Marketing Hot Seat with Ingrid Sierra

Welcome to the Marketing Hot Seat – a fortnightly series of honest conversations with senior marketers about what’s really shaping marketing today.

It’s a space for clear thinking, real experience, and the trade-offs behind modern marketing decisions, and we’re delighted to share them with you. 

In this edition, we speak with Ingrid Sierra – a marketing leader with more than 20 years of international experience across fintech, technology and high-growth businesses. She has held senior marketing leadership roles spanning both B2B and B2C, with a track record of driving revenue growth, building brands and scaling customer engagement across global markets.

Currently Brand & Marketing Director at Zego, Ingrid has previously served as Chief Marketing Officer and UK Managing Director at Finfare, where she led global marketing and brand strategy during a period of rapid growth. Known for her focus on customer insight, commercial impact and team development, she is also an active mentor and advocate for greater diversity in fintech and technology leadership.

What’s the one thing in marketing right now that you think isn’t getting the attention that it deserves?

I would say creativity. 

I feel like we’re drifting a little bit from the importance of creativity. In some ways content is much easier to produce than it used to be. But producing more doesn’t mean being more creative. Because we can move faster, we risk the work becoming very vanilla and losing the spark that comes from real creative thinking. 

AI plays a big part in in the shift of expectation, as a result there is a lot of pressure on marketers to go faster in response to what the business asks us to do. Despite that, we can’t lose the focus on creativity, the customer, and those nuggets of insights that allow you to really connect with them in a meaningful way.  

What separates a good marketing partner from a great marketing partner?

The key is in the way that they challenge you. There are lots of great capabilities out there which marketing partners possess so the difference will be in the way they provide different perspectives and push you positively outside of your comfort zone and beyond the echo chamber of your category or industry.  

What do you think is holding marketing back from delivering on its ambitions right now?

I would say the lack of clarity in the first place which is driven in part by the race between brand and performance. It should have never become a battle between the two. It’s positioned in such a way that performance comes first and brand second. The dynamics of performance marketing has changed with CPAs increasing, but if you drive performance first then you find that often it is too late to build the brand that would have allowed the CPA to come down. It’s a hard conundrum to solve.  

What action or decision are you most proud of because it changed the direction of the business?

In one of my previous roles, I was working on engagement, loyalty and experiences at a time when UX and UI weren’t as prominent as they are today. 

I spotted a gap and created a customer experience team that brought together marketers who were mapping journeys and running design sprints, alongside designers focused on UX and UI. Bringing those capabilities into one team created a much more joined-up approach. 

That shift changed everything. We saw a significant impact on customer engagement, loyalty registrations and, ultimately, revenue. 

Who has taught you the most about marketing?

I’ve been very lucky to work with true role models throughout my career. Early on, I worked with people who didn’t just shape how I think about marketing but showed me what good leadership and being a good person looks like. 

From a marketing point of view, one of the most influential people was a boss I had when I was working in loyalty. She struck a rare balance between doing what was right for the team and what was right for the customer. She never lost sight of either. 

She also worked incredibly hard to ensure marketing had a seat at the top table. At times it felt like a fight, but she was relentless in pushing for the role marketing should play in the business. 

That combination of protecting the team, championing the customer and managing marketing internally is incredibly hard to get right. Seeing someone do all three well had a big impact on me.  

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This interview is part of the Marketing Hot Seat, a fortnightly series from AAR. 

AAR helps marketing leaders design future-fit operating models that unlock greater commercial impact. 

We work alongside marketing teams to align structure, capability, technology and agency partners, so the way marketing is set up enables better strategy, stronger creativity, and more effective execution. 

When the operating model is working, marketing performs better in practice, not just in principle.