Do Fewer Things Better
Shafqat Islam, CMO of Optimizely and co-founder of NewsCred, walked into the role having never held a marketing position. His first act was to question whether the entire marketing function was necessary. What followed was a masterclass in starting from a blank slate, measuring everything, and letting experimentation unlock creativity.
“If you can beat the cost per opportunity target, we will pour money into it forever. For a lot of people, this was a freeing, liberating thought.”
Shafqat Islam is the CMO of Optimizely, the digital experience platform used by the world’s largest enterprises for content management, experimentation, and personalisation. He came to the role with no prior marketing experience but with thirteen years building NewsCred, one of the founding companies of the content marketing category, into a business that raised $100 million and ultimately exited to Industry Dive.
Shafqat co-founded NewsCred in 2007 and led it for over a decade, pioneering what is now called content marketing. He spun out the software business as Welcome in 2020, then oversaw its acquisition by Optimizely in 2021, running the Welcome division within Opti before his CEO, Alex, asked him to take on marketing for the broader business. His response, that he had never held a marketing job, was, by his own account, not a deterrent.
Before NewsCred, he spent seven years at Merrill Lynch Bank Suisse as Vice President, where he was the youngest ever member of the technology management team, leading a 30-million-pound platform project across London and Geneva. That operational background, combined with a founder’s instinct for first principles, shapes how he approaches every marketing challenge: start with a blank slate, measure ruthlessly, and test everything.
“AI is not going to replace people. But if you don’t use AI, you may be replaced by a person who does.”
“I had a hunch that if we stopped all our marketing, nothing would change. For a lot of people, that was a freeing thought.”
The first thing Shafqat did as CMO was question whether marketing was working at all. Not as a provocation, but as a genuine hypothesis. By treating the entire function as a blank slate and demanding that every channel, campaign, and activity justify itself against a cost-per-opportunity target, he created both accountability and creative freedom at the same time.
“Being great at experimentation does not just mean being data-driven. It unlocks creativity.”
The assumption is that rigorous measurement constrains creativity. Shafqat found the opposite. When marketers know they can test any idea against a clear success metric, and a failed test is not a failure but a learning, they generate more ideas, not fewer. The testing mindset is not a cage. It is a permission structure.
“The lines between brand and demand are very blurry. I like ideas that couple both together. Those are my favourites.”
Half of Optimizely’s pipeline comes from inbound. Most of that starts not with a search but with a relationship built over time through events, content, and brand presence. Shafqat’s case is that separating brand and demand budgets is a false distinction. The best marketing ideas do both simultaneously, and the best way to serve demand is to have invested seriously in brand.
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