The Problems Are the Same
Maria Shcheglakova has spent more than eighteen years in marketing, starting with luxury alcohol in Russia and arriving in London in 2009 to learn digital from the inside. She built a career in ad tech, most recently across five years leading EMEA marketing for PubMatic, and now directs global CTV and data advertising marketing at TiVo. Her view cuts against the grain of B2B convention: the wall between consumer and business marketing is a fiction, the funnel is really a circle, and the job is less about technology than about storytelling and human craft. She leads flat, multifunctional teams across more than thirty markets, where the youngest hire’s idea counts as much as the most senior one’s.
It's all about gains and risks. What do I gain? And if I don't join you, what are my risks?
Maria Shcheglakova is Director of Global Marketing for CTV and Data Advertising at TiVo, having spent five years as Marketing Director for EMEA at the ad tech company PubMatic. A Future100 member with more than eighteen years in marketing, she bridges two worlds: she started in luxury B2C brand marketing before building a B2B technology career, and argues the problems are the same whoever you are selling to. Her throughline is that storytelling and human creativity matter more than any tool.
Maria began her marketing career as a junior brand-export manager at Moet Hennessy in Russia, where she developed a foundational understanding of luxury B2C brand marketing. She moved to London in 2009 with the intention of staying eighteen months to learn about digital marketing from the inside. That brief plan turned into a permanent move as she progressed through media agency roles at Mediaedge:cia and Mindshare, working across 360-degree campaigns for clients including Paramount Pictures, London Business School, and HSBC.
Her journey into ad tech began after running her own consultancy, Canvas Marketing, advising fashion tech, fintech, and other technology startups. She went on to hold marketing leadership roles at Perfect Channel, Affectv (now Hybrid Theory), and Videology before joining PubMatic in January 2020. Over four and a half years, she has been part of the company's growth from around 400 employees to more than double that size, helping to shape the marketing narrative as PubMatic expanded into new countries, launched new products targeting new customer segments, and established itself as a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. In January 2025 she moved to TiVo as Director of Global Marketing for CTV and Data Advertising.
She is a committed advocate for sustainable marketing practices, both in the operational sense of how marketing teams buy, produce, and distribute materials, and in the broader industry context of reducing the carbon footprint of digital advertising. PubMatic's partnership with Ad Net Zero, the organisation committed to achieving real net zero in advertising by 2030, was driven in part by Maria's leadership, and sustainability has become an integral part of how her team measures marketing effectiveness alongside traditional commercial metrics.
Maria is a regular contributor to industry conversations through New Digital Age, Campaign Media360, and PubMatic's own PubAcademy series. Her team structure deliberately avoids vertical specialisation, instead building multifunctional marketers who can operate across content, events, product marketing, and demand generation, an approach she likens to a football team where players pass ideas to each other and everyone contributes to scoring.
We first try to think who are we creating it for? What's in it for them?
People say you work in B2B marketing and they imagine you sending gazillions of personalised emails from Salesforce. It's very wrong. There is so much connectivity between B2C and B2B. It doesn't matter who you're marketing to. The problems are the same. You need a story to really work for the long term.
Tell people you work in B2B marketing, Maria says, and they picture you firing endless personalised emails out of Salesforce. She finds that picture badly wrong. The line between consumer and business marketing has all but vanished, because it does not matter who you are selling to: the job is to find the customer's real problem, the thing that is unresolved, urgent or unworkable, and speak to it. In ad tech especially, where rival platforms describe themselves in nearly identical terms, the story is what sets a company apart. Storytelling, for her, is the secret sauce, and everything tactical, the events, the campaigns, the sales enablement, hangs off it.
We don't have a verticalised structure where we have an events person, a product marketing person. We can all do it all. It creates this fluidity between the team. It's pretty flat, which means everyone can contribute their ideas and challenge each other. Like a football team, we're passing ideas to each other.
Maria runs her marketing team flat and multifunctional. There is no dedicated events person or product-marketing person; everyone can turn their hand to most things, which she finds creates a fluidity the team thrives on. The model she reaches for is a football team passing the ball, ideas moving quickly between people, each one built on by the next. It also flattens hierarchy: the newest joiner's idea carries as much weight as a veteran's, and she actively asks her team what they would do if they ran the function, or sat in the chief revenue officer's seat. The best ideas, she has found, often come from the people who have been there the shortest time.
I was preparing and I was like I must say AI, but I don't believe in it. What I'm most excited about is human creativity and the ability to apply those technologies. You could personalise content to a hundred customers. But you can also create overload. It's about relevancy.
Asked what excites her about the future, Maria admits she is supposed to say AI, and then says she does not quite believe in it, at least not as the headline. Her team uses AI tools daily for efficiency, but what excites her is human creativity and the judgement to apply the technology well. The danger she sees is overload: if you can personalise content to a hundred customers, you can also drown them in it, so relevance matters more than volume. Marketing's future, in her telling, will be more about craft and creativity and less about pure technology, with the tools serving the people rather than the other way around. Technology, she says, is there to hand us insight; the craft is still ours.
We care a lot about sustainability. We started looking into sustainable marketing, not just from operational perspective, but thinking about what experiences we deliver, what merchandise we produce, how we buy, how much is digital versus offline. Sustainability became part of our effectiveness measurement.
For Maria, marketing effectiveness is not only a commercial question. A few years ago her team began treating sustainability as part of how they measure their work, looking not just at operations but at the experiences they create, the merchandise they produce, how goods are bought and shipped, and how much of the marketing is digital rather than physical. Under budget pressure that mostly does not grow year on year, the discipline doubles as efficiency: waste is waste, whether measured in carbon or in spend. It reflects a wider conviction that an industry contributing so much to the economy should also account for its footprint. Sustainability, for her team, sits alongside pipeline and brand as a real measure of whether the marketing was any good.
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