Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp, shares her playbook for thoughtful, creative marketing that transforms engagement from fleeting moments into lasting business impact.
True engagement is harder to come by than ever. To stop someone mid-scroll means grabbing attention—and keeping it. Enter Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp, a master of cutting through the noise.
In the first episode of The Engagement Principles, Jessica and host Alison Lange Engel discuss what it takes to get people to actually pay attention:
From establishing data collaboration as a category at LiveRamp to launching breakthrough revenue streams across her career, Jessica reveals her playbook for thoughtful, creative marketing that takes engagement from fleeting moments into lasting business impact.
The Human Behind the Magic:
Jessica Shapiro is Chief Marketing Officer at LiveRamp, where she leads global marketing for the data collaboration platform. With over 20 years of experience spanning both B2B and B2C environments, she's built her expertise across companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Zulily, and SAP.
The Money Quote:
“People don’t connect with a logo. They connect with the humanity.” - Jessica
Can’t Miss Moments:
*(01:30) - Jessica’s Career Journey and Role at LiveRamp
*(03:50) - The Power of Storytelling in Marketing
*(12:20) - Building Trust and Customer Relationships
*(21:20) - Leveraging AI and Creativity in Marketing
*(26:20) - Marketing Trends Worth Keeping an Eye On
Worth Your Click:
0:00:00.2 Alison: I'm Alison Lange Engle, CEO of Ceros, and this is The Engagement Principles, a series about how bold ideas, creative conviction, and intentional storytelling drive real results in a distracted world.
0:00:14.2 Jessica: I really have a fundamental belief that marketing is a revenue driver, and so making sure that marketers have the tools in order to drive that revenue is really important. Balancing the long-term brand building and the short-term revenue generation is what's on my mind and what's on my mind to tell our customers.
0:00:37.2 Alison: That's Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp. She's a master of building what didn't exist before, from launching new revenue streams at Starbucks to creating new categories at LiveRamp. She's proving that creativity, clarity, and trust still move the needle. Let's get started. Hi, Jessica. It's great to see you.
0:01:11.6 Jessica: Alison, it's great to be here.
0:01:13.6 Alison: Over the years, we've had so many intertwining roles, and we've been in so many similar rooms, and so it's so fun to continue our conversation in this forum. I appreciate you spending the time.
0:01:23.9 Jessica: I love having this opportunity, and thank you for inviting me to your podcast.
0:01:29.5 Alison: Great.
0:01:29.9 Jessica: Let's jump in.
0:01:30.9 Alison: Let's start by having you just share more about your career and your background, and then, of course, a bit on your life and world as CMO at LiveRamp.
0:01:39.1 Jessica: My passion has always been marketing. I started my career on the consumer side, doing marketing for companies like Starbucks and Zulily, and then switched to the B2B side. I've been on the corporate marketing side, the demand gen side, and worked for companies like Microsoft and SAP, and have had the chance to see a lot of things. Now I'm at LiveRamp. I've been here for about three and a half years. LiveRamp is a data collaboration company. We work with the largest advertisers in the world, and we help them be more precise in their advertising, be more efficient in their advertising, and use their data to find the right people to deliver the right experiences, and then be able to measure those experiences so they can optimize those campaigns for better results.
0:02:40.3 Alison: What's the biggest challenge you've been solving recently as CMO at LiveRamp?
0:02:45.4 Jessica: When I think about today's economy and the uncertainty, I think about how do we take care of CMOs? I am very fortunate to be in a role where I get to market to CMOs. CMOs are making decisions about whether to buy LiveRamp. They're also making decisions as to what to cut in this very difficult time or uncertain time, and so I'm thinking a lot about how we really demonstrate that with LiveRamp, you can be more efficient, you can deliver more to the bottom line, that you can spend your money more effectively. I really have a fundamental belief that marketing is a revenue driver, and so making sure that marketers have the tools in order to drive that revenue is really important. Balancing the long-term brand building and the short-term revenue generation is what's on my mind and what's on my mind to tell our customers.
