At 6:30 on a December morning in Montreal, Martin Aubut sat down to write about the dangerous moment in a company's life: the moment when things are going well. His subject was transformation. His warning was that calm water can be deceptive. A healthy business has the money, talent and room to reinvent itself, but rarely the panic that makes reinvention feel necessary. Waiting for rough seas creates urgency. It also takes away options.
That 2016 essay reads like a field note from the middle of his career. By then Aubut had moved through CGI, Bell, Quebecor, Havas and Yellow Pages before joining L'Oréal Canada. He had watched search rearrange directories, social media rearrange publishing and e-commerce rearrange retail. Each shift arrived with its own vocabulary. The recurring work was organizational: persuade people to see the customer differently, build the capability to respond, and make the company act before the evidence became painfully obvious.
Aubut now applies that instinct to mortgages. As chief marketing officer of Nesto Group, he oversees marketing and communications across a brand ecosystem that includes consumer lending, commercial mortgages, servicing and mortgage technology. It is a wider canvas than the online brokerage he joined in 2021. Nesto's 2024 acquisition of CMLS combined a young digital lender with five decades of mortgage expertise. In June 2026, the company announced a CAD 302 million Series E at a CAD 1.47 billion valuation, with more than CAD 80 billion in mortgages under administration.
The career is the pattern
Read as a list, Aubut's résumé looks restless. Read as a sequence of customer interfaces, it becomes coherent. At Bell, he worked in marketing and product management. At Quebecor, he ran reseaucontact.com, an early Canadian online dating property. At Yellow Pages, his portfolio included social commerce and Canada411.ca. At Havas, he worked on interactive strategy for brands including Volkswagen and Via Rail. These were all places where an older commercial habit was colliding with a new digital one.
The L'Oréal years made the pattern visible. Aubut arrived in 2011 and helped establish an internal digital team. His responsibilities grew to span e-commerce, CRM, data science and innovation powered by artificial intelligence. By 2017, L'Oréal Canada's transactional sites had more than tripled to 17. The storefronts mattered, but Aubut's public talks from the period dwell on something more fundamental: a shopper does not experience a company by department.
The customer wants the product when and where it is needed. Inside the organization, however, that seemingly simple request can cross media, technology, analytics, inventory, retail and service. Aubut argued that digital transformation was really a consumer revolution. Data could reveal patterns across those encounters, but collecting it was not the achievement. The point was to make the next encounter more relevant.
“Build your foundation and WALK before RUNNING.”Martin Aubut, writing on business transformation, 2016
The capital letters are revealing. Aubut is enthusiastic, sometimes emphatic, and fond of ending a public post with “Let's go.” Yet his stated method is not blind velocity. Walking means test, learn and refine. Running begins only after the evidence says the foundation works. It is the discipline of a growth marketer applied to the messier problem of moving an institution.
Transformation is a team sport
Corporate transformation stories often give software the starring role. Aubut's account gives more attention to human mobilization. At L'Oréal he wrote about the difficulty of changing processes at the heart of an organization and the need to dissolve silos among IT, marketing, HR, finance and operations. Technology created an opening. People had to reorganize themselves around it.
Former colleagues describe the same balance from the other side. A recommendation on his LinkedIn profile credits him with challenging the status quo while forming alliances with stakeholders and giving every level of the team more visibility. Another remembers a clear vision, a strong rhythm and a “work hard, play harder” atmosphere. The details turn an abstract leadership style into a practical formula: set direction, widen accountability, keep the energy human.
This is also why Aubut's language about customers sounds less like a campaign brief than a design constraint. At a 2015 e-commerce gathering, he said the consumer was L'Oréal's “only boss.” A boss is not a persona pinned to a workshop wall. A boss can force priorities to change. If the customer's experience crosses the company's internal boundaries, then the company has to learn to cross them too.
