Maja Neable began with mathematics, a field in which an answer can be demonstrated. Marketing offered a different kind of proof. A message has to survive the meeting where a budget is assigned, then survive contact with the person scrolling past it. One audience wants evidence. The other wants relevance. Neable has spent more than two decades learning to speak to both.
She came to Canada as a Serbian immigrant to study mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Her early work was in technology, beginning in computer programming and moving through Microsoft and Expedia. At Expedia, where she spent seven years building digital experiences, the code was useful but the customer was magnetic. She liked math because she was good at it, she has said. The work that held her attention sat closer to people's needs and problems.
That preference changed the shape of her career. Instead of abandoning the analytical side, she carried it with her into marketing. It became a way to connect a campaign to a business result, to ask cleaner questions of data, and to explain why an idea deserved investment. Creativity became the other half of the job: the means of turning a complex product into something a person could recognize in the middle of a life already crowded with choices.
A career built by changing the context
After travel technology came telecommunications. Neable held senior roles at Rogers Communications and Telenor Group across Canada, the United States, and Europe. At Telenor, she became Chief Customer Officer and led work spanning channels, sales, service, and experience. The company recorded leading customer-recommendation scores during her tenure. The assignment widened her view of marketing: the promise in an advertisement is only as credible as the product, call center, store, and digital journey that follow it.
Banking was another new context for the same question. Neable joined BMO, first leading digital marketing and later holding a broad portfolio that combined marketing for personal and business banking with data and analytics responsibilities. She described learning unfamiliar industries, countries, and business problems as rejuvenating. It is a revealing word. Many executives defend expertise by narrowing their terrain. Neable appears to compound hers by moving the terrain underneath it.
The connective tissue is curiosity. At Expedia, she watched a digital company reshape how people arranged travel. In telecom, she saw the front line and the contact center as part of the brand. In banking, she worked on products whose emotional weight rarely appears in their technical descriptions. An account, loan, investment, or insurance policy becomes meaningful when somebody changes countries, starts a business, buys a home, or has to ask for help.
“I like learning new things.”Maja Neable on the instinct that has guided her career
The experiment needs an operating system
One of Neable's most visible BMO experiments started in a culture she did not personally inhabit. She was not a gamer when her team proposed meeting gaming audiences on Twitch and Discord. Her response was to get educated. The bank recruited internally for a Gaming Relations Specialist, selected employee Sean Frame from roughly 50 applicants, and built BMO NXT LVL around live content that connected gaming culture with conversations about personal finance.
The move matters less as a novelty than as a glimpse of how Neable thinks innovation gets institutionalized. Teams and agencies need permission to bring forward ideas that a leader would not generate alone. They need budget reserved for experiments. They also need a clear business reason for showing up. In this case, the channel was unfamiliar to the executive, familiar to the intended community, and connected to a real problem: financial guidance often fails when it waits for people to enter a bank branch.
The program went on to receive industry recognition, including two Cannes Lions Gold awards credited to the broader team in 2023. Neable's public reaction distributed the credit. She called her Marketer of the Year recognition a reflection of the crew at the bank and its agency partners. That language matches her account of the work: invite broad input, learn quickly, and create enough trust that an unusual idea can become more rigorous before it becomes more conventional.
Make the product legible
Neable moved to TD in early 2024 as the bank's Canadian Chief Marketing Officer. The portfolio grew, but the central challenge stayed intact. TD sells across retail banking, insurance, wealth management, investing, and commercial banking. Each line has its own audience and rules. Neable argues that the communications still need to appear as one TD: begin with a human truth, then apply a strong brand framework.
Partial-share investing offered a clean test. The product lets an investor buy a fraction of a share, lowering the amount needed to own part of a public company. The technical description is accurate and easy to ignore. TD's 2025 Super Bowl campaign reframed it around the spectacle already on screen. Instead of only watching ads from major companies, viewers were invited to consider owning a small piece of them through TD Easy Trade.
The reported result was a 300 percent jump in TD Easy Trade traffic over the weekend, while downloads doubled. The campaign did not remove the complexity from investing. It found a doorway into it. The customer was already paying attention to brands, prices, and commercial theater. The creative idea redirected that attention toward ownership.
Insurance invited a different joke. In TD's Pole Pillows work, the nervous moment of backing a vehicle toward a concrete garage pillar resolves when the pillar is wrapped in protective green cushions. Installations appeared in Toronto garages, and people began tagging the bank to request their own. The product promise, protection, became physical and faintly ridiculous in a way that made it easy to repeat.
These campaigns share an operating principle without sharing a format. Start with behavior somebody recognizes. Make the benefit visible. Let the brand supply consistency. The discipline keeps a broad portfolio from sounding like unrelated companies, while the human observation keeps consistency from hardening into sameness.
The proof travels in both directions
Neable's mathematics background surfaces most directly when marketing has to explain itself. Even with better tools, she has observed, executives still face the old problem of proving the work's business impact. Marketing-mix modeling, attribution, and incrementality testing can contribute different kinds of evidence. Their value rises when marketers can put them into a useful dialogue with finance and business leaders.
Yet a perfect measurement system would not decide what a brand should say. Numbers can locate movement and estimate contribution. They do not understand embarrassment in a parking garage, the theater of a Super Bowl commercial break, or the uncertainty of opening a first bank account in a new country. For that, a team needs people whose experiences resemble the lives it hopes to serve.
Neable has spoken personally about this point. Her own background as an immigrant is an advantage in an organization trying to understand newcomers without reducing them to a single segment. She has emphasized diverse teams because new Canadians are not a monolith. A bank relationship can last decades; earning it requires attention to the particular point in life at which a person arrives.
“We want to understand our customers' life stories.”The customer brief, reduced to one line
Her community work runs alongside that view. Neable has served with Skills for Change, an organization supporting newcomers and refugees, and on the board of Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company, where she chairs the development committee. The pair is fitting. One organization helps people establish a life in a new place. The other stages stories that ask an audience to inhabit somebody else's place for an evening.
A global brief, tested at home
In 2026, after leading marketing for TD Canada, Neable became the bank's Global Chief Marketing Officer. She stepped into the job as TD was putting its first North American brand platform into market. Her stated priority was direct: bring it to life through close attention to client needs and build on the team's existing work.
The scale is new. The method is familiar. Give agencies enough knowledge of the business to improve the creative. Let customer insight move between internal and external teams. Hold many products inside a coherent brand. Keep a lane open for the idea the leader needs to learn before she can approve it.
There is also a smaller test. Neable has said that her husband Craig and their children act as a sounding board for ideas. The family is useful precisely because it sits outside the marketing bubble. If the premise cannot travel across the kitchen table, the boardroom's enthusiasm may be a false signal. Her public biographies add the rest of the off-hours picture: two sons, skiing, fitness, running, and reading.
That kitchen-table check completes the loop. The programmer's instinct asks whether the system works. The mathematician asks whether the claim holds. The operator asks whether the teams can deliver. The marketer asks whether a person cares. Neable's career has not required choosing among them. It has required making them answer the same brief.