0:03:48.3 Alison: It is such a challenging push-pull right now in the market between growth, growing efficiently. It seems like everyone is shouting on all of the social feeds. Advertising and marketing has become so loud. As part of that, how do you feel like you can effectively break through? In particular, how are you thinking about visual storytelling and maybe storytelling overall as a way to engage the CMOs and the companies that you guys are targeting?
0:04:19.9 Jessica: I've been at LiveRamp for about three and a half years, and one of the first things we needed to do was establish our category of data collaboration so that people would understand where to go to find these solutions. Our company's been around for over 10 years. We've been known for onboarding data, activating data, and now we do much more. We do all those things, but we do much more advanced things. First, it's giving a language to the benefits that we offer, and then to visual storytelling. Storytelling is really, as we both know, the key to getting consumers' buyers' attention. I think that storytelling is done. People respond in all different ways. Some people really like long-form, deep, research-oriented papers. Some people like that quick quote. My husband and I talk about how we'll have a conversation about a topic, and I'll tell him something, and he'll tell me something, and then if we each ask each other a follow-up question, we can't answer because we're living in headlines. Making sure that we have those right headlines, the right demo videos, the right videos from our customers, having our customers tell our stories, that's been a really powerful tool to breaking through.
0:05:42.7 Jessica: We also are in a complex space. There's a lot of technology that goes behind what we do. And we've done things like introducing a series called Here's the Deal, where we take really complex topics and we break them down into simple answers in two, three-minute segments. It's a series, and we feature executives and people in the company. So we're putting a face to the brand, and we're leveling the playing field. We're giving people education and hopefully a little entertainment along the way.
0:06:17.7 Alison: That's great. How are you assessing engagement? And where does that live? Is that on YouTube, or it's a separate podcast or series? How do you guys think about driving distribution of that?
0:06:28.2 Jessica: We do a lot of our distribution of creative through owned and earned channels on social media. And we're looking at engagement metrics, how many people are viewing, how many people are clicking through, and then obviously how much of our creative is leading to opportunities.
0:06:47.1 Alison: Okay. That's great. So cool to have. You have to own it, right? It needs to be in your voice.
0:06:52.3 Jessica: Absolutely.
0:06:53.6 Alison: A quote of yours, because you've published some very cool thought leadership, and a quote of yours that really resonated with me and is really an underpinning of the show is, the most powerful innovations don't just fill gaps. They challenge entire mindsets. You've done that at MSN, Starbucks, now LiveRamp. It sounds like when you think about approaching a category, really reintroducing LiveRamp and carving out a broad space for the company, that's part of changing mindset, right? Or influencing mindset. What does that process look like? What are some of the ingredients in that approach to changing or evolving your buyer's mindset?
0:07:37.2 Jessica: One of the fun examples from my career was when I was at Starbucks, and it was 2009, the economy was not in a good place. Starbucks was having its first downturn in the company's history, and we needed to introduce new revenue streams. So the idea was, how do we bring instant coffee to the Starbucks lineup? It was like blasphemy. How could Starbucks employees even get behind gourmet, our gourmet line, high-end launching instant coffee? And then how could we get customers to believe in instant coffee? But we knew that if people just kept coming back for their latte, but in a different flavor, we weren't going to grow the business. We needed to expand the category and create a new line of business. So that was about first understanding the customer's mindset going in. What were the concerns? Why wouldn't people ever think about buying instant coffee? They thought about it as those crystals in the back of your grandmother's pantry. And we knew our challenge was to get them to understand that it could be just as good as a cup of fresh brewed coffee. We did lots and lots of testing. I think testing and learning is a way you build new categories.
0:09:00.5 Jessica: You have to find out what's going to connect with customers. And in the end, we discovered that not only did we have to tell people that it tasted as good as fresh brewed, we had to get them to taste it. So we conducted a taste challenge across America, 10,000 stores, and then expanded globally, a taste challenge of Via versus Pike Place Roast and said, bet you can't taste the difference. Everyone was a winner and got a fresh brewed cup of coffee and a coupon for Via. And the amazing thing was, though we knew it would happen because of all of our testing, people really couldn't taste the difference. Via took off and it is now a billion plus revenue stream for Starbucks. So really understanding that mindset, understanding what you're going up against, and then trying different techniques to shift people's behavior and thinking.
