The marketer who spent a career teaching people to trust the machine

You have almost certainly met Krista Todd's work without ever knowing her name. The TiVo you bragged about to friends. The Logitech mouse sitting next to your keyboard. The little Norton badge that told you a website was safe to hand over your card. Behind each of those was a communicator deciding, quietly, how a piece of technology should talk to you - and whether you should believe it.

Today she is Chief Marketing Officer at Gen Digital, the company that owns Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira and CCleaner. It is one of the largest consumer cybersecurity businesses in the world, and its product is not really software. Its product is trust. When someone downloads Norton or signs up for LifeLock, they are buying a promise that somebody is watching out for them while they bank, shop, scroll and raise kids online. Todd's job is to make that promise clear, credible and worth paying for - to hundreds of millions of people at once.

It is a strange, high-wire kind of marketing. You cannot see the thing you are selling. You only notice it when it fails. And the audience is, by definition, anxious - people who have been scammed, phished, breached, or are afraid they are about to be. Todd has spent more than twenty years learning how to speak to exactly that feeling.

01A communicator's climb

Todd did not arrive at the C-suite through an MBA or a growth-hacking bootcamp. She came up through public relations, the old-fashioned craft of getting a skeptical reporter to write something true and flattering about your client. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Communications from the State University of New York College at Buffalo, and her first real proving ground was an agency, McGrath/Power, where - fittingly - she represented cybersecurity companies including RSA Security and Internet Security Systems. This was years before most consumers thought twice about online threats. She was explaining firewalls and encryption to the press when the internet still felt new.

From there she moved in-house at TiVo, the company that briefly made a DVR feel like the future, leading corporate and consumer communications, PR and social media as the category exploded. In 2011 she joined Logitech as director of global PR and social media and climbed to Vice President of Global Communications, shaping the brand story across corporate reputation, product launches, influencer work, social and employee communications for the hardware sitting on desks all over the world.

Look at that path and a pattern jumps out. TiVo. Logitech. Norton. Every single job was about making unfamiliar technology feel safe enough to invite into your home. That is not really a marketing skill. It is a trust skill. And it turns out to be exactly what a cybersecurity company needs at the top of its marketing organization.

02Into cybersecurity, at the top

In July 2020 Todd joined NortonLifeLock in a role that did not exist until she took it: Vice President of Marketing and Communications, responsible for global corporate and employee communications, PR, brand marketing, corporate marketing and investor relations. On arrival she offered a line that reads, in hindsight, like a thesis statement for everything that followed.

Then the company changed shape underneath her. NortonLifeLock merged with the Czech security firm Avast and, in 2022, rebranded the parent company as Gen Digital - a single house holding Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira and CCleaner. Overnight the marketing challenge multiplied: multiple beloved brands, overlapping audiences, one story to tell about digital freedom and safety. Todd's remit grew with it, and she became Chief Marketing Officer, owning brand, communications, growth marketing and creative across the portfolio.

03Marketing at the heart of the product

Most companies treat marketing as the paint - something applied at the end, once the engineers have finished building. Todd argues for the opposite. She wants marketing in the room when a product is being born, not handed the keys the week before launch. Her favorite proof is Norton Genie, the free app that uses AI to check in real time whether a message, link or offer is a scam.

Marketing was involved in Genie from the very first meetings. Her copywriters and creatives were not brought in to write ads after the fact - they helped find the app's actual voice, the tone it uses to tell an anxious person that yes, that text really is a scam, or no, you are fine. For a product whose entire value is reassurance, the voice is not decoration. It is part of the machine.

That belief - that nothing is permanently dead, that a retired idea can be revived when the moment is right - runs alongside a hard-nosed discipline about numbers. Todd is unsentimental about spend. She has said plainly that it is critical every dollar in the marketing budget is justified, and that her teams are relentless about collecting data and measuring the success of their efforts. The romance of a big creative swing and the arithmetic of a spreadsheet are supposed to sit at the same table.

04The AI question, answered calmly

If there is a single project defining Todd's current chapter, it is the AI-enabled marketing transformation she is leading across Gen. The idea is to embed AI and intelligent automation throughout marketing operations - to speed up the grind, sharpen effectiveness, and personalize at a scale no team of humans could reach by hand. In a company whose products are themselves powered by AI-driven threat detection, having AI-powered marketing is less a novelty than a matter of consistency.

What stands out is how she talks about it. Plenty of executives frame automation in the language of efficiency, which employees correctly hear as the language of layoffs. Todd's framing is different. One of the things that excites her most about AI, she has said, is that it is creating new opportunities for everyone to learn, grow and contribute in new ways. It is a leader's answer, and a communicator's answer - the same instinct that has always guided her, which is to notice what people are afraid of and speak to it directly.

05What she keeps coming back to

For all the talk of automation and dashboards, Todd's public advice tends to land on unfashionably simple ground. She insists your website is incredibly important - a complete, honest resource where a customer can figure out who you are and how you actually help them, doing the quiet work of a salesperson who never sleeps. She talks about marketing that outlasts the first sale, turning buyers into loyal advocates rather than one-time transactions. And she keeps returning, again and again, to knowing the customer well enough to say the right thing in the right place.

There is a neat symmetry to where she has ended up. The young publicist who once explained RSA Security and Internet Security Systems to reporters now sits at the top of the marketing organization for the biggest consumer name in that same field. The subject matter she started with - keeping people safe online - turned out to be the story of her whole career. The tools kept changing. The DVRs became mice became security suites became AI apps. But the assignment underneath never did: take something technical and slightly scary, and make an ordinary person feel they can trust it.

That is a useful thing to be good at right now. As scams get smarter and the line between real and fake gets blurrier, the companies people turn to will be the ones that have earned belief in advance - one clear, honest, well-measured sentence at a time. Which is, more or less, what Krista Todd has been practicing since her first day at the agency.