Mark Zablan and the distance between a click and a connection

Mark Zablan’s ideal communication technology was teleportation. Asked what he would build if he could design the perfect system for his business, the software executive skipped past another screen and imagined arriving beside his colleagues and customers. It is a useful joke to keep in mind when reading his résumé. Here is someone who has spent much of his working life selling the possibilities of the digital world, while retaining an obvious appetite for being in the room.

His career has taken him through data, marketing software, content management, social commerce and, now, digital accessibility. The job titles change. A persistent question runs beneath them: how much distance remains between a business and the people it hopes to serve?

An American learns to change countries

Zablan was born and raised in San Diego. His working life carried him considerably farther: Amsterdam with Ernst & Young, Chicago and New York with Experian, then London. Consulting, data and marketing became successive parts of an education in how businesses work. Eventually, the Californian was running European operations and learning the less measurable skills that come with living somewhere other than home.

In 2014, while president of Adobe’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, he described himself as an American who had been living in Europe for five years. Changing countries had required an open mind about opinions and methods. He connected that personal adjustment to the adjustment marketers were making as their customers moved between physical and digital life.

His argument had a practical edge. New devices and channels could produce excitement without producing a useful strategy. A retailer might be fascinated by technology that recognized a shopper inside a store. It still needed to decide what to say, and when a supposedly personal message became intrusive. The gadget could not settle the manners.

That distinction helps explain the executive who emerged from these roles. He was working in an industry fond of announcing the next thing, while talking about the people, processes and judgment needed to use it. Reinvention, in his account, included the marketer who had to learn a different way of working.

The subscription required a conversation

He joined Adobe in 2012, as the company was changing how it sold software. The move toward cloud subscriptions altered a relationship that customers already understood. Explaining a different commercial model became part of delivering the product. Zablan later recalled that education and acceptance took time. Even when a company believes it has chosen the right direction, its customers still have to make the journey.

By January 2017, Sitecore had appointed him chief revenue officer, responsible for worldwide field operations. The announcement linked his Adobe experience to cloud subscriptions and his Experian experience to the move into digital marketing. Those two transitions gave him something more specific than a collection of recognizable employers: practice in changing the commercial machinery while the business continued to run.

Sitecore’s own proposition involved content, customer context and commerce. Its customers wanted to respond coherently across channels. Zablan’s job placed him where that promise met the market, with responsibility for the operations that took the product to customers around the world.

A new name for an old customer problem

Astute appointed Zablan CEO in August 2020. The company had recently acquired iPerceptions, adding customer feedback and analytics to its engagement software. He arrived with a mandate to build momentum around the technology and the businesses coming together.

On June 1, 2021, the combined Astute and Socialbakers business introduced its new name: Emplifi. Its starting point included established products, global operations and a reported customer base of 7,000 brands. Zablan was its founding CEO. The new identity put marketing, commerce and customer care inside one proposition.

The underlying problem is familiar to anyone who has bought something online. A company can be charming while attracting attention and baffling once asked a question. A customer experiences those encounters as dealings with the same business. The organizational chart may have other ideas.

Emplifi aimed to connect those encounters, including the social channels where discovery, buying and asking for help were converging. The name itself joined empathy and amplification, a compact piece of branding for an ambition that would require cooperation across products and teams.

The launch gave that proposition a customer conversation of its own. Zablan appeared with Delta Air Lines’ Angela Gammill to discuss support for flight attendants in the moment they needed it. That example brought the software back to a working day: someone serving a customer, needing an answer, with little time to go searching.

In September 2021, Emplifi released Social Commerce Cloud. Zablan described the change with the pleasing economy of a retail sign. The storefront was following the customer into the feed.

“Social media shops are rapidly becoming the new shopping malls.”

Mark Zablan, September 2021

Later that month, the company acquired Go Instore, a British video retail platform. Its technology connected online shoppers with people who could demonstrate products and answer questions. The acquisition added a human conversation to a digital transaction. A screen could carry the shop assistant as well as the shelf.

What the billion-dollar number meant

In March 2022, Emplifi announced a growth equity investment led by Sixth Street Growth, with LionTree participating. The transaction valued the company at more than $1 billion. Audax remained the majority investor, while Sixth Street’s Bo Stanley and Ben Johnston were to join the board.

Zablan called Sixth Street a patient investor and pointed toward product innovation and expansion. The distinction matters to the story: the valuation marked investor confidence in a business assembled around an existing customer problem. It also brought another set of relationships into the CEO’s working life, alongside employees and customers.

The platform continued to grow. In November 2022, Emplifi acquired Pixlee TurnTo, adding user-generated content, ratings, reviews and influencer marketing capabilities. Customer voices became another part of the proposition. A brand could talk about itself; the people buying its products had things to say too.

Leadership appointments followed the same operating logic. Ken Smith joined as chief revenue officer and Vijayanta Gupta as chief growth officer. Zablan described their remit through customer relationships, talent and partnerships. Building a broader platform meant finding people to run the broader business.

The customer who cannot get through

On October 8, 2024, Level Access announced Zablan as its new CEO. Founder Tim Springer would remain on the board and work with him during the transition. Zablan brought his enterprise software background to a company focused on making digital experiences accessible.

The move changed the emphasis of a familiar subject. Marketing asks how a business reaches a customer. Accessibility asks whether that customer can use what the business has built. It gives the phrase “customer experience” a demanding first condition.

Level Access combined software, expert services and training. In December 2024, it reported that annual recurring revenue had passed $100 million earlier that year. The timing places Zablan’s arrival in context: he was joining an established business with significant scale and an existing team, taking responsibility for what came next.

Europe became part of that next chapter. The company deepened its regional investment and appointed local leadership. Zablan pointed to more than ten years spent working in Europe as a reason he understood the value of support close to customers. His earlier international life had become directly relevant to the new assignment.

In October 2025, Level Access launched AI agents and capabilities designed to help teams find issues earlier, address them and report progress. The operating model paired automation with human expertise. The intention was to fit accessibility work into the tools and routines teams already used, reducing the effort needed to keep it going.

Proof, please

By 2026, Zablan was emphasizing evidence. When Level Access announced its tenth appearance on the Inc. 5000, he thanked customers and said: “They know that accessibility claims are only as strong as the evidence behind them.” It is a sober sentence for a software announcement. It asks the reader to look beyond the claim to the experience that can actually be demonstrated.

On October 16, 2026, Level Access announced its placement in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Digital Accessibility Platforms. Zablan used the occasion to stress the gap between the speed of software creation and the time available to check it. His question was whether businesses could demonstrate that a product was accessible.

There is a personal cost to being the person responsible for those promises. Zablan has described the CEO’s job as more isolating than people imagine, with difficult decisions reaching his desk because others cannot resolve them. He has also argued for listening before acting and for allowing employees to help define a company’s culture.

Read across the appointments, and a pattern becomes visible: the product changes, but the work keeps returning to people trying to understand one another. A customer learning a subscription model. Separate teams joining a business. A shopper needing a conversation. A user trying to complete a task.

Teleportation remains a good joke for an executive with that history. He has spent years working on the distance that software can close. His current assignment asks him to pay attention to the distance it leaves behind.