Storytelling Is the Secret Sauce
Maria Shcheglakova, formerly Marketing Director EMEA at PubMatic and now Director of Global Marketing CTV and Data Advertising at TiVo, brings a B2C marketer’s instinct for story and a sustainability leader’s discipline for impact to the world of ad tech. Her conviction: in a crowded market, storytelling is the differentiator that technology alone cannot replicate.
“B2B marketing is about much more than personalised emails. There is so much connectivity between B2C and B2B.”
Maria Shcheglakova is Director of Global Marketing CTV and Data Advertising at TiVo, having previously served as Marketing Director EMEA at PubMatic for five years, where she oversaw marketing across 30+ markets. A Future 100 member and sustainability business management leader, she began her career as a brand marketer for Moët Hennessy and has spent over 18 years building marketing expertise across B2C, media agencies, and ad tech.
Maria grew up and began her career as a brand marketer for a luxury alcohol brand before moving to London in 2009 with the specific aim of learning how great brands run digital marketing. She worked across media agencies including Mindshare and Mediaedge:cia, worked with brands including Paramount Pictures, HSBC, and London Business School, and then ran her own marketing consultancy, Canvas Marketing, for seven years, serving fashion tech, fintech, and technology clients. She also held concurrent EMEA marketing lead roles at Videology and Amobee during that period.
She joined PubMatic in 2020, building the EMEA marketing function as the business scaled from around 400 people to over 800, launched into new markets, and became a public company. In January 2025 she moved to TiVo, where she leads global marketing for the CTV and data advertising business. She is also a passionate advocate for sustainable marketing practices, having introduced sustainability as an explicit dimension of her team’s effectiveness measurement at PubMatic.
“The best content I’ve seen engagement on were exactly the questions people don’t know the answer to.”
“In ad tech, companies are often very close in their business proposition. And I think it’s about storytelling.”
In a category where technology capabilities converge and differentiators narrow, the brand that tells its story most compellingly wins. Maria’s case is that storytelling is not a creative department’s job, it is the marketing function’s core responsibility. Understanding what your customers cannot solve, what is urgent and unworkable for them, and creating content that addresses exactly those questions is the foundation. Everything else is distribution.
“I don’t believe in a funnel per se. I think it’s really a circle.”
The funnel implies a linear journey from awareness to purchase. Maria’s experience is that buyer journeys in ad tech are not linear. They are relational, iterative, and influenced by touchpoints across the full spectrum of channels simultaneously. The more useful mental model is a circle: existing customer advocacy creates awareness, awareness creates new conversations, new conversations create new customers, new customers create new advocates. The marketing job is to keep the circle turning.
“Ruthless transparency is the most exciting part. Share everything so you build on each other instead of duplicating.”
Maria runs a flat, multi-functional team spread across multiple countries. The risk in that structure is duplication, misalignment, and the gradual siloing of effort. Her antidote is radical openness: regular structured brainstorms, challenges that ask team members to act as if they were the CRO, joint sales training, and a standing invitation to question how anything could be done differently. The friction of honest conversation, she finds, creates far better work than the comfort of assumed consensus.
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