0:09:55.4 Alison: That is an awesome story. I was a, I don't think I was in the test case, but I was an active and still am consumer of that product, kind of always on the go. So it spoke to me, but that is such a cool story. I'm sure throughout that process, like with any new product launch or any attempt to shape a category or shape perception, it's never as linear as we all hope it to be. It's a squiggly line. Describe either some of the first principles or some of the values you come back to when there is, you guys didn't have a roadmap for that product expansion. It's a significant risk to take those expansion efforts on behind the back of a brand like Starbucks with that sort of base and equity. What are some of the, either the signposts or the ways that you go about that testing to make sure you really can see the outcome on the other side?
0:10:47.4 Jessica: I always believe it comes back to really deep consumer insights, like really understanding how people feel baseline, testing and learning and seeing what's working. In that case of VIA, we did a test market launch in Chicago. It was initially really successful, but we were giving away packets of VIA and not getting people to taste it. And we realized they weren't tasting it because they weren't coming back to buy it. So we adjusted the taste challenge. We got people to drink the wet coffee in Seattle. It was a success. We were able to test in different stores, in different formats. We had people who were on the front line, the baristas, engaging with customers. We have so many more tools now to do that digitally. I think it's really important to have both quantitative and qualitative data to back up big decisions that you're going to make. And we had that data to make a really big bet. So coming back to principles of really understanding the audience, testing and learning, trying new things, being creative, pushing yourself out of the box, looking for ideas in all the places that you may not think the ideas are going to come from, other customers, other baristas, other things you read about what brands are doing.
0:12:11.9 Jessica: I'm a very curious person. I'm always reading, always observing. And I think that's where some of the best ideas come from.
0:12:19.1 Alison: Oh, I love that point about customer insights fueling innovation. I just absolutely agree with that. And having a team that's really insatiably curious to keep mining the insights, you keep asking why. Let's talk about trust for a minute. That's such a critical part of everything a company is trying to do, right, in terms of building loyalty, of course, building brand, but building an enduring business. This is a complicated media and marketing landscape for so many, all of the reasons, right, of what's happening in the news cycle, what's happening with the AI cycle. And I feel like the polarization of just in general how people are thinking about business and decisions is probably at a decibel we haven't really ever seen. But we all have to build trust and sustain both of our customer relationships and build obviously new relationships with prospects. How are you earning and living that kind of trust value prop at LiveRamp? How are you getting people to pay attention and see what's possible with data collaboration?
0:13:29.3 Jessica: At LiveRamp, one of our core values, and it's been our core value from the beginning, is say what you mean, mean what you say. And I think trust is earned in very small increments over a long period of time. But I think there are things you can do to accelerate trust. And trust comes through transparency, making sure that people understand what's going on behind the scenes. We build trust with our customers by having really high uptimes that they can depend on. We also build trust by having a consultative relationship with our customers, making sure that we help them think through what they might be able to do to further their business that they're not even thinking about, best practices that we know. We're in the data business. There is nothing more than trust. And so we do spend a lot of time with our customers not just talking about the business of LiveRamp but helping them manage through making the data changes, making the adjustments, making the communications that they need to create for their customers to ensure they're being compliant with the regulations as they change, making their end customers feel trust in their company.
0:14:50.1 Jessica: So it's something that we think about all the time. And I think it's a lot of different things have to contribute. And it's slowly won and quickly lost.
0:15:02.4 Alison: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have a true north of how you measure trust?
0:15:08.9 Jessica: We talk about it with our customers, with our customer service people. Our sales reps are talking about trust. Customers are coming to us talking about trust. I wouldn't say that we have a measurement of how much they're trusting us. But what we do know is there's a huge pull on us to help educate them on how to be trustworthy companies. So it's more of them looking to us to say, you're in the data space all day long. We might be in the data space just for our advertising. Help us understand how we can build trust with our customers.
0:15:49.2 Alison: So meeting them where really meeting them where they are and trying to be that strategic partner.
