Coworking with Erin Hutchinson

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

Erin Hutchinson is CMO of Trilliad, a growth services provider for B2B companies. She was previously CMO of Insights by Kantar, and she was also global CMO at the business consultancy Merkle.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Hands down, Trilliad’s Growth Imperatives. Every year, we take everything we’re seeing across sales, marketing, and customer success—the patterns, the shifts, the things top revenue leaders are actually wrestling with—and turn it into a definitive anchor piece that moves the conversation forward. It pushes us to bring our best thinking together across the entire organization, which makes it as valuable internally as it is externally…It’s the kind of work that builds the brand and drives the business at the same time.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’m a baseball fan, so one that immediately comes to mind is Coors Light’s “Hits the Spot” campaign. Shohei Ohtani hit a home run that literally knocked out a panel on a Coors Light digital billboard in New York, and instead of treating it like a maintenance issue, their team instantly recognized it for what it was: a gift. They turned the broken, blacked-out ad into commemorative cans, launched creative around the moment in real time, and made the whole thing feel completely organic. The instinct to recognize a moment and the infrastructure to act on it before it’s gone is what separates great marketing from good marketing. It wasn’t a big-budget idea. It was a sharp team moving fast with a clear point of view on their brand. That kind of creative agility shows real organizational strength, tight alignment, and a genuine pulse on what’s happening in the world.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I can walk into almost any city in the world and find an amazing meal within 20 minutes. It’s not a skill I planned to develop, but it’s become a superpower of mine over the years.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Most optimistic: The advantage that comes with a strong data strategy. Everyone is racing toward AI, but AI is only as good as the data behind it, and most organizations don’t have their data house in order. The companies doing the hard work of building a real data foundation right now are going to have an almost unfair advantage. They’ll be able to use AI in ways that actually move the business, while everyone else is getting mediocre outputs from mediocre inputs.

Least optimistic: Channels eating strategy. Every new platform comes with a new wave of experts telling you why you can’t afford to sit it out. Meanwhile, the fundamentals of a clear message, a defined audience, and a compelling reason to buy get treated like table stakes instead of the whole point.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I’ll give you two—they are very different, but I keep coming back to them. First, I’ve Got Questions with Sinead Bovell. She has a rare ability to connect macrotrends in AI, tech, and the economy to what’s happening in our day-to-day lives. The questions she asks are sharp, and the perspective is always clear, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Second, Marketing Over Coffee with John Wall and Christopher Penn. It’s been around forever for a reason. They cover classic marketing fundamentals alongside the latest in AI and tech in a way that’s practical and never pretentious.