In Other Words

Nobody asks a crayon company about commercial strategy. But Victoria Lozano spent 17 years helping expand Crayola beyond its core products into physical venues, children's entertainment, and global licensing. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway is joined by Victoria Lozano, former Chief Marketing Officer and EVP at Crayola, to explore why awareness alone is not enough to drive growth, how a single brand speaks to a five-year-old and a boardroom, and how campaigns, content, and experiences work across markets and languages. Victoria also brings direct P&L experience, having built and run Crayola's location-based entertainment business before leading global marketing.

Sean Hopwood started a company in 2007 without owning a computer. Nearly two decades later, Day Translations works with more than 10,000 linguists across offices on three continents, all without a dollar of outside investment. In this CEO-to-CEO edition of In Other Words, Sean joins Phrase CEO Georg Ell to share the decisions behind that growth. He explains how his team won back a client by building an AI interpreting service over a single weekend, and why he sees persuasion as another language to learn.

Raja Rajamannar dropped the Mastercard name from its own logo. After testing brand recognition across 26 countries and studying how the brain processes visual symbols versus written words, he was confident the evidence was on his side. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway is joined by Raja, who spent 12 years as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard and is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Quantum Marketing. They explore the conviction behind that logo decision, how he cut the advertising budget by more than 70% and still accelerated the brand from number 87 to number 12 in the world during his tenure as CMCO. They also examine why most marketing organizations are competing for human attention in a world where the audience is increasingly a machine.

Your next customer might hire someone through an AI assistant and never visit your website. Llibert Argerich, Thumbtack's first-ever Chief Marketing Officer, previously scaled Udemy's customer business from $250 million to nearly $700 million across 65 languages. On In Other Words he shares how Thumbtack is embedding its marketplace of 300,000 service professionals directly into AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Alexa Plus and why the company treats every zip code as a distinct market. Llibert explains how he expanded a search-dependent acquisition model into an 11-channel growth engine.

AI slop might be the best thing to happen to legacy publishers. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway talks with Nandagopal Rajan, CEO of The Indian Express Digital, about building a trusted news business in the most demanding content market on earth. From a 30-person basement team to 550 people reaching 100 million monthly visitors, Nandagopal grew The Indian Express Digital by refusing to compromise journalism for platform traffic. With a billion internet users, 22 official languages, and monetization models that can value the same reader differently depending on the language they use, India challenges almost every assumption about how content businesses scale. For leaders operating across complex markets, it offers lessons few other markets can.

In most industries, a branding mistake costs you credibility. In medtech, a misplaced claim on a device label can cost a patient. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway is joined by Terence Wiggins, Peripheral Marketing Leader at Cordis Corporation. They explore what brand means when your buyer is a surgeon choosing a device mid-procedure and how you hold a coherent message together across more than 70 countries with different regulatory and language requirements. Terence brings over two decades of global medtech marketing experience to a conversation about why storytelling in this industry carries a weight that most marketers never have to consider.

In a market where 130,000 games compete for attention on Steam Store, and players can get a full refund with a single click, a poor language experience can cost you the player before the game even starts. Tamara Tirják spent a decade building the localization program at Frontier Developments, one of the UK's leading game studios, before moving into independent consulting and research. On this episode of In Other Words, she joins host Jason Hemingway to share what that decade taught her about the business cost of getting language wrong.

Over 70% of AI governance leaders recently admitted they'd let unaudited models keep running if they were tied to revenue. Dr. Eva-Marie Muller-Stuler has spent 25 years advising Fortune 500 companies, the UN, and the EU Parliament on AI strategy and governance. She built and led EY's Data and AI practice across the Middle East and North Africa, served as CTO for AI at IBM, and was named World's Best Data Scientist in 2020. Now the founder and CEO of The Hummingbird Group, she joins host Jason Hemingway to explore what companies get wrong when scaling AI globally and where accountability sits when AI is embedded in enterprise decision-making.

Scott Kinka has advised over 12,000 businesses on technology decisions. As Chief Strategy Officer at Bridgepointe Technologies, he manages one of the largest independent partner ecosystems in the U.S., with a supplier network that extends into Europe, the UK, and Latin America. On this episode of In Other Words, Scott examines with host Jason Hemingway where build vs. buy decisions go wrong when businesses expand across markets and languages, how the organizations getting the most from AI are the ones investing in platforms they can build on, and what global consistency means when your customers expect the same experience everywhere.

In this special CEO-to-CEO edition of In Other Words, Phrase CEO Georg Ell sits down with Cathy Hackl, Global Tech Futurist, CEO of Future Dynamics, Nokia's Futurist-in-Residence, and one of Newsweek's Top 25 AI Visionaries. Known as the Godmother of the Metaverse, Cathy traces her journey from Emmy-nominated journalist and Emmy judge to one of the most influential voices in spatial computing, AI, and immersive technologies. They discuss the AI supercycle and the infrastructure powering the next era of computing. They also explore why a generation of kids already converting dollars to Robux in their heads may be rewriting the rules of commerce, communication, and customer experience.