0:15:53.9 Jessica: Right. We've brought customers to Washington, D.C. To meet with legislatures to understand what's going on with different laws that are being passed and laws that are being considered to help them lobby or understand different jurisdictions and the laws in those jurisdictions.
0:16:13.6 Alison: Yeah, super interesting. How there's so many dynamics at play when you think about building those trusted relationships, either with prospects meeting LiveRamp for the very first time or folks who've worked with you guys for years who might be advocates and ambassadors for what you do. How have you tweaked your content strategy and kind of your messaging and positioning over the last year or two, taking into account all of the dynamics at play? And what were the ingredients and kind of principles that led to those changes in content or messaging?
0:16:48.2 Jessica: From macro trends, with the cookie going away or at least diminishing, there's been an opportunity to educate people on how they can not lose the signals. There's so much noise in the system. And so companies need to be collecting first-party data. So educating people on the power of that first-party data, and that is data that customers are giving in a consented way to companies so that they can deliver a better experience to them. First-party data is the foundation of what we do at LiveRamp and the foundation of how we help customers deliver better experiences. And so we talk much more about building first-party data strategies. The other thing is something I just alluded to, which is the word consented, really helping people understand that we are about consented data, that the consumer, the person, the human is in charge, and they need to be able to provide that consent. They need to be able to take back that consent. They need to have visibility into what they have granted to different companies. And so we talk a lot more about consent-based strategies, and LiveRamp is about consented-based data.
0:18:06.5 Alison: Well, I love your comment about that human-centric approach. Ultimately, that is the connection. That is the kernel of trust. How do you ensure at your scale? You guys are a public company. It's a white-hot spotlight. How do you ensure your team, the marketing team, the company, the brand, live that human connection? I think it can be hard to not default to, right, there's a process with quarterly earnings. It's really intense market dynamics. Obviously, we're all living in dashboards, and the data set is often what people default to. How do you ensure people are elevating out of that? All that's important, right, but not missing the real picture of how you guys are positioned and ensuring you're not defaulting to B2B marketing tactics that sometimes miss the human? How are you keeping LiveRamp so human-centric?
0:19:05.4 Jessica: We all have to remember that we're not marketing to companies. We're marketing to people within these companies. It helps that a lot of our marketing is to marketers, so we are reminded that we are the audience, and we have to think about what objections would we have, what would resonate with us, what would resonate with our peers, but it is building that human connection. So I talked about our Here's the Deal series. We also spend a lot of time making sure that our executives are sharing their points of view, their thought leadership, putting their face to the brand because people don't connect with a logo. They connect with the humanity. We have the benefit of having some people who've been here for a really long time, and then we have a lot of new energy. So doing that storytelling through video, through storytelling that we're producing. We also do a big industry conference every spring for about 2,500 people. It's a great time for us to make those human connections. That one-to-one connection, we all know it goes so far, and it can be built upon throughout the year. And during that conference, we spend a lot of time mining for incredible stories, and we bring those stories to life throughout the year.
0:20:29.4 Jessica: So a lot of our marketing is having our customers tell the stories of how LiveRamp has impacted their brands. And I think it's that human when someone talks about from Dick's Sporting Goods about how they're building Little League teams and how they're using the data from LiveRamp to understand how to talk to a Little League team that's in a really warm temperature and they need certain gloves and they need to stay in hotels that have swimming pools, and they can really do that hyper-specific marketing because they know their audience on such a local and emotional level. It just warms your heart. And so being able to share those stories is a really powerful way for us to connect.
0:21:19.3 Alison: And we've talked about stories a lot, obviously creative, creative expression, the creative hook is such an important part of those stories resonating. How do you think about creativity kind of top to bottom between strategy, tactics, and then how your team is enabled to deliver on that creative vision?
