Agostina Gazzano, a senior marketing leader, shares insights from her extensive experience across LATAM and EMEA. She explores how to balance global consistency with local relevance, align marketing with revenue, combine data and creativity, navigate AI’s impact, and develop the strategic and financial skills needed to become a successful marketing leader.
Welcome to the interview series, Agostina. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?
Thank you for having me. My marketing journey started through language; I trained as a Sworn Translator in English, and for several years I translated marketing materials, surveys, and subtitled films for festivals like BAFICI. That background gave me an education in how meaning shifts across markets and audiences, which became a foundation for my marketing career.
I entered the industry in 2007 as a Marketing Assistant for Turner Broadcasting System LatAm (TNT, CNN, TCM, Cartoon Network, and others), supporting entertainment campaigns. Over fourteen years there, I grew from coordinating BTL actions and merchandising into Pan-Regional and Senior Specialist roles and into a Marketing Manager position for Warner Channel, across Latin America. I completed a postgraduate degree in Marketing at UCA and later a Master’s in Digital Marketing and E-Commerce, which formalized the strategic and digital skills I was building.
In 2021, I moved into the ad-tech and mobile marketing space as Sales Marketing Manager, then Director, for LatAm and EMEA at Entravision, leading a four-person team across Argentina, Mexico, and Barcelona and aligning our brand and content strategy with corporate standards for Entravision MGS and Smadex. After that, I joined AppsFlyer as Regional Marketing Manager for SP LATAM, where I owned the full-funnel marketing strategy for a fragmented and dynamic mobile region, covering brand positioning, demand generation, co-branded programs with Google, AWS, Meta, and TikTok, and large-scale events such as M.A.M.A. México. Looking back, the common thread across entertainment, ad-tech, and MarTech has been the same: translating a global story into something that feels local and drives real business results.
Now, I’ve started a new challenge at Olé Life as Head of Marketing, a neo-insurer that’s scaling fast across LATAM. I’ve worked across industries, countries, and cultures, and each experience has taught me something new. What I love most about marketing is that it sits at the center of everything: you’re close to customers, sales, and the business, understanding challenges, market realities, and the impact of your work. Some of my valuable lessons came not from campaigns but from failures, missed targets, and conversations; marketing taught me patience and resilience.
You have led marketing across LATAM and EMEA. How do you balance global brand consistency with local market relevance?
My rule of thumb is that the brand’s purpose, positioning, and core narrative have to stay fixed globally, while the way that story gets told should flex market by market. This is actually the consensus among most marketing leaders writing about global-local strategy right now: a recent Forbes Business Council roundtable on this exact question put it well, describing the goal as brands that “feel consistent in purpose but local in voice,” with non-negotiables like tone, visual identity, and the core problem being solved staying centralized while channels, cultural references, and messaging execution are handed to local teams.
In practice, that’s exactly how I’ve approached it throughout most of my career. Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, for example, are all at very different stages of maturity, so a report or campaign that resonates in a greenfield market like Colombia needs a different entry point than one built for a more mature market like Mexico, even though the underlying narrative doesn’t change. Regional industry reports are a good example: I use the same global thought-leadership framework but localize the data, language, and case studies so the content supports the sales narrative in each specific market. The same logic applied at EVC, where I had to keep the brand aligned with global corporate standards while managing a team split across Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City, each closer to their own market’s customers and culture. Co-creating with local teams from the start, rather than shipping a headquarters-built campaign and asking them to translate it, is what makes that balance actually work.
As marketing becomes more revenue-focused, what does effective alignment with sales and customer success look like?
It looks like shared metrics and a shared seat at the table, not a handoff at the end of the funnel. I recently took part in a study on B2B marketing attribution, and what struck me was that even though the three of us involved came from very different profiles within marketing, we all arrived at a similar conclusion: design the system from day one, with sales, with finance, with clear definitions in place before friction sets in. Attribution isn’t a tool you buy that makes the problem disappear; it’s a working agreement between teams, and the earlier you build it, the less time you waste rebuilding it once internal politics get involved.
The data backs this up too: research shows that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment see 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher win rates and can generate up to 209% more revenue from marketing than misaligned organizations, yet only around 8% of companies report having that strong alignment today. That gap is exactly where marketing leaders can create outsized impact.
Now as Head of Marketing, I work directly with Revenue and Customer Success to align marketing programs with pipeline targets, retention goals, and expansion opportunities, rather than treating those as separate downstream conversations. Sales enablement assets and regional insight reports are built with input from the sales teams that will actually use them, so the content answers real objections instead of generic ones. I built a similar discipline in previous roles, where I designed the team’s KPI dashboard and delivered monthly MBR-style reports that tied marketing activity directly to business outcomes finance and sales cared about. Effective alignment, in my experience, means marketing is measured against the same revenue and retention numbers it helps influence and is in the room early enough to shape those outcomes rather than just reporting on them after the fact.
