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Preston Nix shared thisIt's time to tell the story behind our name. Marlo is named after my mom, Janet Marlowe Nix. For as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted to start my own company. I also knew that, if I ever did, I wanted it to stand for something bigger than just business. When Gabriel Cebrian 👨🏻💻 and I first started talking about the idea that would eventually become MarloAI, we kept coming back to one theme: memory for marketing. We wanted to give marketing teams a living memory of their brand, so knowledge compounds over time and shapes every future decision, message, and experience. Once we realized that memory was at the heart of what we were creating, the name felt obvious. Six years ago, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She developed it in her early sixties, which unfortunately is not uncommon in our family. My mom has three siblings, and of the four of them, three are living with this terrible disease. I'm incredibly lucky to still have my mom in my life. In fact, she still pops up on LinkedIn sometimes, which always makes me laugh. But the looming threat of Alzheimer's hangs over her and our family every day. It's one of those diseases that progresses slowly, taking everyone it touches on an emotional rollercoaster of hope, heartbreak, grief, and gratitude. And despite all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure. What makes it especially hard is knowing who my mom has always been. She has been a ray of sunshine in my life and in the lives of everyone around her. Growing up, she wasn't just my mom. She was "Mama Nix" to all of my friends. She had an incredible gift for making people feel like family. Her warmth, generosity, and unwavering support left a lasting impression on everyone fortunate enough to know her. That's also why we're committed to making Marlo part of something bigger. Gabe and I have pledged to donate a portion of our revenue every year to organizations supporting Alzheimer's research and education. If I ever need motivation to keep building, it's knowing that every step forward helps push that research a little closer to a cure. That's a legacy that would make my mom proud. Our first step is happening on Saturday, October 3, when my family will participate in the Walk to End Alzheimer's in Raleigh at Halifax Mall. We've created a team in honor of my mom and her siblings, Team Nix / Dawson / Cartwright. Marlo will match every dollar donated to the team, up to $2,500. That means your $50 donation becomes $100, with every dollar going directly to the Alzheimer's Association. You can support the team here: https://lnkd.in/emrv9uvP 🔗 I've shared this story with many people over the years, and I'll end with the same message I always do: share your stories and look out for the people around you. Chances are someone you know is carrying a burden you can't see. And if Alzheimers has touched your family too, please reach out. I'd love to hear your story. You're not alone.
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Preston Nix shared thisEvery brand has a marketing calendar. Almost all of them exist in a spreadsheet or PowerPoint that someone manually updates each week. I ran a few of them for years (CRM, media, offers). Every window, every promotion, every launch, color coded, locked months out. These calendars were genuinely useful, but they always lacked one thing: context. They did not know we had already run that offer twice that year, or how it performed. They did not know a competitor was about to drop the price on the exact item we were promoting that week. And they did not know the promotion we locked in for a Thursday in September would land on the same night as the NFL's opening game. Instead, the calendar relied on people to be the integration layer. Someone to remember what we ran last year and how it performed, someone to track what was coming up in culture, and someone to catch conflicts before anything shipped. So when we started Marlo, the calendar was one of the first things Gabriel Cebrian 👨🏻💻 and I wanted to fix. Picture the same calendar, except it has context. It knows that the local NFL team has a home game that Sunday and that rain is in the forecast, so when it recommends an offer it's built for delivery and groups, not a single eater. It knows a competitor dropped the price on the exact item you are promoting. It knows what happened the last four times you ran this promotion, where you ran it, who received it, and how it performed. At that point, it is not a document anymore. It is something living, taking in what is happening around it and using that context to make what comes next smarter. All of that said, a living calendar is a lot easier said than done. Every brand and every team approaches their calendar differently. Different guests, different markets, different priorities (and different definitions of what a "window" even is). So there is no perfect uniform solution, and that is exactly why we believe so much in the co-building part of MarloAI. Some teams will want a fully automated calendar. Others might want a simple interface that shows them what is happening. And others will want something completely custom. Marlo should be able to support all of it, because we built it to be composable with a brand. Our intelligence stack is standardized. The output is shaped around what each brand actually needs. And every edit someone makes to a calendar feeds back into the system, so Marlo learns from those decisions too. This is a multi-year journey for us. Cracking something this critical to how our clients work will take time, iteration, and a lot of rethinking how the work gets done. But it's a good start. So, if you run a calendar today, I'd genuinely like to know a few things. How many different documents do you have to open before you can tell whether next month’s plan is actually a good one? What tool do you actually like using? And how do you keep it all current?
