Adobe CMO Balazs: Marketing chiefs must reinvent or get left behind

Lara Balazs has a simple rule for the marketing team she runs at Adobe: use the company's own products first, and break them before customers do.

"I am customer zero at the company," said Balazs, Adobe's chief marketing officer. "We are co-creating the products that allow us to go to market. I can give the product people feedback on what works and what doesn't."

Balazs joined Adobe 18 months ago from Intuit, where she also led marketing. She said the job of a CMO today is not about defending last year's playbook. It is about staying ahead of shifts in how brands reach buyers, how data privacy reshapes targeting, and how AI changes content production.

"You're disrupting yourself. You're reinventing yourself so that you're a learner all the time, and not assuming that what you did yesterday is going to get you where you're going to be tomorrow," she said.

The comment lands as Adobe pushes deeper into generative AI tools for marketers, including Firefly for image creation and Sensei GenAI for campaign analytics. Balazs's team tests these tools internally before they reach paying customers. That feedback loop, she said, lets the marketing side shape product roadmaps rather than just consume what engineering ships.

For CMOs at other companies, the implication is direct: the pace of change in marketing technology means the role itself has to evolve. Balazs said the CMOs who thrive will be the ones who treat their own function as a product to be iterated on, not a set of processes to be managed.

"You're disrupting yourself," she said. "You're reinventing yourself."