The Best CMOs Don’t Just Run Marketing ft. Kellyn Smith Kenny of AT&T

The fastest way to shrink marketing’s influence is to treat it like it’s just another department.

In this episode of Marketing Vanguard, Jenny Rooney sits down with Kellyn Smith Kenny, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T, for a sharp conversation about what the CMO job actually demands.

Kellyn argues that marketing should operate as an engine for growth, gets into why leaders are responsible for raising the bar, why conviction without patience can backfire and a foundational mistake marketers risk making with AI.

Kellyn Smith Kenny is Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T. Here, she brings marketing and growth together - a combination reflected in how she thinks about the CMO role itself.

Her career has taken her across major brands and very different stages of company growth, including Capital One, Uber, Hilton and AT&T, giving her a broad view of what marketing leadership looks like inside both established organizations and businesses undergoing major change.

Her approach is simple: marketing cannot operate as an isolated function. It has to understand the economics of the company, build strong relationships across the organization and create the conditions for both the business and its people to perform at a higher level.

What You'll Learn:

• Why marketing leaders need to understand how the entire business makes money
• Why finance and operations should be allies, not neighboring departments
• What separates being a marketing manager from being a company leader
• Why great leaders create the conditions for people to do the best work of their careers
• Why raising the bar requires conviction and patience at the same time
• Why high-quality data has to come before meaningful AI adoption
• Why human insight still belongs at the center of strategy and creative work

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