At thirteen, Michael Roberts stood before a conductor, a 40-piece orchestra and a 60-person choir. The assignment was a baritone solo in Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service, sung in Yiddish at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Most future insurance executives do not begin there. Roberts did, and the scene supplies a useful first clue about the career that followed: the young singer had to prepare alone, enter on cue and make a complicated idea reach the back of a room.
Today the room is larger. Roberts is MetLife's executive vice president and chief marketing and communications officer, a member of the insurer's Executive Leadership Team, and the leader of a global function responsible for marketing strategy, communications and customer experiences. His official brief speaks in the language of stakeholders and measurable impact. His personal route to it speaks in scales, auditions, consulting engagements and a long apprenticeship in the machinery of financial services.
He did not swap one identity cleanly for another. The more interesting story is how an early ambition cracked, how the anger of that change eventually loosened its grip, and how the underlying craft survived. Roberts still studies voice and still performs from time to time. Singing did not become a charming footnote to an executive biography. It became a durable way of thinking about improvement, risk and connection.
“I loved the process. I love rehearsing. I loved feeling like I was getting better at something.”Michael Roberts
A career begins with an ear
Roberts was the youngest of four children, all of whom attended Dartmouth. In his telling, each sibling had a recognizable lane: history and running, acting, painting. His was music. At Dartmouth he majored in it, sang, and developed the social ease of someone who genuinely liked being among people. Boston University followed, with a master's degree in voice and the expectation that classical performance might become the work.
Then New York supplied its blunt review. Other young singers had the technical foundation of conservatory training. Roberts saw that he was not ready for the career he had imagined. He kept a foot in singing while taking work in consulting, and for a while the change felt less like opportunity than loss. Music had been more than something he did. It had been the label that organized who he thought he was.
The release came gradually. Strategy consulting let him work with large ideas, move between audiences and turn something abstract into something people could use. He realized he could love another kind of work and become good at it. Better still, a result at work no longer had to deliver a verdict on his identity. That distance made risk less frightening. A missed note in business could be information for the next rehearsal.
→ Experiment
→ Communicate
→ Understand
This is a practical distinction. People who fuse themselves to a job often protect the performance rather than improve it. Roberts learned to stay attached to the process. He could admit that he was a beginner, manage people with deeper functional expertise and keep moving toward the next useful skill. The habit sounds artistic, but it is also the basis of experiment-driven management.
Building range, role by role
The résumé that followed looks broad because Roberts treated each stop as a way to add range. He worked at Ernst & Young and Capgemini, then in strategy and operations at Citigroup and AlixPartners. At TIAA, an assignment involving marketing operations became the turn into marketing itself. He has called the experience an on-the-job MBA: a chance to see how the function works rather than merely how its strategy reads on a slide.
At Bank of America Merchant Services, where he became chief marketing and digital strategy officer, the system was deliberately complicated. The business served the pizza shop on the corner and recognizable national retailers. Distribution ran through field and phone sales, thousands of bank branches, business bankers, corporate bankers and digital channels. The lesson was not simply how to advertise payments. It was how marketing fits into a dense go-to-market ecosystem where customers, products and routes to market refuse to line up neatly.
The next gap was direct-to-consumer experience. Roberts joined Vanguard in 2018 as a principal and CMO for its Retail Investor Group, a business with more than $2 trillion under management when his MetLife appointment was announced. There he expanded prospect marketing and cross-sell capabilities supporting growth in financial advice. By then he had worked inside the engine room of complex business marketing and in a vast consumer franchise. He felt he had assembled enough of the craft to call himself an expert, while retaining the musician's suspicion that expertise is always unfinished.
Marketing beyond the applause
MetLife recruited Roberts in 2021 to lead Global Brand and Marketing. The mandate later broadened into his current marketing and communications title. He has pushed the organization toward agile, data- and experiment-driven work across paid, owned and earned channels, making the function part of what MetLife describes as its customer-centric growth engine.
His argument about the modern CMO is straightforward: promotion is necessary but insufficient. A marketing leader should resemble a general manager who uses marketing as a primary lever, not the custodian of a function waiting for a business leader's request. Product, price, place, promotion and customer experience meet in the same commercial reality, even when the organization chart puts them in separate boxes.
That changes measurement. Roberts does not dismiss return on marketing spend, but he regards budget justification as too cramped an ambition. The more useful task is to identify the outcomes the executive team shares and measure marketing's contribution to them. The applause at the end of a campaign is not the score. Business movement is.
“It's about identifying the shared outcomes that an executive team has and then measuring marketing's direct contribution to those.”Michael Roberts
This philosophy also makes room for purpose, provided purpose survives contact with operating decisions. Roberts has described MetLife's aim of building a more confident future as a reason he joined. In 2025, he helped announce a three-year partnership with Global Citizen and a $9 million founding commitment from MetLife Foundation to an education fund. In 2026, he spoke about using alignment and impact as a rubric for deciding which partnerships and programs belong together. The vocabulary is telling: purpose is treated as a filter, not decoration.
There is also an appealing human note in his proposed CMO job description. The experience should span sales, marketing and strategic planning. The skills should include communication, influence and humor. Yes, he says, being funny can be practiced. The traits are curiosity, humility and confidence. It is the list of someone who understands both the pressure of the stage and the value of keeping the room loose enough to listen.
The practice continues
Roberts did not resolve the tension between music and business by banishing either one. He built a life that holds both. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. He has described regular time with the voice teacher he has worked with for years, expanding the rehearsal schedule when a performance approaches. In 2018, singing took him to Italy. Since 2024, he has listed service on the board of Lincoln Center Theater, a neat return of the arts to the institutional side of his life.
The continuity matters more than the contrast. In both disciplines, Roberts is trying to close a gap between the thing imagined and the thing that reaches another person. A singer hears a phrase internally, trains the body, then discovers whether the audience receives it. A marketer begins with a strategy, organizes people and channels, then learns whether customers notice, understand or act. Neither result can be ordered into existence. Both demand preparation followed by exposure.
His career offers a useful idea for anyone facing a professional change. The original plan can fail without making the original practice worthless. Skills travel in disguise. Rehearsal may return as experimentation. Stage presence may become executive communication. The ear trained to hear balance may become the instinct to find the one message competing voices can carry together.
Roberts is now on what he calls his third tour of duty as a CMO. The phrase is lightly comic, which fits. It also suggests that the work is never finished. There is another audience, another difficult system and another performance that will reveal what the rehearsal missed. For a leader who says he is, at heart, somebody who wants to get better, that is less a burden than the point.