Dara Treseder

Company: AutodeskTitle: Chief Marketing OfficerIndustry: TechnologyNotable in 2024: Treseder launched Autodesk's partnership with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympic Games, a high profile initiative that will drive Autodesk's marketing story for the next four years.

In late 2022, software company Autodesk released its first TV ad in over a decade. It made the kind of mark that companies dream about with a return to big ad budgets.

The Walking Dead-themed campaign was a collaboration with Ryan Reynolds' agency, Maximum Effort, and it helped launch the company back into the mainstream media conversation. A year later, Autodesk partnered with the LA28 Games to be its official "Design and Make Platform."

Behind the company's brand revival is chief marketing officer Dara Treseder, who was named to the role in October 2022. She was ready to go, having created a 100-day plan before even accepting the position. Less than 30 days into the job, the first ad campaign debuted, and Treseder has continued to spearhead the global marketing strategy for the nearly $66 billion business which brings in over $5 billion a year in sales.

"I realized that a core part of this has to be the elevation of our brand and telling our story in a more creative way, in a more engaging way, on a bigger scale," Treseder told Jim Stengel on the The CMO Podcast. "We had the insights, we had the data, we had the stories — we just had to start acting on them."

One of her first key initiatives as CMO was structural, creating a global growth marketing organization for Autodesk by combining its media center, demand generation, and marketing operations groups. Treseder set a clear vision for her team to break out of working in corporate silos. "As a leader, it's easy to focus on what's going to happen, and how. Spending time going through the 'why' really helped the team rally and come together," she said. "It's really about cohesively thinking of the job to be done, thinking about the tools in your toolkit and then bringing these things together in a way that drives results. I think a lot of myself as a conductor of an orchestra."

Treseder is a Black female executive at the highest level of corporate America in a C-suite world where Black women are still underrepresented. About 4% of Black women hold management roles, according to Catalyst, and only 1.4% are in the C-suite, according to LeanIn.org. Born in Nigeria, Treseder graduated from Harvard University before earning her MBA from Stanford. Prior to joining Autodesk, she was the chief marketing officer for Peloton Interactive, helping to build that breakthrough fitness brand, and held top marketing posts at GE, Apple and Goldman Sachs.

"There are not a lot of Black women that get to grace stages like this ... And, for me, I'm trying to demystify that," Treseder said at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event. "We need a world where more people in positions of power reflect the population, and so I think about how I can contribute to that in a small way."