The first useful image in Samantha Orihuela's story is not a boardroom. It is a batting cage in a backyard, built by her father from chicken wire, thick wooden posts and patient labor. On weekends, he pitched. She gripped an aluminum Louisville Slugger, its handle wrapped with extra tape, and listened to one instruction: keep your eyes on the ball.
Softball was a refuge when Orihuela was young. She has written about being an easy target for bullies and about the clean logic she found in sports. The game did not care who liked her. The scoreboard registered what happened. She called performance “the great equalizer.” Her nicknames were Slamming Sam and Hollywood, the second earned partly by an early affection for oversized sunglasses. The scene is funny, tender and remarkably close to the executive she later became: attentive to the audience, alive to pressure, interested in what can be measured, and still willing to swing.
In February 2026, that executive returned to ADP as chief marketing officer. She now leads global marketing and communications for a company whose products sit inside the ordinary machinery of work: payroll, HR, talent, time, benefits and compliance. Her brief is broad. Strengthen the brand. Accelerate demand. Make the experience coherent across countries, channels and types of customer. The job asks her to connect a giant operating system to individual human moments.
Chapter oneA career built by widening the frame
Orihuela's career did not begin with a C-suite theory. It began with execution. At Aflac, she moved through advertising, sponsorship and business-to-business marketing roles. By 2010, Columbus and the Valley Magazine had named her among its “Top 5 Under 40 & 5 Rising Stars.” She then crossed from insurance into hospitality, joining Caesars Entertainment and rising to global brand work. When PruittHealth recruited her in 2015, its announcement emphasized both her communications experience and her leadership.
The sequence matters because each stop added a different lens. A sponsorship teaches reach and association. Hospitality teaches experience, where the promise and the delivery occupy the same room. Communications teaches reputation. At ADP, where she first worked from 2016 to 2019, Orihuela moved closer to the customer, leading client experience strategy and then client experience and marketing communications. The word “marketing” was no longer enough to describe the system. The work included how customers encountered the company, understood it and stayed with it.
The widening brief
She returned to Aflac in late 2019 as vice president for U.S. innovation strategy and execution, then completed an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 2020. Her concentrations were business management, marketing and strategy. The degree supplied formal language for a career already moving from campaigns toward enterprise choices. At Paylocity, she led brand and campaigns. At Gap International, a global consulting firm, she became CMO and worked on a brand and go-to-market evolution, an integrated demand engine, a unified narrative, and stronger CRM and marketing automation.
That movement also shows a willingness to revisit an institution from a different altitude. Orihuela did not simply pass through Aflac and ADP once. She returned to each after gathering a new set of questions elsewhere. At Aflac, the return shifted her focus from marketing programs to innovation strategy. At ADP, it moved her from client experience leadership to responsibility for the global marketing organization. A return can look conservative on a résumé. In her case, it functions more like a controlled comparison: the company is familiar, but the mandate, the context and the person entering it have changed. The advantage is not nostalgia. It is pattern recognition. She knows some of the system's history, while her years outside it offer enough distance to see where old connections might be rebuilt and where new ones are required.
Chapter twoThe CMO as systems operator
There is a tempting way to read this career as a tour of industries: insurance, hospitality, services, HR software, consulting. A more useful reading follows the expanding unit of work. Orihuela started by managing programs. She went on to shape brands, then customer experience, then innovation portfolios, then a go-to-market system. By the time she arrived back at ADP, the unit was the whole growth engine.
ADP makes that engine unusually complex. It serves small businesses, global employers and many organizations between them. Its marketing must speak to practical needs without turning a large portfolio into a wall of features. It must help a payroll buyer understand confidence, a business owner understand time, and an HR leader understand what technology changes for employees. The common language cannot be vague. It must be specific enough to move a decision and broad enough to hold a global company together.
Orihuela's own description of her early weeks back at ADP offers a compact playbook. Listen. Learn. Connect. Build trust. Seek deep understanding. Lead with clarity and purpose. These ideas can look soft on a planning document. In practice, they are a sequence for reducing organizational friction. Listening reveals the real constraints. Trust makes honest information travel. Clarity helps teams make compatible choices. Purpose gives those choices a test.
The important move is from brand as decoration to brand as coordination. A coherent narrative helps a salesperson explain value. A connected experience makes that explanation believable. A demand system captures and learns from response. CRM and automation provide memory, while creative work supplies meaning. The parts strengthen one another only when someone treats them as one operating problem.
Chapter threeHuman language in the machine age
Orihuela's public thinking about artificial intelligence fits this operating view. She has argued that the past decade rewarded marketers who mastered systems, while the next will reward people who master language. Her emphasis is not prompt technique. It is the language of people: motive, feeling, hesitation, identity and context. Large language models, she wrote, “only sound as human as the humanity you feed them.”
That line carries a practical warning. Automation can make mediocre material more abundant. It can also help a team explore, synthesize and adapt when the inputs are rich. The difference lies upstream. Does the company understand the audience? Can it name a tension precisely? Does its data describe behavior without pretending to explain the person? Has someone exercised taste?
At an ADP client gathering in 2026, Orihuela applied the point directly to HR. AI's useful role, she said, is expansion rather than replacement. That distinction is especially relevant in workforce technology, where a system may process millions of events but the consequence often lands on one employee, one manager or one family. Intelligence becomes valuable when it helps a person see more clearly and act with better context.
For marketing, this means empathy cannot be appended at the end. It has to shape the training material, the audience model, the brief and the review. Orihuela's formulation places human judgment inside the system instead of outside it. The machine contributes scale and pattern. People remain responsible for the question, the standard and the meaning.
Chapter fourKeeping your eyes on the ball
The backyard batting cage returns here because it contains the same combination. Repetition and judgment. A measurable outcome and a deeply personal memory. The sharp ping of bat meeting ball, the nerves before a pitch, the reward after contact. Orihuela has written that those feelings still find her as an adult. An “at bat day” is a moment when preparation meets pressure and the result becomes visible.
A global CMO has many such days, though the scoreboard is harder to read. Brand relevance, lead flow, media visibility, commercial adoption and team health move at different speeds. Some can be counted immediately. Others reveal themselves through consistent choices over years. The operator's work is to keep those clocks from becoming separate companies inside the company.
Orihuela now has the scale to test the full thesis. Can ADP's many capabilities feel like one useful story? Can the marketing organization connect emotional resonance to measurable growth? Can artificial intelligence expand what teams know without flattening how customers feel? Her record suggests the method will begin with close attention, followed by a shared language and an insistence on follow-through.
The father in the backyard did not swing for her. He built the conditions, threw the pitch and offered the reminder. Orihuela had to watch, decide and commit. Two decades into her career, that remains a fair description of the work: see the field, help others see it, and meet the moment when it arrives.