AI Reimagines the Marketing Funnel at Optimizely

Dylan Cosper:

We are at Cannes Lions 2026, speaking with leaders driving innovation in marketing. Today, I am joined by Tara Corey, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Optimizely. Tara, welcome.

Tara Corey:

Thank you for having me.

Dylan Cosper:

Could you just give me an idea of what your role looks like currently and how it kind of changed maybe in the last 18 months?

Tara Corey:

I think like every other marketing leader right now, we are facing the biggest change ever with technology in my 20-year career. And part of it's just really driving that change and transformation that's in front of us at the moment. So we have an AI platform for marketing, so we're customer zero. So aside from everyone else driving transformation, we're also innovating on our own product and bringing that into the organization, pushing boundaries, and testing and really driving that transformation. And at the same time, Optimizely has been really transformed as an organization over the last few years. So aside from this transformation, we're transforming our brand and relaunched here at Cannes as well. Our own platform from the website, and we really wanted to ensure that in this rebrand, that we stood out from the sea of sameness that I think we are all sort of facing with AI to a degree. But I really believe that it's not just about catching attention, but how are you keeping attention with your customers and prospects? Optimizely really sits at the intersection of a lot of different areas. You have content, you have experience, of course, the customer as well, and not just digital, but now AI.

Dylan Cosper:

So currently where are you seeing the biggest opportunities for AI to change and maybe even help humanize brands?

Tara Corey:

I think another key theme is how important brand is becoming with GEO and AEO currently. I just had an opportunity to listen to one of the amazing panel sessions at Salesforce just before, and one of the themes I think that we're starting to see is there's so much pressure to prove ROI right now. And so teams are trying to find the quickest little wins for value, which do add value, but oftentimes, I think we're maybe losing that big picture of not being able to really reimagine some of the processes. So I'm actually really excited to see how we can reimagine processes going forward, and I'll give you an example. I come from a very marketing operations and demand generation background.

So lead scoring, lead management, end-to-end funnel management has been like ingrained in me, and marketing measurement throughout my career. And right now, the team is like, "Oh, we need to redo lead scoring." I'm like, "Do we? I don't think we do." I'm like, "We need to reimagine that entire process." And we are, which is really exciting to me, we're blowing things up and really reimagining the art of the possible with our SDR team and how we engage in prospects and really rethink what marketing leads and funnel looks like now.

Dylan Cosper:

I think this is a very senior perspective here is I keep hearing in a lot of these more senior conversations, let's not just recreate what we're doing, either manually or what we've been doing, but it's AI. Let's look for how we can actually, like you said, blow things up, do something a bit different. Because realistically, that's where the value is going to come. Even in our research, we have plenty of people who are talking about these low-hanging fruit efficiency gains, or the very squishy, at times, productivity. But where's that real tangible value where you can say that, this product is increasing customer engagement by 30%? That's what we need to find.

Tara Corey:

I agree. And I also believe the small wins can compound over time, too, to really have some amazing results. I'll give you one example, which I feel like we've hit this pivotal transformational point where now the teams are really beginning to, they've embraced it, they're using it, they're sharing across themselves versus us pushing down. We're really seeing now the marketing team share their examples. And one example that was done recently, it's one of our directors of campaigns. And she basically took all of our very large AI opportunities that we've won over the last year, and she put that into our AI platform, incorporating information from CaliberMind from a marketing attribution, we've got Salesforce, our own content marketing platform. All of that information in, created the prompt, and looked at all those closed won opportunities, and really to be able to see what made a difference in generating those opportunities and also accelerating those opportunities into pipeline, to be able to then use that output to then inform her second half H2 plans. And so that's something that would take an analyst and her and so forth previously probably weeks to be able to do some of that analysis, right? And now she's able to do that in minutes, very short amount of time, have those recommendations, make real-time decisions. And I think as we've always been striving to be data-driven marketers, and putting that information into the teams, and now we're doing that and they're doing that. There was a conversation in that one panel about everybody's saying, "Oh, you're saving time, and what are we doing with that time?" And to me, this was a great example of what you can actually do with the time. Which we've always wanted to do that. And we've always had the idea. We've probably done it, but we've never done it consistently, and or done it at all, because we just ran out of time to do those types of things.

Dylan Cosper:

As AI adoption continues to mature, what do you think is going to change, but what will also stay the same within marketing?

Tara Corey:

What will change is, I think, just the example that I just referenced, our ability to use data. And I think we'll also clean our data faster. Everybody's talking about you have to have that strong foundational data. I think AI is going to help us change that and fix that problem once and for all, much better. So that's, I think, a key change, and then we'll be able to leverage that data to our advantage going forward to move faster. And what's going to, I think, stay the same or I think you've seen a little bit of our rebrand. We feel like there's a bit of nostalgia. I think marketing has lost its way a little bit over the years. In terms of measuring every click and conversion and the science of marketing really took over, I think, over the last few years in terms of being performance-focused. We're so focused on demand generation. I think we've not invested enough in brands over the years, and that's, I think, come back to bite us a little bit as marketers. So I really think that brand will play a bigger role, and also the true creative storytelling and human-created artwork. When we did this rebrand, we chose to go with an artist as a key part of it. That was a big decision for us. It's truly art. We still leverage AI, but in other ways, and it's a mix, but we really think that there'll be a resurgence, a bit of human-created artwork and creativity and storytelling, for sure, coming back into the fold.

Dylan Cosper:

Thank you again, Tara, for such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate the insights that you've shared.

Tara Corey:

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure meeting you.