meeting the barrier is not.
“Marketers spend millions chasing personalization, yet most ignore the one feature that personalizes every single experience: accessibility.”Chad Sollis
This is also where Sollis refuses the convenient robot. Automated testing can identify and fix a meaningful share of problems at scale, but he does not present it as a complete answer. His preferred model combines automation with expert review, integration into the software-development process, and input from people with disabilities. The arrangement is less magical than a one-line script. It is also more honest about a changing website, where every release can create fresh barriers.
AI raises the stakes. It lets small teams produce pages, interfaces, and content at a rate that was recently impossible. If accessibility is absent from those systems, speed compounds the omission. Sollis's warning is not anti-AI. He says he uses it daily. It is anti-amnesia: a faster tool does not relieve its operator of context, and generated code does not arrive with a conscience.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. Early in his career, Sollis worked on attribution because marketing could see activity but not the whole path to revenue. At AudioEye, he is asking companies to see another incomplete path: the visitor who was counted as traffic, perhaps even targeted as a segment, but could not become a customer because the experience excluded them. Both problems reward the same habit. Follow the journey beyond the flattering metric.
Make the work answerable to a person
Sollis studied general business and accounting at Brigham Young University before transferring to the University of Utah. Unsatisfied with the standard programs available, he designed an undergraduate course of study combining information systems, accounting, and computer science, including upper-division and some graduate-level work. It sounds, in retrospect, like an early refusal to choose between the spreadsheet, the system, and the code.
That refusal became a career. Creativity without measurement can become decoration. Measurement without product understanding can optimize the wrong thing. Product without an account of who can use it can turn ambition into a locked door. Sollis has occupied each of those rooms, and his clearest ideas come from leaving their doors open.
The same pattern appears in how former colleagues describe his teams. Erica Miller, who worked with him on digital content and A/B testing, recalls a manager who paired marketing expertise with emotional intelligence and made it safe to explore large ideas. Another colleague, Jamie Harper, points to “Extreme Ownership” and a culture of personal commitment. There is an operator's lesson tucked inside those compliments. Experiments require psychological room as well as statistical discipline. People have to be able to suggest the odd variation, watch it lose, learn why, and return to the next test without turning the dashboard into a courtroom. Sollis's public impatience with empty fashion is matched by an appetite for useful curiosity.
He says what fires him up is growing businesses meaningfully, profitably, and efficiently. Those adverbs do more work than the verb. Growth alone is easy to worship and difficult to live with. Meaning asks who benefits. Profit asks whether the system endures. Efficiency asks whether effort reaches an outcome. Accessibility brings all three into the same uncomfortable meeting.
There will always be a new marketing label, a fresher dashboard, and a machine promising to remove the troublesome human from the loop. Sollis, who has spent his career installing the machinery, keeps returning to the human anyway. The customer is not the final cell in the funnel. The customer is the reason the funnel exists. Even a chubby unicorn can see the difference.