When Goldman Sachs hired Fiona Carter in 2020, it gave her a title the firm had never used before. Carter became its first chief marketing officer, a partner charged with leading brand marketing, content and digital strategy across a bank built on discretion, expertise and direct relationships. The apparent contradiction was the point. Goldman already knew how to speak inside a boardroom. Carter’s work was to help that knowledge travel farther without draining it of meaning.
She arrived with the habits of a planner. Her career had crossed British retail, American advertising, industrial conglomerates, consumer goods, telecom and finance. The companies changed. The basic problem did not: a complicated organization possesses more knowledge than any audience can absorb. Someone has to decide what matters, find the human promise inside it and build a form in which it can move.
At Goldman, that audience is unusually broad. It includes chief executives considering a transaction, investors following a market, entrepreneurs entering a development program, recruits weighing a career and alumni maintaining a connection to the firm. Carter oversees global marketing, advertising, content and social media, and sits on the Firmwide Client Franchise Committee. Her job touches reputation, but it also carries a commercial test. The language has to help the business work.
A literature student learns to plan
Carter grew up in England and studied French literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1992 with a master’s degree. It is an apt opening for a career spent interpreting large systems. Literature trains attention toward language, context and competing points of view. Advertising planning asks for much the same attention, with sales figures waiting at the end.
She spent the first half of her career in London. One of the assignments associated with that period was Tesco’s “Every Little Helps,” a line built to carry the weight of an enormous retailer through the scale of ordinary customer moments. In 2000 she moved to New York to work at BBDO. There, she helped develop GE’s “Imagination at Work,” Ecomagination and Healthymagination platforms around the world.
Her agency years made her an integrator as much as a storyteller. She led Omnicom’s work for Bank of America, coordinating more than a dozen agencies as the financial crisis unfolded and the bank integrated Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. She later took on a similar role for P&G, then spent two years as chief operating officer of Omnicom’s Diversified Agency Services advertising, research and branding agencies. The progression moved her steadily closer to the machinery behind the message: staffing, coordination, budgets and decisions.
The general manager behind the brand
That operating experience became visible at AT&T, where Carter served as chief brand officer from 2015 to 2020. Her scope covered consumer advertising and analytics, brand strategy, creative and design, media, sponsorships and social marketing. The annual advertising budget exceeded $5 billion, placing it among the largest in the United States. Scale did not simplify the work. AT&T was simultaneously a network, a technology company, a service provider and a growing media owner.
Carter’s public comments from that period reveal a bias toward usefulness. In 2020, as businesses changed course quickly, she argued that brands should focus on helping customers, consumers and companies get back on their feet. She warned marketers against imagining one settled “new normal.” There would be “lots of next normals,” she said, and brands would have to adjust.
The formulation is revealing because it treats marketing as a responsive management function. Preserve flexibility. Keep learning. Avoid disappearing when customers need information. Carter’s sharper line from the same period was that marketers had to get inventive to survive. The provocation was attached to a practical end: emerge stronger for customers and for the economy.
Building the function, not merely a campaign
Goldman hired Carter after more than two decades of agency and client-side work. She joined the executive office as a partner on September 1, 2020. The firm’s instruction was cross-divisional from the start: lead brand, content and digital strategy globally while supporting the “One Goldman Sachs” approach.
The phrase conceals an organizational puzzle. Investment banking, markets, asset management and wealth management each have their own clients, vocabulary and commercial rhythms. A firmwide marketing function cannot simply paste one slogan over them. It has to recognize the differences while making the combined institution easier to understand.
Goldman has described Carter as a constant student of its businesses. That is the planner’s method scaled to a bank. Learn the commercial activity closely enough to translate it. Turn research and market analysis into useful formats. Give prospects, clients, recruits and alumni more ways to encounter the institution. Use digital marketing to connect work that previously moved through separate relationships.
A former Goldman marketing executive once described meeting Carter during recruitment. Carter was thoughtful and methodical in her questions, passionate about what the firm was doing and clear that the marketing strategy still had to be created. That anecdote offers a glimpse of her recruiting pitch and her management challenge. The attraction was not inheriting a famous machine. It was helping to author a missing part of one.
The agency background matters here. An agency leader learns to enter a business from the outside, ask questions quickly and work across people who do not share a reporting line. Carter had already practiced that form of coordination at Bank of America, where more than 12 agencies had to work through a financial crisis and the integration of major acquisitions. She practiced it again across P&G and then as an Omnicom operating executive. Goldman changed the industry and the vantage point, but it did not remove the need to persuade experts to see a common brief.
Her remit also reaches beyond paid advertising. Content can turn an analyst’s argument into something a client forwards. Social media can give a recruit a view into work that once stayed inside the building. An event can place a private conversation into a broader community. None of these formats replaces the relationship model that built Goldman. They add more entrances to it. The marketer’s task is to keep those entrances consistent with the institution people eventually meet.
By 2024, Forbes framed Carter’s work as building a modern function inside an enterprise that had historically relied on in-person sales and relationships. The publication recognized her on both its Entrepreneurial CMO 50 and World’s Most Influential CMOs lists. Goldman’s own description stressed the global team she had assembled and its work translating commercial activity, expertise and market analysis into modern marketing.
Representation enters the operating system
There is another throughline in Carter’s career: who gets represented, and how. At AT&T, she helped make the company the first advertiser to incorporate the Association of National Advertisers’ Gender Equality Measure into copywriting. The company also worked with the Tribeca Film Festival on Untold Stories, a program designed to support underrepresented filmmakers in producing a feature.
Carter serves on the Association of National Advertisers board, is part of SeeHer’s leadership and is a trustee emerita of the Women’s Sports Foundation. SeeHer’s mission is to eliminate gender bias in media and advertising. Her work with the sports foundation connects representation to participation: what girls see can affect what they imagine themselves doing.
The beacon metaphor sounds lofty until it is reduced to decisions. Which stories are funded? Who appears in the work? Which media owners receive investment? What gets measured? Carter’s record ties advocacy to tools, budgets and partnerships. It makes representation part of production, rather than a paragraph added after the strategy is complete.
The person inside the institution
Carter’s own public shorthand is warmer and more specific than a corporate biography. On X, she identifies herself as an Englishwoman in Brooklyn and Montauk, a wife, mother and friend, a fierce advocate for equality, and a culture, fashion and theater junkie. Other biographies note that she spends free time with family on Montauk beaches and cheers for the Mets.
Those details fit the work without needing to explain it. Her career began with British advertising’s close observation of daily life. It expanded through New York agencies and American corporate scale. It now sits inside an institution whose public voice has to accommodate markets, people and events moving at once.
The range also explains why Carter resists a narrow definition of the CMO. In her telling, the role can build the brand that attracts employees, draw consumers toward a company and clarify why the company serves people beyond its own walls. Those are connected jobs. A message aimed at a client is also visible to an employee. A commitment made in advertising eventually meets the service behind it. The brand officer therefore has to notice where the words and the experience separate, then bring the two closer together.
Carter once said chief marketing officers are “great provocateurs” who can rip up old playbooks. Her Goldman assignment is a careful version of that idea. The old playbook of relationships still matters. The provocation is to ask what else becomes possible when an institution learns to show its work: when analysis becomes accessible, when separate divisions sound connected, and when reputation is treated as an operating asset rather than a polished surface.
The work is unfinished by design. Markets change. Channels change. Audiences change. There will be more next normals. Carter’s durable contribution is a method for meeting them: learn the business closely, translate without condescension, connect the pieces and keep the human audience in view.