Cogeco offered the next test. Aubut first became vice-president of its transformation office and strategic innovation in 2018, then vice-president of marketing and e-commerce in 2020. The sequence put organizational change before market communication. It also gave him a close look at a subscription business where the relationship does not end at purchase. Acquisition, installation, product use, billing and service all become part of the brand.
Do not begin transformation with a channel. Begin with the customer journey, name the organizational seams it crosses, and build the smallest test that can teach the team something real.
Selling clarity in a complicated category
Nesto brought Aubut back toward startup life. When he joined in September 2021, the company had recently raised CAD 76 million and created the CMO role to accelerate national customer acquisition. He described the opportunity in familiar terms: use digital technology in an industry that needed to place the consumer back at the centre.
Mortgages make that promise unusually concrete. The product is consequential, the regulation is real, and the process can feel opaque to someone making one of the largest commitments of a lifetime. A low rate may earn attention, but confidence depends on everything around it: understandable choices, transparent information, responsive advice, reliable approvals and the invisible systems that move an application forward.
As Nesto expanded, the marketing problem expanded with it. The group now speaks to home buyers, brokers, financial institutions and commercial borrowers. It operates through Nesto, CMLS and Nesto Cloud. Aubut is no longer positioning only an online mortgage option. He is helping explain how technology, lending expertise and servicing can function as one connected system.
That is difficult brand work because an ecosystem is not automatically a story. Its pieces can sound like an org chart. The useful narrative appears when every piece answers the same customer problem. For Nesto, the declared ambition is a simpler, more transparent and efficient mortgage journey. Aubut's career has prepared him for precisely this translation: turn a complex operating model into a promise, then pressure the operation to keep it.
There is another complication. Mortgage marketing lives inside a category where trust accumulates slowly and can vanish quickly. A clever line cannot substitute for a clear explanation. A fast application cannot compensate for uncertainty later in the process. The marketer therefore has to think like a product operator, watching where expectations are set and where the experience either confirms or contradicts them. Aubut's route through customer care, analytics, CRM and e-commerce becomes useful here. Each discipline reveals a different piece of the same relationship. Together they show whether the business understands the person on the other side of the transaction.
“You can't transform without doing anything wrong.”Martin Aubut, 2016
The next bold move
In late 2025, Aubut celebrated a Silver at the Google Search Honours Awards Canada for Nesto's marketing team and its partners. His post thanked the people involved, then immediately pivoted: find the next bold move; build a new media play; reach more Canadians. Recognition registered as a checkpoint, not a finish line.
The same posture appears in his public speaking. He has discussed chatbots and conversational marketing at C2 Montréal, data and personalization at L'Oréal, artificial intelligence in performance media, and the challenge of keeping marketing human as automation advances. At a 2026 conversation for Montreal founders, the promised subjects were notably practical: value propositions beyond price, first customers, channels that work, mistakes to avoid and competing with incumbents.
There is an unglamorous continuity beneath those topics. A technology creates possibilities. A company decides which possibility matters. A team turns it into a repeatable capability. The customer decides whether the result is useful. Marketing sits across the entire chain, not merely at its end.
It also explains the playful edge in Aubut's professional voice. His early blog promised case studies and “Jedi tips.” His writing slips between French and English, strategy and exhortation. The informality is not separate from the management philosophy. It lowers the distance between an executive idea and the people expected to carry it. A transformation plan can be technically sound and still die from abstraction. Aubut's preferred vocabulary - walking, running, calm water, bold moves - gives a team something concrete to repeat when the slides are gone.
Aubut has spent his career at that junction, during a period when Canada's digital economy moved from directories and early social platforms to predictive systems and AI-assisted lending. His job titles have changed from director to vice-president to chief digital officer to CMO. The work has kept returning to the same stubborn question from that Montreal morning: can you create urgency while the water is still calm?
His answer is written across the sequence. Choose a clear destination, even if learning later changes it. Build the foundation. Let people test without pretending errors can be eliminated. Make the customer's experience the measure. Then, when the evidence arrives, run.