The checkout lane used to tell the future one receipt at a time. A shopper bought cereal, skipped a familiar detergent or tried a new drink; a few feet of paper could carry a coupon shaped by that decision. Long before marketers spoke casually about real-time customer journeys, the machinery around a grocery basket was already turning behavior into a next move. Jennifer Burke spent a consequential stretch of her career inside that world. At Catalina USA, where purchase data met brand marketing, she rose from senior vice president of brand development to a president role. The setting supplied a durable education: data matters when it arrives soon enough, in language clear enough, for someone to act.
Today Burke is Area Vice President, Digital Experience, Media & Entertainment at Adobe. The basket has become an audience. The coupon has become a personalized digital interaction. The systems now carry grander names, and artificial intelligence has compressed the time between signal and response. Yet her work still circles the same commercial problem: how do you help an organization notice what its customers are doing, decide what it means and respond without losing their trust?
The education of a translator
Burke graduated from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Her career began in sales at General Mills, an environment where abstractions do not stay abstract for long. A brand earns its space on the shelf, a promotion either changes behavior or it does not, and the customer’s verdict appears in the numbers. Consumer packaged goods became what she later called her professional “wheel-house,” a phrase that carries the ease of someone returning to familiar terrain.
That terrain grew more technical at Catalina. From 2012 to 2017, Burke served as senior vice president of brand development. She then led a major consumer-goods brand business as president; a 2018 announcement identified her as president of established brands. The titles chart upward movement, but the product work says more about the problem she was learning to solve. Catalina’s New Product Accelerator promised brands quicker feedback during the uncertain opening months of a launch, combining forecasts, observed sales and targeted media.
“Marketers are flying blind when it comes to meaningful insights into how new products are performing.”Jennifer Burke, 2018
The line is blunt because the business pain was blunt. A company could spend years developing a product, place it in stores and then wait too long to understand who was buying it or why. Burke’s pitch was an instrument panel: see the buyer profile, track the result and make a course correction while the launch still had time to change. It was enterprise technology explained through an operating decision rather than a feature list. That habit of translation would travel well.
The signal migration
Sales and shelf reality
Retail behavior and activation
Cloud and engagement
Digital media experience
The cloud gets an industry guide
In 2019, Burke joined Microsoft’s consumer packaged goods and retail industry team as a senior industry executive. The move placed her between two groups that often speak past each other: technology builders fluent in cloud architecture and commercial leaders fluent in shoppers, margins and distribution. Her value sat in the overlap. She understood the old constraints, the customer vocabulary and the organizational patience required to move an enterprise account from interest to adoption.
When she left for Salesforce in early 2021, Burke publicly thanked her Microsoft colleagues for two years of personal and professional growth. She wrote that she was returning to her CPG “wheel-house” to help drive growth through big data, technology and personalized engagement. At Salesforce she served as an area vice president in the consumer-goods vertical’s Marketing Cloud organization. A former executive colleague later described her as a self-aware leader who paired business growth with the development of people.
Another former colleague, who worked for Burke at Catalina, remembered an executive who mentored her team, built C-suite relationships and took a consultative approach to long-term partnerships. The recommendation included a specific detail: Burke helped her develop the strategy for a global beverage client. It is a small window into enterprise selling as it is actually practiced. The leader does not simply arrive for the final presentation. She helps shape the account, improve the thinking and leave the person doing the work more capable.
- General MillsA sales foundation in consumer packaged goods.
- Catalina USABrand development leadership followed by a president role.
- MicrosoftSenior industry executive for CPG and retail.
- SalesforceArea vice president in Consumer Goods Marketing Cloud.
- AdobeArea vice president for Digital Experience, Media & Entertainment.
From shoppers to audiences
Burke joined Adobe in March 2024. The industry changed, from consumer goods to media and entertainment, but the connective tissue remained customer experience. Studios, streamers and other media businesses hold relationships that stretch across subscriptions, advertising, content, commerce and service. Their audience data can be abundant and fragmented at once. Adobe’s Digital Experience business sells tools designed to bring those interactions into a more coherent view and turn the view into a useful journey.
For Burke, the shift creates a telling inversion. At General Mills, media helped sell the product. In entertainment, media is the product, and the surrounding experience helps people find it, pay for it and remain connected to it. The executive conversation therefore reaches beyond campaign performance. It touches how an audience is understood across systems and how a company can personalize without making the relationship feel mechanical.
Read the customer signal. Translate it into the industry’s language. Connect the technology to a decision. Develop the team that carries the work forward.
Artificial intelligence adds speed and a fresh set of judgments. Burke’s current public activity reflects Adobe’s work with studios, streaming platforms and global franchises as they consider AI in creative and audience workflows. The pressure is easy to name: more content, shorter timelines, more channels and a need to protect the identity of the work. The useful executive is not the person who repeats the broad promise. It is the person who can keep the conversation attached to the customer’s real process, commercial stakes and standards.
Burke’s route provides that attachment. She has seen personalization when it meant a printed offer triggered by a basket. She has sold cloud adoption to consumer-goods and retail organizations. She has led inside a marketing platform company. Now she works in a sector where the unit of value can be a story, a subscriber or an ongoing audience relationship. The progression is less a reinvention than an expanding field of view.
The work after work
Her public record also contains a second timeline, measured less by promotions than by return visits. Since 2013, Burke has volunteered with Kids Alive International. She describes multiple family trips to Constanza in the Dominican Republic, including construction work on schools and homes for children and holiday visits meant to bring time and attention as well as supplies. The commitment predates her moves through three technology companies.
In November 2023, she added another form of service through Exodus World Service’s Refugee New Neighbor Program. Burke described delivering “Welcome to America” packs to newly arrived families, then meeting them weekly as they adjusted to their communities. The work is practical and relational: a set of household basics at the beginning, followed by the consistency of showing up. It echoes what colleagues say about her professional style without needing to become a corporate lesson.
Family appears in her public life in other small, cheerful ways. In early 2021, Burke celebrated her daughter Sarah and a classmate for placing first in an Indiana University Kelley and Deloitte business analytics competition. The pair had built an Excel tool that helped a company compare decisions and visualize outcomes. A mother who graduated from Kelley in 1990 was applauding the next generation for turning data into a usable choice. The symmetry is almost too tidy, but there it is.
The technology keeps changing. Burke’s recurring work is helping people see a decision inside the data.
A career with a through-line
Executive careers are often narrated as a ladder: bigger title, larger company, wider remit. Burke’s makes more sense as a thread pulled through changing systems. Consumer goods taught her the discipline of the market. Catalina made customer behavior visible at the point of purchase. Microsoft and Salesforce moved the work into enterprise cloud platforms. Adobe brings it to media audiences and AI-assisted digital experiences.
At each stage, credibility comes from remembering that technology adoption is a human decision made inside an organization. Buyers need a case they can defend. Teams need room to learn. Customers need an experience that respects the reason they arrived. The data can be immediate and the platform sophisticated, but translation remains slow, social work. Burke has spent her career becoming fluent in it.
The receipt printer has largely disappeared from the story. The essential loop has not. Someone acts. A business notices. A team decides what response might be useful. Jennifer Burke’s career has followed that loop from the grocery aisle to the media cloud, carrying forward a simple preference: make the signal legible, then help people do something sensible with it.