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Preston Nix shared thisWhen I first had the idea for MarloAI, I was completely obsessed. I could not stop thinking about this concept of a "marketing operating system" and how powerful it could be. Then I brought the idea to the most experienced engineer and founder I know, Gabriel Cebrian 👨🏻💻. He definitely liked the idea, but he barely brought it up when we first started. Instead, he kept coming back to how we worked as a team. He would always say "it's not about the idea, it's all about the team." Transparently, I felt slightly disappointed that he didn't love my "idea" the way I did. But he was right. You can have a million great ideas, but the team is what determines which ones survive. For us, it shows in how we work together. I tend to be the one that gets overly excited about a new application of technology or caught up in thinking about how we "can change how marketing gets done." Gabe remains consistent, thoughtful, and calm each time. Whether it's a high pressure demo, a client escalation, or something breaking an hour before a meeting, Gabe always approaches things with the same steady demeanor. Last week I texted him the truest thing I've said about our company: "Our commitment to making this thing is so equal and so intense." The core idea has not changed since day one, which is to change how marketing gets done. But the way we execute is always shifting. It is shaped by every client, by the technology, and by every problem we tackle along the way. So the idea turned out to be the easy part. It's the one thing that has stayed consistent. Everything around it gets rebuilt. And the work is a whole lot better when you trust the person building it next to you. For anyone building something right now: who is the person you want on the call when it is going badly?
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Preston Nix posted thisNobody buys the vision. Three months in, that's my most useful learning. I know for experienced sales folks this sounds like a no-brainer, but it's worth saying out loud, especially when one of us (me) is the marketer who absolutely loves selling a big vision. I'll explain: We would walk into the room with the entire MarloAI platform laid out: the intelligence layer, the memory system, what it looks like when every campaign makes the next one smarter. And the room would nod along, genuinely interested, and then…nothing. It wasn't that anyone disagreed. Most of the CMOs and CEOs we spoke with were fully aligned on where marketing is heading. But every conversation ended the same way: "I just don't know where to put you," or "It's a lot," or my personal favorite, "so are you an agency or a platform?" The vision resonated. They just couldn't place us. That's when we changed our approach and started much smaller. You find the one workstream that takes two to three months today, and you get it down to two weeks. That's it. That's the whole opening move. One undeniable win that proves the model before you ever talk about the rest of the platform. Enter learning #1: if you want to bring a disruptive approach to an industry that hasn't evolved in years, you must deliver IMMEDIATE VALUE without overcomplicating it. So now the first month or two of every engagement has one job, and it is the least visionary job imaginable: find the workstream that eats the most time and cut it down. Sometimes that's reporting. Sometimes it's the creative feedback loop. Sometimes it's legal review (sorry, legal 😎). Once someone has felt that first win, we build the roadmap together, and the bigger system stops being a pitch and starts being the obvious next step. The platform, the intelligence layer, the memory system: now they have a place to land. The part I did not expect is that this made the vision easier to sell, not harder. It turns out people will follow you a long way if you're useful to them first (duh!). My honest read, for anyone pushing something new into a big company: your first ask is probably still too big. Mine was, for a long time. Tell me the small version: what's the one workstream in your world that still takes two to three months?
