The old marketing dashboard still adds up. That is precisely the trouble. At Canto, Erica Gunn watched paid-search cost per lead double over roughly two and a half years while web traffic fell nearly 40 percent. A tidy reading said the marketing team had become less efficient. Gunn’s reading began somewhere less comfortable: the market had changed, the customer journey had moved, and the spreadsheet was recording only the part of the trip that still passed beneath its window.
AI-powered search now answers questions that once sent a buyer to a software company’s website. Prospects can compare products, absorb category language and form a shortlist before a conventional analytics tool sees them. For a chief marketing officer, that creates an awkward boardroom scene. The numbers are real, but their old meaning has expired.
Gunn’s response is revealing. She says she spends less time squeezing marketing into finance’s vocabulary and more time teaching colleagues how marketing’s environment works. Competitive spending, shifts in search behavior and category-wide cost trends arrive before the defense of any single campaign. Context first, arithmetic second. It is the move of someone who learned the company as a system before she made marketing her title.
The point is not that measurement stopped mattering. Gunn’s argument is that leaders must explain when the measurement environment itself has shifted.
The advantage of refusing one lane
Gunn did not begin with a marketing pedigree polished for a future CMO biography. She earned a political science degree at The George Washington University, followed by a master’s degree in education. Her working life moved through business development, operations, IT and product development. It crossed nonprofit work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, enterprise software at Planview, the orchestration of marketing operations at Nordstrom, and product marketing and marketing leadership at Workfront and Adobe.
The itinerary sounds restless only if a career must behave like a railway. Gunn treats the variation as an education in how a business fits together. Operations shows where work jams. IT shows what the tools permit. Product work forces a close encounter with what customers buy. Retail adds speed, taste and the uncompromising deadline of the season. Nonprofit experience changes the cast of stakeholders. Marketing connects all of it to a person with a problem.
Her jobs have placed her near high-level political figures, in interviews with major-company CEOs, at New York fashion shows, on commercial sets and on work trips across Europe. None of those scenes looks much like a taxonomy field or a paid-search report. Together they trained a useful executive reflex: look at a situation from more than one chair.
“It’s part creative, part strategy, and mostly about connecting with people.”Erica Gunn on the work of marketing
A live broadcast and the danger of a tidy no
The lesson arrived early and loudly. Gunn was working on an international business summit where a panel would speak several languages. The audience had translation headsets; the booths serving television media did not. A large outlet needed the translated audio for a live program bound for American viewers. Gunn checked with the translation service. Media translation was outside the contract. She told the producer it could not be done.
The producer understood the consequence more vividly: an hour of television that much of the audience could not understand. A studio manager called and made the stakes unmistakable. Gunn went back to the translation team, arranged a quick contract addendum and secured the English feed before the panel began.
She can laugh about it now, but she kept the bruise of the insight. A technically correct answer can still be an abysmal customer experience. The contract described the vendor’s obligation; it did not solve the broadcaster’s problem. Gunn learned to occupy the customer’s seat before allowing process to close the case.
There is a straight line from that control booth to her current role at Canto, a company that helps organizations centralize, organize and distribute digital assets. A creative team asking for the current image, the approved logo or the licensed video does not care that a system has faithfully preserved every version. It cares whether the right one can be found before the deadline.
AI makes the mess before it cleans it
Generative AI gave marketers a faster production line. It also gave them a warehouse problem. More copy, images and variations mean more versions, rights, approvals, expiration dates and regional adaptations. In Gunn’s recent account of marketing content, the challenge is not merely generating an asset. It is surfacing the right asset, understanding who may use it, moving it through a workflow and keeping brand standards intact.
She points to practical uses of AI inside that thicket: automated tagging, natural-language search and relief from repetitive workflow steps. Yet the machine does not excuse judgment. Translation can swap words; localization must preserve meaning for a culture and market. A regulated company still needs audit trails and approvals. Brand governance becomes more valuable as the supply of material grows.
This is an operator’s version of the AI story. The glamorous prompt is a tiny moment. The less photogenic questions determine whether the result becomes useful work: Where will it live? Who can find it? Which version is current? Where is it cleared to appear? When should it retire? Content abundance without an answer to those questions is a cupboard where every jar has lost its label.
“No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.”Gunn’s favorite life-lesson quote
That maxim suits her approach to both projects and metrics. Sunk cost is not a strategy. A team should still ask why a plan deserves to continue, even after time and money have attached themselves to it. The bravery lies less in charging ahead than in admitting the road no longer goes where the company needs to be.
Bread, credit and other useful disciplines
Away from enterprise software, Gunn describes herself with a phrase that would surprise a visitor to a SaaS conference: a bit of a pioneer woman. She bakes the bread her family eats, including biscuits, bagels and sandwich loaves. She makes jam in summer, slow-cooks meals, knits and quilts. These are domestic arts with little patience for vague inputs. Yeast, heat, time and sequence all insist on being understood.
Her public management advice is similarly concrete. Say thank you. Give employees visible credit. Do not congratulate the most reliable people by loading every difficult project onto their desks. Spread work more evenly and ask experienced performers to coach junior colleagues, strengthening the team without converting competence into a tax.
Remote leadership, in her telling, depends on clarity rather than surveillance. Communication must carry enough context to travel across time zones and screens. Shared work should have an intelligible home. Managers should judge outcomes instead of keystrokes. Gunn had recruited remotely since 2019 by the time she described these principles, and she valued the access to talent beyond one geography.
She brings a human boundary to personalization, too. In 2022, Gunn singled out B2B emails that lifted her LinkedIn photo and placed it into a salesperson’s image or animation. The tactic knew something about her but had not earned familiarity. Relevance had slipped into intrusion. More customer data had produced less connection.
The work behind the work
Gunn joined Canto in 2021 with responsibility for global demand generation, brand awareness and customer advocacy. Since then, the digital asset management category has been pulled closer to AI, product information and a marketing world that produces at unprecedented volume. Canto added AI visual search, acquired MerlinOne and later Image Relay, extending the conversation from storing brand files toward connecting assets with the information and workflows around them.
Her task is to market that evolution while living through it. Search engines deliver fewer visits. LLMs become research intermediaries. Brand, which once looked soft beside the clean line of a cost-per-lead chart, becomes part of what helps a company enter an AI-generated answer and a buyer’s memory. Gunn has argued that brand marketing matters more in this environment because discovery itself is changing.
There is no claim that the new model is settled. Gunn has been blunt that marketing leaders are working it out together. That uncertainty is not an alibi; it is a condition to manage. Her career offers a method: widen the frame, learn the system, listen to the person receiving the work, and turn back when the road is wrong.
The spreadsheet will remain. It is useful, portable and reassuringly square. Gunn’s contribution is the reminder that a clean cell can sit inside a messy world. Leadership begins by noticing what the grid leaves out.