Local Voice, Global Core
Johanna Wahlroos is VP of Marketing, Global Strategy and Planning at DoubleVerify, where she has been for nearly five years, having joined as VP of Global Client Strategy. She has lived and worked across Finland, Chile, Germany, and the US, has delivered keynotes in five languages, and leads the Women ERG at DoubleVerify across ten global chapters.
“AI is the tool. Customer-centricity means staying genuinely curious.”
Johanna Wahlroos is VP of Marketing, Global Strategy and Planning at DoubleVerify, responsible for cross-channel marketing strategies across AMER, EMEA, and APAC, customer-centric sales enablement, and the global expansion of DoubleVerify’s marketing reach. She was promoted from VP of Global Client Strategy, which she held from August 2021 to July 2025.
Johanna’s international background is formative rather than incidental. She has lived and worked in Chile, Germany, Finland, and the US, conducted research at the University of Helsinki, and spent a decade at Google across Helsinki, San Francisco, and New York. She describes the move from Helsinki to New York in 2015 as a pivotal crash course: in Finland, staying humble and not reaching too high are cultural norms backed by proverbs. In New York, being able to verbalise your team’s accomplishments and tell the story of your results is not self-promotion. It is professional competence. She adjusted, without losing her Finnish roots.
At Google she progressed from Senior Industry Analyst to Global Insights Manager to Account Executive managing a global automotive portfolio of over $100 million. She then joined DoubleVerify where her VP Global Client Strategy role was focused on the company’s largest customers, Fortune 500 brands and Big Six agency holdcos, and where she co-led the global Women ERG to ten chapters and over 300 members. Her current VP Marketing role expands that scope to encompass global strategy and planning, driving alignment between marketing and sales across all regions.
“It all starts with putting yourself in the shoes of the customer.”
“After 20 years, it is tempting to think you know your customers. Staying curious is still the job.”
Johanna’s core marketing belief is that expertise and curiosity need to coexist, and that they often do not. The example she draws on is from her time in Europe: major automotive and financial services brands, confident in their knowledge of their consumers, who were slow to see that digital was changing the purchase journey entirely. A decade later, those brands were competing against entirely new entrants. The lesson she takes from it is not that experience is worthless but that it can narrow your field of view if you let it. The antidote is staying close to consumers, staying open to signals that contradict your assumptions, and treating market understanding as a renewable practice rather than a fixed asset.
“You need the crisp positioning everyone can repeat. You need both.”
Johanna’s global-local framework is built on the distinction between positioning and tone. Positioning, the core story of what a company does and why it matters, should be universally consistent. Tone, the specific way that story is told in a given market, should be locally calibrated. The obvious example is visual: product imagery shot in snow does not land in Brazil or Australia. But the deeper point is cultural: what makes an argument persuasive in Germany is different from what makes it persuasive in the UK, and the marketers who understand those differences from lived experience rather than from guidelines are the ones who produce work that actually resonates.
“Sales teams hold enormous knowledge in their heads. The last thing they want after a great meeting is to write a novel.”
Johanna’s most forward-looking observation about AI in B2B marketing is about bridging the information gap between sales and marketing. The sales team holds enormous qualitative intelligence: what clients are actually worried about, what arguments landed, what the buying committee really cares about. That knowledge rarely makes it back into the marketing strategy because it is stored in people’s heads and the incentive to document it is low. AI tools that passively capture and synthesise call recordings, meeting notes, and CRM interactions make that intelligence available to marketers without asking salespeople to change their behaviour. That is, in her view, one of the most commercially significant applications of AI in B2B marketing right now.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.