A financial-news screen is a small rectangle with an unreasonable job. It must carry prices, charts, headlines, faces and context, often while the underlying facts keep changing. One bad hierarchy and the viewer sees motion without meaning. One good decision and the noise resolves into a story. Tom Clendenin has spent much of his career making that second outcome more likely.
Today he is chief marketing officer for MS NOW and CNBC, two Versant news brands with different audiences and a shared need to stay recognizable while media habits change. The assignment sits at the intersection of identity and operations. It includes the visible work of campaigns and design, but also the quieter work of aligning researchers, producers, editors, engineers, talent and outside partners around what an audience should understand.
Clendenin arrived there by an indirect route. His résumé moves through financial regulation, advertising agencies, sports media and fashion retail before settling into business news. The sequence looks eclectic until you notice the recurring problem. Every stop asked him to take a large system with its own language and make it legible to people outside the building.
Before the ticker, there were sneakers and sports
Clendenin studied business economics at Alfred University from 1983 to 1987. Early professional chapters included the National Association of Securities Dealers, Young & Rubicam and Partners & Shevack. By 1999, he had become ESPN’s vice president of advertising and promotion, developing marketing and creative services for ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPNews. His broader work touched extensions such as ESPN Magazine, ESPN.com, ESPN Radio and ESPN Zone restaurants.
This was a useful education in how a brand travels. A television network is one experience. A magazine, website, radio feed and restaurant are others. The identity has to remain coherent without pretending each setting is the same. That ability to distinguish a brand’s durable promise from its temporary packaging would become increasingly important later.
Retail sharpened a different instinct. At Old Navy, he developed strategic marketing plans. In 2003, Aéropostale hired him as senior vice president and director of marketing for both Aéropostale and Jimmy’Z. Clothing stores teach their own hard form of clarity: a customer decides quickly whether a space, image or garment feels relevant. The strategy eventually has to survive contact with a window, a rack and a price tag.
Promoted to ESPN vice president of advertising and promotion.
Joined Aéropostale after senior marketing work at Old Navy.
Joined CNBC and began a long run shaping its brand.
Led marketing for CNBC’s Live Ambitiously platform.
Named chief marketing officer for CNBC and MSNBC, now MS NOW.
The screen becomes the strategy
Clendenin joined CNBC in 2006 after a period as an independent consultant. Over the following 15 years, he helped shape the brand across business units. One of the clearest examples came with CNBC’s 2014 on-air redesign, when the network moved beyond a protected 4:3 picture area and embraced the full 16:9 frame.
More room sounds like a gift. In information design, it can be a trap. CNBC’s operation was capable of producing thousands of graphics in a day while ingesting a continuous stream of market data. Additional space created more choices about what to show, how long to show it and how much emphasis each element deserved. The answer could not simply be more.
“Presenting financial data clearly and accurately to support better story telling was the objective.”Tom Clendenin on CNBC’s on-air redesign
His explanation put the audience before the machinery. Financial data, he observed, is a commodity. CNBC adds value through context, analysis and the answer to why. He also argued for keeping the network’s journalists and guests in focus. The screen was not an electronic dashboard with people squeezed into the corners. It was a storytelling environment in which numbers and expertise had to support each other.
The hidden lesson is managerial. Automation delivered the data, but editorial judgment still determined what appeared. Research, production, marketing and technology all had claims on the screen. Clendenin described the process as highly collaborative and stressed the network’s responsibility to viewers. A good visual system was therefore not decoration. It was a set of negotiated priorities made visible.
Invite the audience to do something
Clendenin’s CNBC work also shows a preference for participation. In 2008 and again in 2011, he discussed the network’s Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge, a fantasy trading competition with a real cash prize. His pitch did not rest on the jackpot. He emphasized the chance for serious investors, casual investors and non-traders to learn about equities and currencies by trying to manage a portfolio.
The same instinct appeared around The Profit. CNBC and Comcast Business organized events in cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Hartford, Philadelphia and Nashville during National Small Business Week. The television program became a reason for entrepreneurs to gather, trade practical knowledge and connect with local business communities.
Both projects widened the role of a media brand. Watching was only the first step. People could test a portfolio, attend a panel or see how another owner handled a difficult decision. The marketing worked because the invitation carried a real activity.
Ambition, made more human
In 2023, CNBC introduced Live Ambitiously, its first broad refresh of brand look and tone in several years. The phrase could easily have drifted into corporate wallpaper. Clendenin gave it a more specific job: inspire people to recognize their own ambition, seize opportunities and improve their lives and financial well-being.
“Whether you’re someone looking to run a company, or just looking to better themselves, this campaign is about humanizing the challenging process.”Tom Clendenin on Live Ambitiously
The campaign featured CNBC talent alongside founders, executives and athletes. A fast-moving promotion used more than 1,200 photographs and clips. Longer pieces asked people what ambition meant in their own lives. Brian Grazer spoke about curiosity and emotional destinations. Other participants talked about careers, goals and persistence. The famous faces provided range, but the framing returned the question to the audience.
Learn the native language of the business, then make its value understandable outside the building.
More space, data or channels increase the need for hierarchy. Capacity alone does not create clarity.
Give the audience a useful role: learn, test, attend, decide or define progress for themselves.
The production credits tell another part of the story. CNBC’s in-house marketers, writers, designers, editors and motion artists worked alongside outside studios and agencies. Clendenin’s public comments repeatedly point back to the group: research, production, partners and the viewer experience. His four Emmy Awards mark individual recognition, but the work itself is visibly collective.
Two news brands, one changing company
In June 2025, Versant appointed Clendenin chief marketing officer for CNBC and MSNBC. The role placed him over both brands as Comcast prepared to separate a portfolio of cable networks and digital businesses into a standalone company. Months later, MSNBC became MS NOW, short for My Source for News, Opinion and the World.
A rebrand during a corporate separation is identity work under pressure. The audience needs continuity, employees need direction and a familiar institution has to explain why its appearance is changing. CNBC faced its own transition away from NBCUniversal while retaining its established name. Clendenin was responsible for marketing two different answers to the same structural moment.
The early public work carried the same themes that shaped his CNBC years. MS NOW’s We the People campaign drew on civic language and ideas of democracy, liberty and respect. In 2026, it received a News & Documentary Emmy nomination for promotional announcement in news, with Clendenin credited alongside a wide creative team. CNBC, meanwhile, continued expanding programming and digital products while keeping its long-standing promise of actionable business information.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the assignment. The marketer who once helped ESPN stretch across television, radio, print, web and restaurants now oversees two news brands learning how to travel without their former corporate frame. The surfaces are new. The question is familiar: what must stay constant for people to recognize the value?
The craft is deciding what matters
Clendenin’s career does not reduce neatly to one campaign or clever line. Its shape is operational. He has moved between categories, learned their pressures and helped large groups turn strategy into something an audience can see and use. Retail taught immediacy. ESPN taught extension. CNBC taught speed and information density. MS NOW adds the challenge of continuity during reinvention.
The transferable idea is modest and demanding: clarity is not simplification for its own sake. It is a decision about what matters, made with enough discipline that other people can act on it. On a CNBC screen, that might mean allowing the right number, chart and expert to carry the moment. In a campaign, it might mean giving ambition a human face. In a rebrand, it means preserving trust while the signs change.
Media companies have no shortage of things to say. Their harder task is making a promise that survives every channel, deadline and organizational shift. Clendenin’s work suggests that the answer begins before the tagline. It begins when a team agrees on what the audience needs to understand.