In today’s rapidly evolving marketing landscape, few leaders exemplify operational excellence and creative adaptability quite like Marie Ross, Vice President of Integrated Marketing at Workday. With a career that spans entrepreneurial ventures and leadership roles across enterprise organizations, Marie brings a rare blend of strategic vision and hands-on execution to the table. Her perspective is grounded in real-world experience — from running her own business to leading complex marketing functions at EMC and now at Workday.
In this episode of Global Marketing Leaders 2025, Marie shares what it truly takes to build high-performing marketing teams, drive integration across business units, and adopt AI in meaningful ways. This blog explores three defining ideas from our conversation, each supported by a specific insight from her journey.
Entrepreneurship as a Crash Course in Leadership
“Running your own business is the best learning experience. You're every department: IT, finance, sales, marketing — and you have to do all the work. It’s a challenge but incredibly valuable.”
Before stepping into high-impact roles at global companies, Marie ran her own business — an experience she credits as foundational to her leadership approach. In that environment, there is no place to hide and no one to delegate to. You are responsible for everything, from operations and customer service to marketing and finance. It is not glamorous, but it is transformative.
This kind of end-to-end ownership taught Marie the importance of resilience, decision-making under pressure, and cross-functional fluency. These are the very skills she brought into corporate marketing, where understanding how all the pieces connect is critical to building strategies that are both creative and executable. Her entrepreneurial background also instilled a bias for action. “You don’t need perfect conditions to get started. You learn as you build,” she explains.
Breaking Silos to Build Integrated Marketing Systems
“From a marketing perspective, integrated marketing requires deep collaboration across teams and leadership alignment on goals. It’s easy to say you do integrated marketing, but very few companies actually achieve it.”
Integrated marketing is often spoken about but rarely implemented effectively. Marie has seen this firsthand, particularly in large, matrixed organizations where business units often operate in silos. At EMC, each business unit had its own marketing leadership, making cross-functional alignment a complex challenge. To address this, Marie helped establish a horizontal support model that encouraged teams to collaborate rather than compete.
She emphasizes that genuine integration requires more than shared tools; it demands shared goals and mutual accountability. Cross-functional collaboration must be baked into the operating model from the beginning, not treated as an afterthought. This belief shapes her work at Workday, where integrated marketing is more than just a buzzword — it is an operational principle.
The key takeaway is that success in modern marketing does not depend solely on channels or budgets. It requires thoughtful coordination across departments that often have differing timelines, incentives, and measures of success. True alignment begins with intentional systems design and strong leadership.
Rethinking Content Through a Scalable Lens
“Whenever we capture a customer story, I always recommend interviewing multiple people and repurposing content so it works across social, sales presentations, and thought leadership. ‘Shoot once, create many’ is my content mantra.”
Marie’s approach to content is rooted in pragmatism and scale. She is not chasing volume for its own sake. Instead, she believes in designing content with versatility from the outset. A single customer story can be transformed into assets for social media, internal sales decks, executive presentations, and long-form thought leadership — all from one thoughtful conversation.
Her mantra, “shoot once, create many,” is not just a clever phrase. It reflects a modern approach to content creation in a world of accelerating timelines and expanding touchpoints. AI, she notes, plays a growing role here — not simply to generate content, but to accelerate repurposing, personalize messaging, and streamline delivery across channels.
For Marie, the conversation around AI is not about replacing marketers. It is about giving them leverage, allowing them to focus on strategic storytelling, creative insights, and value creation.
The Work Behind the Wins
Marie Ross’s career is a clear example of the operational depth required to succeed in marketing today. It is not just about crafting campaigns or developing creative content. It is about building strong teams, aligning departments, and creating marketing systems that can scale across the enterprise.
At Workday, Marie has helped shape a marketing function that is both collaborative and adaptive. Her experience reinforces a valuable lesson for marketing leaders: real success does not come from chasing the newest tool or trend. It comes from doing the harder, often invisible work of creating alignment — between teams, between strategies, and increasingly, between human effort and intelligent automation.
In an era where marketing is under pressure to prove its business value, Marie’s insights offer a roadmap. Build teams that think holistically. Break down silos with purpose. Adopt technology not because it is new, but because it serves your strategy. That is how marketing drives lasting impact.
Past Episodes
Resources for growing your product
