The First Thing I’d Do If I Was Looking to Save Marketing Spend
Efficiency Issues: Years of optimization produced safe, efficient marketing that lacks creativity and differentiation.
Tech Stack Audit: Before reinvesting in tools, Gill prioritized rationalizing Iterable's existing tech stack to free up budget.
CMO Pressures: Marketers face mounting pressures from AI expectations and rising costs, complicating their operational landscape.
Creative Thinking: Gill advocates for marketers to act as architects, connecting systems rather than relying solely on AI.
Customer Perspective: Having been a customer first, Gill emphasizes understanding user experience for improved product value.
In my conversation with Priya Gill, Iterable’s CMO, she makes a case that's equal parts prescription and provocation. Years of optimization culture has produced marketing that's efficient (read: safe) but boring. 2026 belongs to the marketers who act less like executors and more like architects, connecting systems, shaping strategy, and never outsourcing the question of why to a machine. Beyond this, it's a leaders job to assess which tools belong in your marketing tech stack.
Priya Gill, CMO at Iterable and a two-time customer of the platform before she ever led its marketing team, approached the question differently. In her first 90 days in the role, she didn't ask what to add, instead she asked what to cut, with the goal of freeing up marketing spend.
She made it her mandate to do just that. And, by recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars by rationalizing Iterable's existing tech stack, she found her experimentation budget, one that she never had to fight for. This move is part operational discipline and strategic maneuvering, embodying of how she thinks about the entire marketing function.
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Because for Gill, the tech stack conversation is ultimately a distraction from a more important one.
The Landscape You're Leading In
At a time when AI-generated content is flooding every channel and CPCs are climbing as brands bid against each other's keywords, marketing ROI is getting tougher to validate. Pair this with the promise of replacing entire marketing teams with automation and you have a reality where none of the tools are a one-size-fits all solution.
Gill notes, "we've spent years optimizing everything: testing every headline, color and word. What we end up with is marketing that's efficient but, as a whole, boring."
This will be the year marketing creativity gets its edge back — grounded in insight, not just output, and with customer desires at the forefront.
She believes the marketers who will pull ahead aren't the ones with the most sophisticated infrastructure. Instead, they're the ones who never stopped asking why.
What follows is a conversation about tech stacks, sure, but more pointedly it's about judgment and creativity. Plus, what it means to lead a marketing organization when the playbook is being written in real-time.
Rationalize Your Tech Stack Before You Reinvest
Before exploring what's new, Gill did something that others might bypass in favour of shiny object syndrome. She audited what was already there.
We had tools that people didn’t even realize we still had that we were paying for. It’s not even just a little bit of savings but hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings just by rationalizing our existing tech stack.
Those savings became the experimentation budget, which was a move that made the innovation story internally frictionless.
She highlights how, "I wasn't asking for more money. I figured all of that out by rationalizing at the get-go. I now have a little bit of a budget to be able to test into all of these different tools and really see where we can take the marketing team this year."
Her criteria for what makes the cut going forward is straightforward, desiring AI at the core—not, as an add-on.
I want tools that are composable by design — API friendly or modular, easy to plug in and integrate as we need. And it has to have AI at the core. Not an add-on.
This is a lesson to anyone, leader or IC, looking to free up some marketing spend. Consider the tools you're using on the daily, and whether they provide meaningful benefit to your end goal.
The Pressure CMOs Are Facing
The marketing function is under a particular kind of strain. It's one that feels different from years past because you're now squeezed between inflated expectations around AI's capabilities, on top of a market that's harder to connect with.
Marketers are operating under one of the most intense and pressure-filled environments that I’ve seen in over a decade.
So many brands are facing the need to make swooping changes to how they've operated, seemingly overnight. Gill shares the impact of this referring to algorithym change. She says that "when Google rolled out AI overviews, it just crushed anyone who relied on organic growth overnight.
And as everyone felt that pressure, CPC skyrocketed as everyone started to bid on each other's brands. But this became a double-whammy. And, "at the same time, you had all of these AI tools that popped up out of nowhere flooding the channels, making not only everything expensive, but so much more difficult to stand out."
And yet the internal pressure compounds the external pressure leaders and marketers collectively face. Gill notes the underlying challenge, mentioning how "there was this expectation that with AI tools, you can now replace half your team. The reality is that none of the tools are there. And so there is this constant pressure of rationalizing expectations with the reality of what we're facing."
Other CMOs echo this sentiment, and she adds that it's a pressure she encounters in peer conversations too, noting that "the higher you get, the lonelier it gets. It's a hard place to be."
I find a lot of comfort in talking to peers who are not necessarily in the same space, but within the same size of company going through the same challenges.
Why Efficiency Became the Enemy
Gill's argument extends beyond tooling, highlighting the results of how a hyper-focused optimization culture hasn't necessarily serve marketers well from a differentiation standpoint. This isn't a rejection of AI, but it illustrates where people need to stay in the loop. She continues sharing, "We're at an inflection point where technology can either try to take over the creative portion or it can amplify a marketer's creativity. It doesn't work when the human is removed."
AI sees the system, but not the full story. It can show us what’s working, but it can’t yet define the ‘why’ behind the insights. The marketers who will stand out are those who can combine data and creative judgment with data fluency.
Redefining What Marketers Actually Do
If the creative argument is Gill's provocation, the architect framing is her solution. There's a clear answer to what the marketer's role becomes when AI absorbs the repetitive work.
Marketers should act like architects who are connecting systems, shaping strategy, and ensuring AI's insights can result in impactful work and campaigns."
She applies this thinking internally too. Rather than centralizing AI tool evaluation, she distributes it deliberately amongst her team, saying, "I don't believe in dictating how things should be done across the team. I have a strong POV, but I very much take a collaborative approach. I always am learning."
I don’t believe that I’m the know-it-all in the team just because of the role that I’m in.I make a point to hire people that I think are smarter than I am.
Her philosophy extends to how she's structuring Iterable's entire AI exploration process, including a working session that generated 45 distinct agent use cases from her team in a single afternoon.
Systems Thinking for Marketing Magic
Gill's path to CMO is genuinely unusual, where she started as a computer engineer, spent years in product before moving into product marketing, and built her marketing leadership career at Box and SurveyMonkey before landing at Iterable.
That technical foundation shapes how she thinks, evaluates, and leads in ways that are hard to fake. Gill shares her expertise supports her line of thinking explaining how, "Product marketing is a unique intersection of having market knowledge, deep product knowledge, but also really understanding the customer and the prospect and your ICP."
The only function in the organization that understands all of those together to help inform market strategy, product strategy, sales strategy. I really feel like I owe a lot of my growth in my career to my product marketing chops.
Given that she had the luxury of using the product as a customer, Gill comes with a a perspective most CMOs don't have, and one that benefits her immensely. She credits a path of having been a customer first.
There's a takeaway here, if you are to look at your product or service through the lens of your customer, would you find some opportunities for change? Would it be clear the path a user has to walk in order to realize value from your offering? She shares how, "I was going through the RFP process to replace the platform we had at SurveyMonkey to Iterable. I was also looking at Braze. It was a very interesting perspective to actually be the customer and then become the market leader for the company. I saw all the areas of opportunity within that process and how much we were underselling the value of Iterable."
What’s Next?
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