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Preston Nix shared thisWe ran campaign after campaign, and the system never got any smarter. That's the sentence that made Gabe and I start MarloAI. Here's what I mean by that: marketers keep getting asked to do more — more assets, more channels, more personalized messages, with less time and less support. But the system underneath hasn't evolved with any of it. So you're left with three options today, and honestly, none of them are great. The first option is the familiar one, a stack of tools that don't actually talk to each other. Your social platform doesn't know what's happening in CRM, your reviews system isn't feeding into your local media buys, and nothing is sharing intelligence. Individually, each tool is smart. Together, they're clueless. The second is relying on agencies. And I genuinely love my agency partners (you do incredible work, and we have a solution for you too!). But think about how often you've changed agencies, met a new account lead, and suddenly felt like you were rebuilding everything from the ground up. The third is pushing your internal team to build the tools and systems themselves, hoping it fills the gaps the other two leave behind. But teams are made of people. And people grow, get promoted, and move on. When they do, the systems they built and everything they learned walk out the door with them (see: me leaving Burger King 😊). I had this wrong for a long time, though. These are not three choices you pick between. Every large team I know runs all three at once: tools bought, agencies managing half of them, and the internal team stitching the rest together by hand. And the connection points between these pieces are exactly where things fall apart. Nobody owns connecting social with CRM. Nobody owns linking reviews and media buys. And plenty of teams sit at the other extreme, with the budget for none of it. One person owns social, CRM, the agency relationship and the reporting, and that person is the memory. You know if this is you. Either way you land in the same place, and it's the real problem underneath all of it. Marketing has no memory. There is nowhere that every decision, every piece of feedback, and every performance lesson accumulates so the next campaign starts smarter than the last. And I don't just mean the numbers. I mean the WHY behind the choices. So that's what we're building: a memory system for marketing. Every campaign, every send, every "actually, we tried that and here's what happened" should make the next one better. And here's the part I still haven't found a good answer to: what in your stack today actually remembers anything from last year? Not the numbers — the why, the decisions, the feedback loops, the experiments, the lessons, the context. What tool in your stack can tell you what you tried in 2022 and why you made that call?
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Preston Nix shared thisOkay, here we go! It's been almost 3 months since Gabriel Cebrian 👨🏻💻 and I left Burger King to build MarloAI, and we have not stopped since. We've partnered with our first clients across a few different industries, and we've been putting this wild technology to work on real problems every day. Gabe has also been heads down becoming fully LinkedIn famous (swear, he's gone viral every week). Well, it looks like it's my turn. As I've thought about my presence and our company's presence on LinkedIn, I wanted to set some ground rules for myself. My number one priority is that every post and every insight I put out is authentic, honest, and captures the true essence of what we're building. I want to share what it really means to build with this technology today, the things we've learned working and selling into large enterprises, and some of the features and workflows we've been automating. So here's the split. This account is me. The takes, the stories, and the lessons are all mine. That doesn't mean I won't use AI to clean up and refine my longer tangents, because I absolutely will (my typos are world class). The Marlo company page is the opposite, by design. Our company "brain" plans its own calendar, writes its own drafts, reads its own performance, and publishes. Marlo has been doing that for a while now. When Gabe or I are the ones posting on the Marlo LinkedIn page, we will sign off. If we didn't sign off, you're watching the product at work. Now imagine that for your brand. Every CRM message, every social post, a calendar built months ahead from real market intelligence and your own performance, then adjusted daily as the system learns what actually worked. That's the thing we're building, and this page is where you get to watch it happen. So for the CMOs and marketing leads reading this: what's the first thing you'd actually trust a system like that to take off your plate?
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Preston Nix shared thisSome bittersweet news! After 9 incredible years at RBI and Burger King, I've officially closed the chapter. Working at BK has been one of the best experiences of my life. I got to scale our Digital, CRM, Loyalty, and Media programs and be part of some truly breakthrough campaigns and partnerships along the way (shoutout Whopper Detour, Million Dollar Whopper, Walmart+, Robinhood, and many more). But the real thing was the people. Every leader who took a bet on me, every teammate who pushed me to be sharper, every franchisee, agency, and tech partner along the way. Thank you. You all made me a stronger marketer, a real professional, and most importantly a better human. BK is in incredible hands. Keep crushing it! So what's next? I'm building something new with one of the best technical minds I know, Gabriel Cebrian. Years inside enterprise marketing taught us the same lesson over and over. Marketing keeps being asked to do more, and the system underneath it hasn't kept up. The hundredth campaign teaches the system nothing the first didn't. People leave and what they knew leaves with them. Nothing compounds. We think that's an architecture problem, not a people problem (and we're building the architecture). A lot more to share very soon! In the meantime, if you're a marketer at a big brand or agency and you want a sneak peek, drop me a note. Always around to talk. Cheers to what's next! P.S. More from the journey to come on here. So, kicking it off with a throwback to my very first day. Enjoy, society 🫠 .
