Your Marketing Playbook Expired Last Week ft. Erin Oles of Salesforce

About this episode

If you’re wondering why your good ol’ marketing playbook no longer works, the answer probably lies in the funnel you’re targeting. Turns out, the buyer changed the route. Recorded live at Advertising Week New York, this episode of Marketing Vanguard features Jenny Rooney in conversation with Salesforce CMO Erin Oles to unpack what happens when customer behavior moves faster than the funnel marketers built around it. Erin gets into why traditional attribution assumptions are starting to crack, why marketers need to understand how their brand appears inside LLMs and why AI should be given real problems instead of vague “use cases.” Erin Oles is Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce. Her path into marketing began in sales, an experience she credits with teaching her how quickly you can tell whether a message actually resonates with a real person. Today, her approach to AI is similarly practical. Rather than treating new technology as something marketers need to master in theory, Erin argues for learning by doing, staying anchored to customer problems and handing repetitive work to AI when human judgment can be better spent elsewhere. At Salesforce, that means rethinking