Coworking with Jessica Gilmartin

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Jessica Gilmartin is CMO at Calendly, a scheduling software company. Throughout her career, she’s worked at companies including Google and Asana.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Every time I drive to San Francisco, I see a new Airbnb billboard off Highway 101 that inspires me to pull over, pull out my phone, and peek at the latest amazing homes and experiences listed. I love the purity of their storytelling and the way they create aspirational experiences for their customers. I’m probably not going to book a yurt in the desert for my next vacation, but they make it look very appealing.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? I’m a fanatical baker, and every year I get a little more ambitious with my baking. I love baking for the same reasons I love marketing: It’s part art, part science, and there are always new ways to challenge and push myself to learn more and do better. I find the fun is in the many times I get it wrong, only to finally get it right and create something that brings joy to the people around me.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? With the incredibly challenging economic environment, marketers are even more under the spotlight when it comes to how our spend drives ROI. I see this as both a positive and a negative trend. Marketers should always be willing and able to justify the value of their spend, and I love that we keep getting more tools to connect our spend to revenue. However, if we focus too much on ROI, we’ll never give ourselves the opportunity to experiment, learn, and reach customers in ways that we can’t directly attribute to revenue.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? I adore Gobbledy by Jared Blank. It’s not only laugh-out-loud funny, but it also resonates with me so strongly because it promotes the value of “human-speak,” which is what I constantly preach to my team. We’re all just people talking to other people, and we shouldn’t hide behind the comfort of marketing jargon when speaking with our customers.