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Preston Nix reacted on thisBraze Forge 2026 goes down as probably the best Forge yet. It has grown from the days of smaller spaces into the big, beautiful space at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. The marketing stories are better than ever. Customer engagement is up, and I mean better engagement, not noisier engagement. AI decisioning is becoming more widespread. My highlight was the time with clients, partners, and prospects. Really (really) great dinners and experiences. Thank you to my Merkle team for a great showing and one of the most talked about partner sessions. David Novak, you really crushed it! Braze also showed our team so much love, across so many parts of their global organization. What true partners they all are! Courtney Hedges, David Novak, Jessica Brucale, Caron Whitener, Ariana Schleisman, Barry Latimer, Maddie Sleconich, David Swezey, Jennifer Zimnowski, Justin Turner, Christian Weber, PhD, Milla Stern
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Preston Nix reacted on thisProud of my co-founder Preston Nix for sharing the story behind our name. MarloAI is named after his mom, Janet Marlowe, and we've pledged to give back to Alzheimer's research as we grow. Building great things is one purpose. Helping make this disease go is a bigger one. If you want to help, Marlo is matching donations up to $2,500 (link in Preston's post) or repost.
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Business Analytical Applications
Busi 410
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Change Management for Service Excellence
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Corporate Finance
Busi 408
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Decision Models for Economics
Stor 113
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EEO: Re-imagining capitalism: alternatives for the XXI century
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Entrepreneurial Consulting
Busi 505
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Financial Accounting and Analysis
Busi 407
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Intermediate Microeconomic Theory
Econ 410
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Introduction to Economics
Econ 101
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Introduction to Entrpreneurship
Econ 125
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Leadership In Action
Busi 526
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Leading and Managing: An Introduction to Organizational Behavior
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Legal & Ethical Environment of Business
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Management and Corporate Communication
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Marketing
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Marketing & Sociedad: valores, cambio e impacto social
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Busi 564
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Honors & Awards
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Deans List
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●Achieved a Grade Point Average above 3.5 for 2015 Spring Semester
●15 hours -
Top 4 Ernst & Young Case Off
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● Completed 4 different cases to place in final four of 32 person competition
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Deans List
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●Achieved a Grade Point Average above 3.5 for 2014 Fall Semester
●12 hours -
Deans List
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
●Achieved a Grade Point Average above a 3.5 for 2014 Spring semester
● 15 Hours -
Deans List
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
●Achieved a Grade Point Average above 3.5 for 2013 Fall Semester
●16 hours -
Larry Harrell International Scholarship, 2013
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●Only recipient out of 15,000 car washes in 24 countries
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English
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Spanish
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Delta Sigma Pi
Chancellor
- Present•Headed and compiled agenda for weekly chapter meetings with 109 active brothers •Reviewed and updated 20 pages of chapter bylaws, policies, and procedures per national chapter compliance
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Future Business Leaders of America
President
- Present•Selected leadership pipeline and restructured the organization resulting in an increase from 6 to 104 members •Presided, planned, and conducted meetings of over 100 members and managed executive board of 15 officers •Coordinated all FBLA events, competitions, and operations including National Competition & 6 company visits
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Philosophy, Politics, & Economics
Active Member
- Present•Attend various presentations discussing the need for a joint knowledge in social science •Expected to identify the key aspects of complex decision-making processes and to analyze both their normative and positive dimensions.
