Marissa
Dacay

The Long Way Around Was the Right Way

Marissa Dacay studied Media Studies and Psychology at Fordham University - a pairing that looks, in retrospect, like a preview of everything that came next. The media side gave her the language of stories and audiences. The psychology side gave her the language of people and motivation. She has spent 17+ years at the intersection of both.

Her early career built the technical foundation: demand generation, marketing operations, digital campaigns. The scaffolding that makes marketing actually run at scale. In a discipline often populated by people who went straight for the glamorous strategy roles, Dacay started by understanding the machinery.

Then came the pivot. Three years in HR Business Partnering at Adobe. This is the move that surprises people when they first hear it. Why would a senior marketing executive leave to run HR? The answer, as Dacay tells it, is entirely consistent with her philosophy: it was the choice that scared her, and that meant it was probably the right one.

What she found in HR was not a detour from leadership - it was an accelerator for it. She learned how trust actually forms inside organizations. She learned what causes high performers to check out quietly before they leave loudly. She learned the difference between teams that execute under pressure and teams that fragment under it. These are not lessons you pick up from reading HBR. They come from being in the room when someone is deciding whether to stay.

She returned to marketing equipped with something most enterprise marketing VPs do not have: a genuine understanding of the human operating system underneath the organizational chart. The result is the kind of team-building that compounds - where the culture reinforces the strategy, and the strategy gives the culture a clear direction to run toward.

Today, as Global Vice President of Enterprise Marketing, she oversees the full demand generation and account-based marketing operation for Adobe's enterprise business - one of the most complex B2B marketing challenges in the software industry. Adobe sells to virtually every vertical, at every deal size, with products spanning creative software, document management, digital experience platforms, and AI tools. Making that portfolio legible to enterprise buyers, and building campaigns that move real pipeline, is not a simple problem. It is exactly the kind of problem that rewards someone who spent 17 years learning every part of how marketing actually works.

The session title from Adobe Summit 2026 says it plainly: "Where Creativity Meets AI: How Adobe Is Reinventing Marketing." Dacay was on that stage not as a futurist speculating about AI's potential, but as the executive actually deploying it inside one of the world's most recognized creative software companies.

The challenge for enterprise marketing in the AI era is not the tools - it is the tension between speed and quality. AI can produce content at a pace no human team can match. But content without strategic coherence, brand voice, or audience relevance is just noise at scale. Dacay's work at Adobe is about resolving that tension: using AI to handle the velocity while keeping human creativity in charge of the direction.

Adobe's own platform - Experience Cloud, Journey Optimizer, Real-Time CDP, Adobe Sensei - gives Dacay's team a native advantage. They are not retrofitting AI onto a legacy stack. They are building on infrastructure designed, at least in part, for exactly this kind of use case. The feedback loop between Adobe's product organization and its enterprise marketing team is unusually tight.

At the same time, she has been vocal about the role of trust in AI-driven marketing. Faster personalization only works if the underlying data is trustworthy. More automated journeys only scale if the brand relationship is solid. The efficiency argument for AI and the relationship argument for trust end up in the same place: you have to earn the connection before you can automate it.