Data drives modern marketing. How do you balance analytics with creativity when developing campaigns?
I think of data and creativity as partners rather than competitors, not as two completely separate entities. Data should set the guardrails and reveal the opportunity, while creative teams still need room to test ideas that build an emotional connection: data-informed, not data-dictated.
That’s been my approach throughout my career. At WB, I worked closely with the Data & Insights department to shape campaign decisions for series launches and original productions, but the creative execution with local agencies still had to carry the emotional weight that made audiences tune in. At Entravision, the KPI dashboards and monthly reporting I built weren’t just for leadership visibility; they fed directly back into which creative concepts we scaled and which we retired. At AppsFlyer, the regional mobile marketing reports I produced were grounded in real market data, but the storytelling, design, and event experience around them, like our activations at M.A.M.A. México, were what actually made that data memorable and shareable. Analytics tells you where to look; creativity is what makes people stop and pay attention once you’re looking there.
“My rule of thumb is that the brand’s purpose, positioning, and core narrative have to stay fixed globally, while the way that story gets told should flex market by market.”
Which marketing functions do you believe AI will reshape the most, and where is human expertise still indispensable?
AI is already reshaping the more repeatable, pattern-based parts of marketing fastest. Industry coverage of this shift generally points to four functions in particular: SEO, which is moving from keyword research toward intent-driven content and AI-assisted auditing; performance marketing, where machine learning increasingly handles bidding, feed optimization, and campaign setup; content operations, where automation now manages repurposing and governance across channels; and marketing analytics, which is evolving from static reporting into predictive modeling and interpreting AI-generated outputs. One estimate puts current AI tool adoption among marketers at 88%, so this isn’t a future trend; it’s already the baseline.
Where I don’t see AI replacing marketers anytime soon is anywhere that requires emotional intelligence, strategic judgment, and relationship-building, which, notably, is most of what a marketing role actually is. Reading a room in a private dinner with a C-level partner, knowing which cultural reference will land in Mexico versus Argentina, negotiating a co-branded program with a partner like Google or Meta, or deciding how to reposition a campaign mid-flight when a market shifts unexpectedly: these are judgment calls built on lived experience, not pattern recognition. I use AI tools every day to speed up research, drafting, and reporting, but the partnerships, the localization judgment, and the storytelling instinct are still very much a human job, and I think that will remain true for a long time.
Could you tell us about your most memorable experience as a marketer?
My first unforgettable experience, I have to say, was the world premiere of Batman v Superman in 2016 in Mexico. I was part of the team that worked for Warner Channel LatAm and contributed to that big moment. I still remember it as if it were yesterday. But that was ten years ago already!
The other unforgettable one is for sure launching M.A.M.A. in Mexico, AppsFlyer’s flagship event, back in 2024. Standing up a large-scale industry conference in a new market, from securing the right partners and speakers to making sure the content and experience actually reflected what the Mexican mobile marketing community needed rather than just a copy-pasted global event, was one of the most demanding and rewarding projects I’ve led. Seeing a room full of clients, partners, and prospects engage with content my team and I had built from scratch in a market I’d been working to establish AppsFlyer’s presence in made all the late nights of vendor calls and run-of-show revisions worth it.
It was also a reminder of why I love this job: marketing at its best isn’t just campaigns and dashboards; it’s creating a room where the right people connect, and a brand’s value becomes tangible. That event also strengthened relationships with regional partners and stakeholders that continue to pay off in the pipeline and the credibility we’ve built in Mexico since.
What advice would you give marketers aspiring to move into leadership roles?
Start thinking and speaking like an enterprise leader before the title arrives, not after. Strategy always comes first, so translate your work into the language the rest of the business already uses: revenue impact, customer lifetime value, and P&L outcomes, rather than campaign metrics alone. Build financial fluency so you can connect a marketing investment to a business outcome an executive team will recognize. And develop influence without relying on authority: different stakeholders respond to different levers, whether that’s data, storytelling, a peer champion, or simple visibility, so learn to read which one you need in the room you’re in.
The other piece of advice I’d add from my own path is to actively seek out the unglamorous parts of leadership early: budget ownership, KPI reporting, and managing people across different countries and time zones. Building KPI dashboards, running MBRs and QBRs, and managing a team spread across Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City taught me far more about leadership than any single successful campaign did, because it forced me to translate marketing work into business language and to lead people I couldn’t just walk over and tap on the shoulder. Say yes to that kind of responsibility even when it isn’t the most exciting brief on your desk: it’s usually what actually prepares you to lead.
About Agostina Gazzano
Agostina Gazzano is a senior marketing leader with extensive experience across entertainment, ad-tech, mobile marketing, and MarTech. She combines creative and strategic thinking with a data-driven approach to marketing strategy, brand positioning, demand generation, and project management. Having worked across diverse markets and cultures, she excels at translating global strategies into locally relevant experiences while building strong partnerships, leading teams, and driving measurable business results and meaningful long-term growth.
