Visha Kudhail is an award-winning global marketing leader whose career spans senior roles at Pinterest, Google, YouTube and Square UK. In each, she has led and in some, built, marketing functions from the ground up, scaled teams across international markets and repositioned brands, leading campaigns that drove business growth, cultural relevance and brand trust.
She began her career at Channel 4 before joining Thinkbox, where she spent over a decade delivering large-scale advertising campaigns, experiential events and content initiatives. As former Head of Pinterest EMEA for Business, she led the EMEA Business Marketing function, shaping how advertisers understood and valued the platform through B2C2B strategies and initiatives such as Pinterest Presents and Pinterest Predicts. At Google, she led brand trust and reputation and scaled the YouTube Works Awards to more than eleven markets. At Square, she created the brand story and positioning for the UK and established the company’s first partner marketing department.
Her work has been widely recognised. She was named a BIMA 100 Champion for Change and won the top prize for Best Leader in Marketing, Brand at the 2022 Global Women in Marketing Awards. A committed advocate for inclusion, she co-founded the FUTURES Network for women in the UK, launched the EMEA Chapter of Women at Pinterest and served as the company’s Global Executive Sponsor. She sits on the Executive Committee Board for Soho House and the Development Advisory Board for Somerset House, and chairs the DMA Media Council. She also created and hosted Behind the Face of Success, a podcast sharing the unfiltered stories behind achievement.
Your career has taken you through Channel 4, Thinkbox, Pinterest, Google, and Square UK, with some positions seeing you build their marketing function from the ground up. Looking back across those roles, what has stayed constant in how you approach the work, regardless of the brand?
“The discipline of focus has remained true. Even if you work for the most well-known brand in the world, you cannot assume the fame a brand has will do the heavy lifting for you – particularly in a saturated market where attention is everywhere. I have been lucky to work for some well-known brands, and what it has taught me is that beneath the brand are the mechanisms you need to keep intact for it to truly stay well-known, admired and invested in.
“That means finding the problem areas before your customer does. It means keep investing in consistent storytelling that navigates the complexities of the macro-economic climate and emerging buying habits. It means being truthful in the message so it connects with audiences. And it means investing in and collaborating with people who believe in getting those foundations right alongside with you.”
You spent over a decade at Thinkbox delivering large-scale television campaigns and experiential events before moving into technology businesses. How did that grounding in traditional media shape the way you now think about digital platforms and audience connection?
“I benefited hugely from my time in the TV world and it’s a place I would love to go back to now that it’s far more data-driven and technologically enabled than where it was when I was starting out. For me, TV was a place that spoke first of craft, storytelling and emotion, whether that emotion was to make you laugh, cry or prompt you to act. TV is about connecting people together and moving them. Emotion is rarely talked about in the digital world, which is far more rooted in behaviours, data, formats and the changing nature of attention spans.
“Having that grounding in connecting with human beings, ultimately our customers, through powerful storytelling, and then combining it with the capabilities of technology, is what a perfect marriage of marketing looks like. One cannot exist without the other. Starting my career on the TV side helped me see this clearly, without falling into the trap many performance marketers tell me they fall into, where they cannot connect the dots so simply, and the human connection between brand and audience gets lost.”
As Head of Pinterest EMEA for Business, you built the regional marketing function and shaped how advertisers understood and valued the platform. What was your thinking behind the B2C2B strategy, and why did initiatives such as Pinterest Presents and Pinterest Predicts prove so effective?
“Business audiences are human, and business decisions are driven by very real, very human choices. Just like buying a consumer product, you need to know it works and does the job you want, but consumer marketing tends to focus on emotive needs as well as rational ones to stay top of mind. Business products and business audiences are no different. You must still invest in the brand to make the case for why.
“For as long as I have been in this industry, B2B marketers have tended to invest only in rational tactics. It is quite boring and you make it easy for your customer to forget you. To reach today’s business audiences, we need to reach them as consumers first, before we land the business message. That secures a brand in a stronger position for memorability, and builds a genuine desire to buy and be associated with it.
“The more you allow creativity to flow through your B2B tactics, the more attention you are likely to gain from existing customers but also those sceptical audiences you want to win over.”
At Google you led brand trust and reputation during a period of real market scepticism. What did you learn about rebuilding confidence in a brand, and how transferable are those lessons for other leaders managing reputation at scale?
“The biggest lesson I gained during that period is that trust and reputational marketing is not something you activate when things go wrong. It is something you communicate consistently, on an always-on basis. With more businesses operating online, it has become a critical part of marketing for the modern era. I learnt that some of the least glamorous messaging tends to be the most impactful for audiences, and it is an important reminder that we cannot create marketing in our own mirror. We are not the customer.
“In the case of Google, publishers, consumers and advertisers wanted to know what active steps the company was taking to protect their data and privacy and give them control. Tapping into those unmet needs and tensions was a way of reminding audiences that the company cares. No business ever gets it right, but it is up to us, as leaders, to have those honest conversations with customers.”
