Building a Lean, AI-Era Marketing Team

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Mada Seghete and Ethan Smith sit down with Scott Holden, CMO at Vanta, to unpack how marketing changes when AI accelerates output, weakens old playbooks, and makes authenticity harder to fake. Scott shares why he believes “expertise is dead,” how Vanta is moving upmarket from SOC 2 into broader compliance, risk, trust centers, vendor questionnaires, and privacy, and why the company’s “compliance” campaign used buyer pain, humor, AEO, LinkedIn, and AI-mined Gong insights to reach senior CISOs. He also explains why brand can act like performance spend, how AEO requires repeated message consensus across trusted sources, and why the modern marketing team needs product marketers, systems architects, and creator-style operators.