The useful thing about beginning a marketing career in finance is that nobody lets you confuse motion with progress. Before Jonathan Bedard became Bullhorn's chief marketing officer, before the messaging workshops and product launches, there were economics and numbers. He entered corporate life through General Electric's Financial Management Program, an apprenticeship in how a business keeps score. Two decades later, while marketing departments debate how many words a machine can publish before lunch, Bedard's instinct remains tellingly numerical: count the outcome, not the output.
His route to that conclusion contains more switchbacks than a tidy executive biography usually permits. At Colgate University, Bedard studied economics, graduated magna cum laude and spent four years playing Division I tennis. The record book preserves two pleasing details: he and Andrew Davis won the No. 2 doubles flight at the 2001 Patriot League championship, and Bedard was named Colgate's Most Improved Player in 2003. “Most improved” is not the glamorous plaque. It may be the more revealing one. Improvement requires noticing what the scoreboard refuses to flatter.
A classroom before the conference room
After graduating in 2004, Bedard received a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Korea. He taught English to 900 students at a public high school and advised a Korean government economist on education policy. There is an appealing symmetry in the assignment. One half asked him to explain ideas across language and culture. The other asked him to think about systems. Marketing would eventually ask for both at once.
A classroom is a merciless test of communication. The speaker may possess every fact and still lose the room. Meaning only exists when it arrives. Bedard later summarized marketing's durable job in similarly plain terms: deliver “the right message to the right audience at the right time.” Channels change. Software changes. The human on the receiving end remains inconveniently human.
“The job is still to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.”Jonathan Bedard, The CMO Pivot
The GE program then gave him a view from inside the engine room. From there he worked across marketing, business development and strategy at organizations including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the startup accelerator MassChallenge and the commerce platform Tradeshift. By the time he reached athenahealth, his brief crossed enterprise strategy and operations, customer marketing and product marketing. The company's revenue grew from $400 million to $1.4 billion over his tenure. No single executive owns a climb of that scale, but working through it gives a person an intimate education in what growth asks of an organization.
Athenahealth revenue during Bedard's tenure. The chart describes company growth, not an individual attribution.
The product marketer's education
Product marketing is where corporate abstractions are forced to introduce themselves. A product may be technically elegant, strategically important and lovingly named. The market is free to shrug. The work sits between product, sales and the customer, translating features into choices and choices into reasons. Bedard became athenahealth's executive director of product marketing, then joined Bullhorn in 2019 to build and lead the same discipline across a global portfolio.
Over almost five years, his team managed positioning and go-to-market work across Bullhorn's products. It helped launch Bullhorn One, the company's middle-office platform, absorbed multiple acquisitions into a coherent commercial story, and supported expansion in healthcare and light industrial staffing. These are not billboard accomplishments. They are acts of organizational editing. Acquisitions arrive with their own histories, customers and vocabularies. A portfolio becomes legible only when someone decides how the pieces belong together.
In September 2023, Bullhorn promoted him to chief marketing officer. The title widened the frame. Bedard now leads product marketing, demand generation, public relations, branding, content and creative around the world. Founder and CEO Art Papas credited him with transforming the product-marketing organization and advancing strategic company initiatives. It was an internal promotion, which matters: Bedard inherited not a theory of Bullhorn but the accumulated detail of launching its products.
Revenue has no departmental borders
Bedard's financial apprenticeship surfaces most clearly in how he talks about sales and marketing. The two functions, he argues, share responsibility for revenue. Lead counts and pipeline are useful instruments; they are not diplomatic immunity. If the company misses its bookings target, marketing cannot retreat behind a healthy-looking funnel and declare a separate victory. The customer did not buy from an org chart.
That posture makes marketing less comfortable and more important. It pulls the function into the whole commercial system: the promise a brand makes, the product that must keep it, the seller who carries it into conversation and the revenue that confirms someone cared. Bedard's range across finance, strategy, business development, operations and marketing is handy here. He has occupied enough seats to distrust the walls between them.
Pipeline is evidence. Bookings are the verdict. Marketing shares the number.
A loss is data, if someone writes it down
One of Bedard's more revealing public conversations was not about a winning campaign. It was about losing deals. On the Blindspots podcast, while he was Bullhorn's senior vice president of product marketing, he described the move from an informal win-loss practice built on “tribal knowledge” to a formal, data-driven program. The phrase catches a familiar corporate habit: everyone knows why the deal was lost, yet no two people know the same reason.
A proper win-loss program turns memory into material. Instead of relying on the loudest anecdote in the sales meeting, a company collects patterns it can inspect. Bedard discussed how that shift helped Bullhorn's bottom line and its ability to pivot in a competitive market, and offered practical advice for getting such a program started. It is the finance instinct applied to storytelling. Positioning improves when the organization is willing to count the moments its story did not persuade.
There is also a small lesson in intellectual manners. Wins invite celebration and authorship; losses invite alibis. Studying both with the same curiosity makes marketing less theatrical. It replaces the comforting question - who failed? - with a more useful one: what did the customer understand that we did not? For an executive who later warned that AI can scale poor marketing, this habit of listening to rejected messages feels less like a side project than a governing principle.
AI arrives with a volume knob
The current temptation is to treat artificial intelligence as an industrial press for language. Bedard's warning is bracing because it refuses both panic and enchantment: AI can scale weak marketing as easily as strong marketing. A machine can accelerate writing, distribution and analysis, but acceleration is morally neutral. If the premise is dull, the audience is vague or the knowledge is borrowed, the new tools merely arrange for more people to ignore it faster.
His prescription begins before the prompt. A company needs a defensible position or a useful knowledge asset - something that rewards attention. Then automation can help. Bedard sees the larger advantage in improving quality, outcomes and growth, rather than treating AI only as a device for cutting costs. That distinction separates leverage from subtraction. One asks what a team can now do better; the other asks only how much of the team can disappear.
Bedard's working range for a marketing message. Customer feedback, market conditions, product changes and sales performance tell a team when to refresh it.
Even a good message expires. Bedard estimates that positioning may have a useful life of nine to 18 months. The calendar is not the judge. Customers, market conditions, product innovation and sales results are. A campaign can continue looking splendid in its own dashboard long after it has stopped sounding alive in a sales call. The cure is not perpetual reinvention. It is attention.
The old work inside the new tools
At Salesforce's Partner Summit in 2025, Bedard appeared alongside partners for the launch of AgentExchange. He wrote that Bullhorn was excited to help build and deploy agents for the more than 100,000 recruiters using Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud daily. The scale is considerable. So is the editorial problem. Recruiters do not need machines that simply make more noise around work; they need systems that make the work more useful.
This is where the crooked career becomes coherent. Economics taught Bedard to look for incentives. Tennis supplied a scoreboard and the habit of adjustment. The Fulbright classroom made the audience impossible to ignore. Finance showed how the parts of a company meet in one result. Strategy required choices. Product marketing demanded translation. The CMO role gathers all of it, then asks for judgment at speed.
Bedard's story does not resolve the argument about AI in marketing, nor does it pretend to. It offers a better question. Before multiplying the words, is there a thought worth multiplying? The modern toolkit can produce, target, personalize and measure at remarkable scale. It cannot rescue a company from having nothing particular to say. Twenty years after the finance desk, the numbers still matter. They are simply downstream from attention, trust and a message that earned the trip.