No Assigned Seats

In this episode, host Thomas Stirling sits down with Marshall Thompson, Executive Director of Experiential Practice at Hyperquake, to discuss how Fortune 1000 brands are adapting to a crowded digital landscape. As buyers face digital content fatigue and growing skepticism over polished AI-generated assets, leading enterprises are shifting their investments toward high-impact, physical environments...

Former Second City CMO Helena Verellen joins Thomas Stirling to share hard-won lessons from a career spent stewarding some of the world's most iconic brands, from Sony and WWE to Sesame Workshop and Second City. Helena draws on over two decades of global marketing experience to make one thing clear: when it comes to heritage brands, the core never changes. What changes is how you tell the story. W...

In this episode, host Thomas Stirling sits down with Ian Dowe, SVP of Marketing at HealthAxis Group, a healthcare SaaS company specializing in insurance claim processing. Dowe shares his unconventional career journey, evolving from a front-line insurance sales representative into a veteran healthcare marketing leader across hospital, payer, and technology sectors. Stirling and Dowe dive deep into...

In this episode, host Thomas Stirling sits down with Chris Musico, Vice President of Brand Experience at AvePoint, to tackle one of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing: escaping the dreaded "sea of sameness." In a fast-moving SaaS landscape dominated by identical competitor dashboards, many companies default to risk-averse copy that reads like category boilerplate. Chris shares how his unconve...

In this episode, host Thomas Stirling sits down with Evan Day, VP of Digital Marketing at BriteCap Financial and a PhD candidate in psychology and neuroscience. Evan operates at a rare intersection, combining a decade of data-driven marketing experience with scientific insights into how the human brain actually processes information and makes decisions. The conversation challenges traditional mark...

Most marketing leaders spend their careers fighting for a seat at the table. Sarah Greenough built the table. With more than 30 years at Princeton Properties, starting in marketing and ultimately ascending to President and CMO, Sarah's career is a case study in what happens when marketing stops being treated as a support function and starts being recognized as a core driver of business value. Her...

In this episode, host Thomas Stirling sits down with Chanelle Leslie, a senior marketing leader who has scaled brands across CPG, beauty, fitness, and subscription models, including Overtone, Ceremonia, and somatic fitness app, The Class. Chanelle shares her core belief that sustainable growth does not require louder marketing; instead, it stems from knowing your audience better than anyone else....

Influencer marketing has moved past the moment. Budgets are real. Scrutiny is higher. And the pressure on CMOs to extract more value from every piece of content, across more channels, faster, isn't letting up. Finola Austin has spent her career at the intersection of creativity and performance, helping brands move beyond the one-off creator post and build something more durable: a content system t...

There's a trap most global brands fall into: standardize the message so aggressively that what made the brand powerful in the first place gets flattened out. Consistency becomes uniformity. Scale becomes noise. Johanna Wahlroos has navigated this at the highest levels, leading global strategy and planning at DoubleVerify, and before that, building and scaling brand programs at Google. Her perspect...

Cold outreach didn't fail because buyers stopped responding. It failed because relevance collapsed. The spray-and-pray era is over, not because AI killed it, but because buyers finally have enough noise that they can afford to ignore everything that doesn't earn their attention. And in environments like healthcare technology, where buying cycles are long, committees are large, and the inbox is a g...

CMO roles are getting eliminated. Fortune 500 companies are rewriting the org chart in real time. And if you believe the headlines, half of white collar workers could be gone in the next 18 months. It's hard not to get caught up in the noise. No Assigned Seats is a show about cutting through it. Hosted by Thomas Stirling, brand strategist, agency founder, and the guy brands call when the wheels ar...