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Disability Advocates
Active Volunteer/ Operations Assistant
-•Assisted a disability representative in locating underprivileged or homeless clients in need of disability benefits •Developed a data collection and evaluation method, increasing the amount of cases completed by 15%
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Delta Sigma Pi
Vice President of Public Relations
-•Worked with a budget of $1,000 to ensure sufficient attendance at annual Leadership conference •Responsible for running all social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Wix, Listserv, and Instagram •Collaborated with Senior VP to achieve high publicity for all rush and fraternity events
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Delta Sigma Pi Pledge Class
Assistant Vice President of Finance
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Gina Kimiza Tan, MBA
If you’re scaling a consumer tech product this year, I’d double down on culture and community. ✖️Not more features. ✖️Not more funnels. Features get built 📱 Culture gets shared 🤳🏻 The consumer tech brands that scale fastest don’t just solve problems. They make people feel like they belong. Apple. Nike. Duolingo. Spotify. Peloton Interactive. If you use any of these, you already know what I mean. You don’t analyze why they work. You feel it. That’s culture doing the distribution. 🔥 What they get right, and most teams skip: • Build for identity, not just utility • Let culture drive distribution • Turn users into participants, not customers • Make the brand felt, not explained 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 → 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 → 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵. That loop compounds faster than any funnel. If your product disappeared tomorrow, what would users actually miss, the function or the feeling?
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Jonathan Pearson
🚨 At $100M–$300M revenue, partnerships are no longer a side channel. After years working with founders and CMOs scaling DTC businesses across online education, mobile apps, sports performance coaching, and health & wellness supplements, I’ve formed a strong view: 👉 Partnerships, affiliates, ambassadors & influencers should sit under the CMO. Not Sales. Not Performance Marketing. Not “whoever has time”. Why? Because at this stage, the CMO isn’t just a brand lead. They’re the Chief Growth Architect. This function directly impacts: • Blended CAC • LTV • Market expansion • Brand trust • Channel diversification And it needs one accountable owner. What I see go wrong most often ❌ Junior affiliate managers ❌ Fragmented agencies & creators ❌ No forecasting or margin discipline ❌ Influencers treated as transactions ❌ Partnerships run like paid ads The result? Revenue leakage, brand dilution, and zero compounding effect. What works at $100M–$300M Under the CMO, I’ve seen the best companies build: • A VP / Director of Partnerships & Strategic Growth • Strategic JVs & co-created offers • A disciplined affiliate engine (forecasted, not “set and forget”) • A real ambassador ecosystem (trust > follower count) • Influencers used tactically - not as the growth strategy This team owns non-paid distribution, with commercial rigour and brand fluency. One important distinction Reporting into the CMO with hard metrics. Best-in-class teams still run with: • Revenue targets • Contribution margin thresholds • Attribution discipline • Finance & CRO alignment The reporting line is marketing. The mindset is commercial. At this stage of scale, the real question isn’t: “Should we invest more in partnerships?” It’s: 👉 Do we want this to be a strategic growth engine or a chaotic side project? Structure creates leverage. Leverage creates market leaders.
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Mehtab S. Bhogal
Easy wins this Black Friday you can still harvest... 1. Ringless voicemail. This is free money. For the script, treat it like SMS because it gets transcribed. Be sure to spell your brand out. 2. Insert Black Friday verbiage everywhere. Collection descriptions, PDPs, cart, checkout, LPs, announcements bars... It's easy for people to miss. Also when someone navigates into a product they want to know the product they are adding is part of your sale. 3. Collection sort. Applies to email, sms, your site...EVERYTHING. This is BUTCHERED by most high SKU brands. If you're in apparel and sending people to a best sellers collection but your top product only has XXS or XXXL or some weird size in stock...you're burning $! As you lose size coverage, demote products. Have a long form blog on this, dives in deeper. But this is a HUGE % mover during BF. 4. Direct mail. Keep in mind mail is the same cost even during BFCM VS clicks getting wildly more expensive. With something like Post Pilot (disclosure - investor) it's easy to do this at scale very quickly; it outperforms during BFCM especially, even in holdouts VS SMS or SMS+email. 5. Slam SMS/email frequency. Send a lot and keep deliverability high by doing things like encouraging replies to win free stuff. Don't be afraid to be aggressive. You should be sending email daily...and even 2x - 3x on BF + CM days. Open any of your relative's email accounts (that isn't a nerd) and look at how many promo emails they receive per day. Nobody is going to care that you sent a lot of email during BFCM.
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