Karen Feldman Is Rewriting What Iron Mountain Means

Almost everyone in corporate America knows the name Iron Mountain. Far fewer could tell you what the company actually does in 2026. That gap - between recognition and understanding - is the whole reason Karen Feldman has a job.

For most of its history, Iron Mountain was the company that stored your paper. Boxes in warehouses. Records in vaults. A shredding truck in the parking lot. It is a $6.9 billion business with thirty thousand employees, and for a long time its brand told a simple, physical story: give us your documents, we will keep them safe.

Then the business changed underneath the brand. Iron Mountain built data centers. It digitized archives. It started helping clients pull value and new forms of intelligence out of the data they had been paying to store. And here is the marketing problem in one sentence, in Feldman's own words:

In 2024, the company did something it had never done in roughly seventy years of existence. It hired a chief marketing officer. Not another marketing director, not a VP - a CMO with a seat at the table and a mandate to reintroduce the entire company to the market. The person they picked had spent a quarter century learning how to move the thing that is hardest to move in all of business: what people already believe.

01 — The HireThe hardest job in marketing is the second impression

Launching a new brand is a blank page. You get to decide what people think because they think nothing yet. A rebrand is the opposite. It is a page everyone assumes they have already read. To change their mind, you first have to get them to look again - and people do not like looking again at things they believe they understand.

Feldman had already done exactly this once, at a scale most marketers never touch. As chief marketing officer of IBM Consulting, she led the global repositioning and rebranding of the business after the Kyndryl spin-off carved a huge managed-infrastructure company out of IBM. That is not a logo refresh. That is reintroducing a decades-old brand to buyers who thought they knew it cold, and doing it while the org chart is still moving.

Her path to that moment reads like a tour of American marketing. She started in consulting at PwC, working alongside brands including The New York Times, Showtime, Verizon and Disney. She spent time at American Express. Then came a long run at IBM, where she moved from performance marketing - demand generation, campaigns, global media - up into the CMO role at the consulting arm. Twenty-five years across technology, media, entertainment, telecom, retail and financial services. The through-line was never a single industry. It was the discipline of making a complicated business legible.

02 — The BetWhy a records company sponsors a race car

If you want a single decision that shows how Feldman thinks, look at the McLaren deal. In 2025, Iron Mountain became an Official Partner of the McLaren Formula 1 Team. On paper it sounds like a mismatch. A company built on secure storage, on the side of a car doing 200 miles an hour. Feldman's reasoning is unsentimental and worth reading in full.

First, the format. A sports partnership, she decided, was one of the best ways to reinforce the brand story and buy the reach the company wanted. Then, the sport. Formula 1 is one of the fastest-growing properties in the world, and Iron Mountain is a global company with a global footprint - the geography had to match. And finally, the math of it:

Twenty-four chances a year. Every year. Both a digital billboard and a hospitality suite where enterprise clients get walked through what the company actually sells now. This was not new territory for her either. Earlier in her career she ran marketing partnerships at the Masters, the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. Formula 1 was less a leap than the next line in a resume built on marketing where the world is already watching.

And McLaren specifically? She frames it as a values match, not a media buy. The partnership, she says, "really comes down to this notion of a mutual partnership that values heritage, innovation, and performance." Those happen to be the three words Iron Mountain most wants attached to itself: a company with history that is also fast and modern. She did not pick a team. She picked a metaphor.

03 — The MethodPositive friction, and the sea of sameness

Feldman is a data-and-technology marketer, but she has spent the last few years drawing a careful line around what technology should and should not do. Generative AI is the obvious flashpoint, and her position is one of the sharpest you will hear from a sitting CMO.

Positive friction. The phrase is doing real work. In her telling, AI's value is that it "fast tracked your starting point so that you have the time to be more creative." The machine handles the blank page. The human spends the reclaimed hours making the work distinct. She has the numbers to back the upside: at IBM, a Masters campaign built with Adobe Firefly produced roughly ten times the content in one-fifth the time, with social posts performing 26 times above the company's usual benchmark.

But she is just as loud about the downside, and this is where the psychology degree she earned alongside her marketing degree seems to show. At Cannes, she sat through a presentation on what she calls the "sea of sameness" - the risk that when everyone feeds the same prompts to the same models, everyone gets the same words back. Her favorite example is the line "innovation is in our DNA," a phrase so many companies now generate that it has stopped meaning anything at all. AI did not make that sentence better. It made it worthless. The brands that win, in her view, will be the ones that used the time AI handed back to sound like no one else.

04 — The PersonStrategy, storytelling, and a psychology degree

Feldman studied marketing and psychology at Emory University, then earned an MBA at NYU's Stern School of Business. The pairing is not decorative. In a field that has drifted hard toward dashboards, she keeps insisting on the order of operations: strategy, then storytelling, then the data that proves the story worked. She mentors her teams on exactly that sequence - innovation through strategy, narrative and the application of data, in that order.

She is based in New York City. Outside the work she runs, skis and reads - hobbies that share a certain temperament, the kind that rewards showing up over and over rather than chasing a single dramatic result. It is not a stretch to see the same instinct in a marketing philosophy built on twenty-four races a year instead of one big splash.

The recognition arrived on schedule. In 2025 The Drum named her to its B2B CMO 100, the industry's shortlist of the marketers with real influence inside the world's biggest business-to-business companies. It is a fitting nod for someone whose entire specialty is the unglamorous, high-stakes work of getting a large organization to be understood correctly.

05 — What's NextFrom paper to petabytes

The task in front of Feldman is not really about storage or data centers or race cars. It is about a belief. Millions of people hold a fixed idea of what Iron Mountain is, formed decades ago and reinforced every time they walked past a records warehouse. Her job is to move that idea without breaking the trust the old story earned. The company still keeps your files safe. It also digitizes them, secures them, and helps you find intelligence buried inside them. Both things are true, and only one of them is famous.

If she pulls it off, the lesson generalizes far past one company. The distance between what you actually do and what people assume you do is, for almost every business, the largest and least-examined line in the marketing budget. Feldman's whole career is an argument that closing that gap is worth a CMO, a Formula 1 team, and a very firm opinion about which parts of the job you are allowed to hand to a machine.