Setting up Square UK’s first partner marketing department meant creating go-to-market motions across product, sales, partnerships and communications. For a leader establishing something entirely new inside an organisation, what makes the difference between a function that lasts and one that stalls?
“Ultimately, results. Results show up in different ways. Revenue, of course, which highlights the impact partner marketing can have on the profitability of a business, and proves to the wider organisation that it deserves to stay as a function in its own right. The other is collaboration. Bringing teams together gives a real sense of purpose to especially those who have either been under-resourced or siloed, allowing individuals to contribute towards a bigger goal, and that collaboration brings a greater business impact through combined efforts.
“Lastly, there is the ability to create momentum, which is absolutely needed in working environments today that are hybrid or remote. Momentum brings the energy we need, and that energy can be created in those go-to-market moments where cross-functional teams provide the motivation to keep working towards the end goal.”
Your new book, Authentic Marketing, advocates that human judgement and creativity should sit alongside technology rather than be replaced by it. As algorithms take a larger role in how brands reach people, why do you believe authenticity has become the deciding factor in whether a message connects?
“Being authentic has always been a deciding factor for shoppers and users of platforms. That need has always been consistent, but what has supercharged it is the introduction of AI. Today, people all over the world question whether the content they are viewing is real, and they place more caution on who they are buying from. According to Edelman, even in the most developed countries, AI is being rejected by 2:1 adults. Add to that the rise of performance-driven content over storytelling, which highlights a business’s need for growth with ‘buy me now’ messages over creative, interesting storytelling or rewarding customers.
“The changing climate of the world, and the concerns it brings, creates the conditions for a sceptical audience which makes more discerning choices about where and with whom they part with their money. Being authentic is ultimately being real. It is when your tone, your message, your product, your advertising, right through to how your CEO speaks on TV, is completely aligned. In a time when consumers form their view of a brand through so many different sources of communication, it is the alignment of these fundamental elements within a business that becomes more visible, more outwardly. When you show up real in a world where it’s hard to find that, you immediately connect with people and build trust, and ultimately growing your bottom line.”
A central idea in the book is that marketing deserves a valuable seat in the boardroom and should deliver against company-wide goals. How can marketing leaders reframe the discipline so that senior colleagues see it as central to growth rather than a supporting cost?
“Marketing is an incredibly complex function, and getting more complex by the day. That’s because we have a responsibility to stay true to the brand story, to stay relevant with audiences who are constantly changing, and to stay up to date with the technology to help us do that, to name just a few things. Because of this, something has to give, and over time, that’s become the true story of marketing.
“We don’t spend enough time marketing the marketing and helping educate our colleagues on the why, what and how of it. And overtime it’s been distilled to just a series of ad campaigns and digital formats. Yet it has been proven time and again, through studies from the IPA databank and Kantar, that marketing grows brands. We have seen power brands like Dove and Nike drive revenue growth through strong marketing. In over fifteen years in the industry, I have never heard anyone tell me they did not believe marketing helped the business.
“If anything, I have more often found myself in situations where marketing support was the thing most in demand to help grow markets. Yet there is one thing we need to do far better for our colleagues: to connect the dots between brand and growth in simple, tangible ways. That means highlighting meaningful ROI when communicating initiatives, adding context to reported metrics, and consistently telling our data story so senior colleagues can follow the journey with us: why budget is spent the way it is, and the hard graft behind the scenes, rather than just the finished, polished ad or event. That requires communicating at a level people can absorb. We all know how busy people are.”
You co-founded the FUTURES Network for women, launched the EMEA Chapter of Women at Pinterest and served as Global Executive Sponsor. What have these initiatives taught you about building inclusion inside large organisations, and what would you encourage other leaders to prioritise?
“I have always supported women, so doing all of this came naturally to me. As a leader, you have to balance a lot when it comes to making sure the business is set up for success, and so is your team – to achieve its goals. Women are judged more harshly on their performance, so it is important that we do not let that slip.
“My advice to other leaders (men and women) is to prioritise what comes naturally to you, so you can build it into your day to day. It starts to feel less like work and more like a personal value you are bringing into the real world. Not just an intention. A real action. Co-founding a network for women was about creating space for women in the industry, and the community groups I led during my time at Pinterest were about contributing to a positive and inspiring company culture. Both did the same thing at their core: they created belonging. That is something I never felt when I first joined the industry many years ago, so I have actively found ways to create it ever since, whether internally or externally.”
For those aiming to lead in marketing over the coming decade, the balance between technology and human creativity is likely to define the sector. What qualities do you believe the next generation of marketing leaders will need to succeed?
“Quite simply, it will not be one thing. There will be many. It will be honing your own skills and becoming a critical thinker, so you can lead decisions with confidence, embrace challenging pivots without breaking a sweat, and know the difference between average marketing, good enough marketing, and award-winning work. It will be understanding the complexities of AI: how it works, and how to build it into your function with a strategic mind. And it will mean strengthening your communication skills, so you can tell marketing stories as a business leader, a storyteller and a creative all at once, adapting to whichever version the room in front of you needs.”