0:21:39.1 Jessica: Creativity is so important, and we talk about it a lot. We talk about it in terms of wonder and invention. It is so easy to get caught up in the check the list, and really we have found that we have to name it. Okay, this is a meeting about wonder and invention. This is a time we're starting something. It's about wonder and invention. We also know each person's strengths on the team. Let's make sure we have enough people in this meeting who really over-index in wonder and invention so that we have that time for creativity and creative thinking. And then AI is so top of mind. I want to talk about AI and creativity for a second. I believe that AI is going to change our businesses in ways we don't know. We all know that. It's going to accelerate things. It's going to create incredible opportunities. But the huge opportunity is combining the AI with the humanity and with the creativity. And so we talk a lot about how do we lean into AI, but how do we coach the AI with our creative ideas so that we get creative ideas out of the tools? And keeping that top of mind, showing people what really creative people are putting in as their prompts and what that output looks
0:23:02.5 Jessica: Like, not just the output but the whole process, is a great way to keep creativity top of mind.
0:23:08.7 Alison: No, I love that example. Can you share more about kind of your team's evolution as it relates to using AI, if you have one or two examples or your favorite example of something you guys have either shipped or thought about differently or really inflected parts of the business, big or small, really using new tools and what AI is capable of?
0:23:34.0 Jessica: It's making sure that we are constantly talking about AI and AI adoption and commending people for the way they use AI. And so sometimes we use Gemini. We will have someone who has done a pretty beautiful piece, a great writer, maybe our most senior content producer, and have them show the team how they started with a prompt and manipulated with their understanding of the business and their creative insights, how that prompt evolved and how that creativity evolved to produce a great output, whether it is written or whether it is visual. We use AI to generate some interactive tools. We know people want to be engaged and do surveys and tools and how different data produced for them. Thinking about it before we start any project, thinking through the brief about how is AI going to be part of this project.
0:24:37.9 Alison: So it's really starting even at the brief stage. That's awesome.
0:24:41.5 Alison: And are you finding your team, kind of the learning curve and adoption curve, we know takes time. You have some of your early adopters. Are you really leaning on them or they're taking the role of kind of mentor-led education for how to think about prompts, how to think about the outputs. Are you doing any structured learning or structuring, you know, structured kind of learning and development to ramp your team right on the AI tools they could be using faster?
0:25:07.7 Jessica: Yeah, we are definitely doing that. We are just starting to use Writer, and that comes along with a lot of structured training, so I'm really excited about that. We do a lot of ask me anything sessions where we're talking about AI, and then a lot of mentor-led AI opportunities. We have a learning budget for all of our employees and servicing different opportunities for them to take self-paced classes, to really engage, because I think they are all feeling like AI will help them in their jobs. They're also feeling the downside, which is if they don't keep up with AI, they will fall behind. And we have built a very strong culture, a really strong collaborative team, and we want to make sure that I think a lot about how do we make sure people are feeling that they're having a great career at LiveRamp and that they're continuing to grow and learn. And I don't think you can do that without AI being at the forefront.
0:26:12.3 Alison: Right. Yeah. And feeling successful in this new world.
0:26:15.2 Jessica: Yeah.
0:26:17.2 Alison: Yes. So you've had a front row seat and have been the lead pilot through a lot of change. I'd love to hear, we can continue on the AI thread, but I'd love to hear what's catching your attention these days. Trends or shifts, companies, brand moments, things that are just catching your eye, maybe some things coming out of Cannes as well.
0:26:37.2 Jessica: One thing that is catching my eye is collaboration. Companies coming together to do the unexpected. One recent collaboration was Microsoft Teams collaborating with Maybelline. And so you could get on your Teams call and dial up your makeup. You didn't have to put it on in real life. You got to turn the dials and that's creating an engagement moment. That is a fun moment. You're internal at Microsoft. You're getting ready to start your day and you're having this fun moment. But then when you peel back the layers, because I always do that in my mind, we think about Maybelline is getting all this insight about what colors people like, what products people like. Maybelline's being able to maybe expose their products to a totally different audience. And Microsoft is getting a chance to, through consented data, be exposed to a different audience. I think we're going to see a lot more. We're seeing a lot of collaborations. I think they're fun. I think they get people to grab people's attention. But I also think we need to recognize from a data perspective what's going on behind there. It is companies learning and taking that consented data to reach places they could never reach before.
