The Case Mandates Proof Tools Essays Career
Available · Full-time senior operating role
Marketing, Data & AI Executive

Companies buy capability faster than they learn to operate with it.

Marketing organizations have bought the platforms and accumulated the data. The returns have not caught up.

Twenty-five years across agency consulting, publishing, and financial services, leading the work in-house and advising it from outside. Today, applying that operating discipline to agentic AI.

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Tony Weber
Oxford Saïd Executive Diploma in AI for Business
The case

The gap between what companies spend on marketing technology and what they get back is old. It can be traced back to the first martech buildouts, through data platforms and CDPs, and AI is widening it again. The industry keeps attacking it with technical talent, engineers embedded with customers and integration teams brought in after the sale. Useful, and incomplete. Getting a system into production is one problem. Getting an organization to run on it is a different one, and it belongs to whoever owns decisions, budgets, and the way work actually gets done.

That second problem has been my job the whole way. I led digital product at American Express, digital marketing and analytics at Time Inc., and data inside WPP, where I ran a hundred-person data practice as a chief data officer and a $15M consulting P&L as an EVP. And I stay hands-on. Right now that means building and governing agentic AI systems myself, human gates and audit trails included, so I know where they break in production rather than in a demo.

The technology changes every few years. The hard work of making an organization run on it stays constant.
Mandates

What I can own

Prove the return
Be accountable for what the investment actually returned, in numbers finance accepts. I've owned that answer as the operator inside the business and as the partner across the table.
  • Spotify attributed a 30% cut in monthly active user churn to the Engagement Score work I ran
  • A 19% revenue increase at Time Inc., modernizing marketing analytics across its 22 brands
  • Coca-Cola attributed a 12% performance lift across traditional and retail media to the recruitment-model work in the year I led the analytics team
Run the organization
Build and run marketing, data, and AI organizations, whether an in-house function or a practice that wins its own revenue. P&L ownership, org design, governance, and the leaders developed underneath it.
  • Led a 100+ person data and AI organization across North America as CDO at Wunderman Thompson, then VML, with a P&L above $20M
  • Built Choreograph's North American consulting practice from a solo mandate to 35 people and a $15M+ P&L
  • Mentored 15+ leaders, promoting eight to director level or above
Make the bets
Own the strategy and the platform decisions: what to build, what to buy, and what to do first. I've made those calls as an operator and guided them as an advisor.
  • Owned American Express's global digital identity platform: a $19.7M annual investment serving 14M users and 3 billion daily transactions
  • Ran Mazda's marketing platform selection end to end; the scoring model knocked a presumed finalist out before the bake-off and earned leadership's commitment to the result
  • Oxford Executive Diploma in AI for Business, 2024
Proof

Selected proof

19.4%
Dell inventory-responsive marketing
Dell's predictive cancellation and alternate-product recommendation solution countered inventory-driven cancellations by surfacing alternatives in real time. I was executive sponsor of the Choreograph team that built it; initial results showed a 19.4% conversion lift and an 86% drop in cancellations.
$5.6M
U.S. Marine Corps recruiting
I sponsored the segmentation and digital roadmap work that shifted USMC recruiting from rules-based targeting toward behavioral and predictive intelligence. The strategy unlocked $5.6M in incremental funding, and parts of the data ethics recommendations were written into legislation.
$1.7B
Dimensional Fund Advisors
As head of digital product I launched the firm's first mobile application and drove a 28% increase in online conversion of advisory leads, generating $1.7B in potential new assets under management.
Tools

Instruments you can operate

Signal · Demonstration
Marketing Maturity Diagnostic
Twenty-four questions place your marketing on two axes, operating maturity and AI autonomy, and read the gap between them. You leave with a named pattern, priorities, and a first move.
Open → Signal · Demonstration
Customer Signal Console
Customer data as a mixing board: every signal arranged by what it says and how fast it moves, from stable identity to real-time behavior. A permission gate sits in front, and the message fires only when it clears.
Open →
Essays

Where I stand

Fieldnotes
Burn Your Best Quarter
Everyone can buy the same capability now. What still separates companies is the willingness to disrupt a profitable business before someone else does it to them.
Read → Fieldnotes
Data Rich, Activation Poor
Why the distance between the customer data enterprises hold and what they can lawfully activate keeps widening, and why permission is the gate everything else waits behind.
Read → Fieldnotes
You're Benchmarking the Wrong Thing
Enterprises benchmark the model layer, the one part of the stack designed to be swapped, while defaults nobody treated as decisions harden into the operating model. What to evaluate instead.
Read →
Career

Career, in brief

2025 to presentOnbench PartnerAI strategy advisory; co-developing the firm's AI for Marketing practice
2024 to 2025Choreograph (WPP) EVP, Data & Tech Solution ConsultingThe North American AI and data consulting practice
2022 to 2024Wunderman Thompson, then VML Chief Data Officer, North AmericaAdvanced analytics, consulting, and enablement across eight US locations
2017 to 2021Wunderman Thompson & Acceleration (WPP) SVP rolesPrincipal consulting, solution partnerships, and enterprise pursuits
2014 to 2016Time Inc. VP, Digital Marketing, Analytics & CapabilitiesDigital subscription products and marketing analytics for the flagship brands
2000 to 2013Earlier American Express · Citicards · iCrossing · Possible · Dimensional Fund Advisors
Full resume →
Contact

Get in touch

I'm looking for my next full-time operating seat: SVP, EVP, or C-suite in marketing, data, AI, or all three. If that's the conversation you want to have, email me or reach me on LinkedIn. For advisory or consulting conversations, the same address works. And if you're building in this space and just want to compare notes, I answer those too.

tgweber@gmail.com  ·  LinkedIn →