Coworking with Christy Roach

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

Christy Roach is CMO of AirOps, a platform designed to help brands create marketing content using generative AI. Before joining AirOps, she was CMO at AssemblyAI, and she has also worked in marketing roles at companies including Airtable, Envoy, and Asana.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I’m responsible for helping marketers know AirOps, love AirOps, and stick with AirOps. That means increasing awareness, driving growth, and building a brand that customers love.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? International expansion is always one of the most challenging and most fun projects to take on. Running our first global launch in five languages at Asana at a time when localization was incredibly difficult to do (thanks, AI, for making that easier!) and helping Airtable establish its EMEA presence with our first events in London were two experiences that really stretched me as a marketer, but also provided that pinch-me moment to see how each company had grown from the early days.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? This was a long time ago, but an ad campaign that’s stuck with me was actually by the California Lottery. It was a billboard with palm trees in the background and a lotto ticket close-up that said, “May the best dream win.” As someone who obsesses over positioning, I thought this was such a clever way to elevate buying a lottery ticket to something aspirational and almost a challenge to say, “Your dream is worth a one-in-a-million chance.” They didn’t include the size of the prize; they didn’t drive urgency; they just planted that seed of, “What dreams could I fulfill if I won the lottery?”

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I come from a huge family. My dad is one of 10 kids, and I have something like 25 cousins on one side alone. I learned a lot from growing up in a big family, most importantly to not overthink things and just jump in with my opinion. I grew up in an environment where you had to speak quickly or else someone would talk over you, and it’s served me incredibly well in my career.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I love that AI has actually inspired a lot of marketers to get more human in their messaging, their creative, and their videos. Anthropic’s “Keep Thinking” campaign has gone triple platinum in my brain, and I’m really happy to see us finding ways to connect to one another more rather than less in our marketing.

I’m least optimistic about outputs over outcomes. I hate this “I built my entire marketing workflows in AI skills” phenomenon, where we seem to be obsessed with how we can AI-ify every process instead of focusing on where we can get the most value and where a human really should be the one to do something. Also, I can almost always tell if you Nano Bananaed an image—and not in a good way.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I’m biased because I worked with her and learned a ton from her, but Emily Kramer’s MKT1 newsletter is a must-read for me.