0:28:00.1 Jessica: Or if they're a brand that may be sold on a grocery store shelf that just doesn't get much first party data because it's sold at Kroger and you swipe your Kroger card and you get your, then Kroger has all the data. That brand wants more data. And by doing these collaborations, they can get their first party data. So that's something that's on my mind a lot. And it's just, they're everywhere. They're so fun to watch. I particularly love asking my kids about the collaborations that excite them. And then often I don't know the brands and I have to research them. And then I'm like, no, no, no, no. And then it fuels my curiosity.
0:28:37.3 Alison: Back to curiosity and insights when we started our chat. What do you think companies should stop doing? If you were giving CMOs advice or marketing leaders advice, even CEOs advice, what are the things that people should potentially evaluate, stop doing to more meaningfully connect given everything going on
0:28:57.0 Jessica: In the market today? Authenticity, just like trust, is so important. And in order to be authentic, it is about quality over quantity. I think we can get into this machine of getting how many assets can we get out? How many different things can we test? And I think that CMOs and marketers need to think about how many things are really going to move the needle and make a difference. And how can we do less and create more time for the thinking and create a more powerful impact and connect in a meaningful way? Bringing that emotion. I love humor. I'm a sucker for an ad that makes you feel an emotion. And that can only be done if there's a lot of thought that goes into that creative.
0:29:46.2 Alison: Yeah, I love humor too. It is fun to see. It's a tricky balance though, right? I mean, you can get it really wrong or you can get it really right. But when you do, I think it cuts through. It's been fun to see some of the tech brands in particular. Consumer brands have always gone there, but even some of the more traditional B2B companies taking a page out of the humor side and having the confidence to do it, right? It takes a lot of buy-in to go there with a brand.
0:30:11.6 Jessica: It's interesting to see the number of B2B companies hiring B2C marketers in really senior roles. And I'm sure it's with that intent. How do we bring that mindset of a consumer marketer into the B2B world? Because again, these are people making buying decisions just based on what they're absorbing. And it might be a longer, considered purchase, but there's still a lot of emotion involved in that decision.
0:30:46.3 Alison: It's an effective model for us at LinkedIn as we were scaling and moving marketing leaders around, not only across B2B product lines, which were really different and had different audiences and different cadences to the market, but bringing our consumer leaders into B2B and vice versa with that exact lens, right? You think about the storytelling differently. You think about that headline differently, but there's a similar journey you're trying to take people on. And so I love that cross-pollination because at the end of the day, it's ultimately the same objective, right? And you need fresh thinking, especially in today's market. This has been great, Jessica. I ask everyone the same question before we wrap. How do you nurture creativity in your own life?
0:31:28.3 Jessica: You know, it comes back to that curiosity. I try to listen more than I speak. I'm constantly consuming podcasts, reading, observing. I think it's really important that we're learning from different generations, so making sure that I'm asking my kids and their friends and I'm asking my parents and really making sure that I'm thinking beyond the bubble that I live in, recognizing that I do live in a bubble. We all live in bubbles. You know, how do I get curious about what other people are doing? And, you know, I don't think it's random that I ended up in marketing. I ended up in marketing because I do love that, you know, what is that core human truth and what excites people and how are things changing and evolving and what are the new techniques? So for me, it is about being curious and just absorbing as much as I can.
0:32:30.8 Alison: I love the multi-generational point you just made. That is an awesome point. Since we both have teenagers, I think it keeps you grounded in some of the real reality of how fast the world's moving. When you think about social tied with e-commerce, personalization, right, that generation lives it. It's the phone and the feed at their fingertips. But I love that insight. Thank you. I'll take that. Many of these pieces away from this conversation, but that's really thought-provoking. Thank you.
0:33:00.9 Jessica: Allison, it is always a pleasure to talk to you. I always love our conversations and talking about our past and also what's coming up in the future. So thank you.
0:33:10.4 Alison: Yes. Thanks so much for spending the time. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back soon with bold thinkers, creative leaders, and disruptive builders reshaping what it means to truly engage in today's landscape. If this resonated with you, subscribe and follow the show. We're just getting started. This is The Engagement Principles. Thanks for listening.