Haus Names Olivia Kory Chief Marketing Officer

Four years ago, I left the head of growth path to join a stealth software startup with five customers and no product.

Which, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, either sounds exciting or completely irrational.

At the time, Haus was still more of a belief system than a company. We believed marketers deserved better than platform-reported truth. We believed incrementality could become an operating system for growth, not just a research project. We believed the best brands in the world were making massive budget decisions with data that was often incomplete, biased, or just plain wrong.

That belief was enough to get me in the door.

Since then, a lot has changed.

Haus has grown from a small team with a big point of view into a platform used by the most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world. We have helped brands radically transform their business by making better decisions about where the next dollar should go.

Somewhere along the way, I started joking that my dream was for us to hit the point where two things would be true:

1. We would have an incrementality problem of our own.
2. We would need a CMO.

We are officially there. I am incredibly excited to take on the CMO role at Haus.

I say that with a healthy amount of humility, because I spend most of my days talking with some of the best CMOs, growth leaders, and marketing scientists in the world. They are wrestling with hard questions every day.

What is actually driving my business?

‍How do we balance short-term performance with long-term growth?

‍How do we make budget decisions when traditional MMM, multi-touch attribution, platform reporting, and business intuition all point in different directions?

How do I unify my P&L across disparate business units so that I have a clear understanding of cause and effect? 

How do we bring AI into this process without handing the keys to a system that is optimizing against the wrong signals?

These are the big, boardroom questions. They are CFO questions. They are “bet the business” questions.

They are also exactly the questions Haus was built to answer.

For a long time, Haus has been known for experiments. That will always be our foundation. Experiments are the closest thing marketers have to truth. It tells you what changed because of your marketing, not just what happened after someone saw or clicked an ad.

But incrementality alone was never the end goal. 

The real opportunity is helping marketers move from measurement to decisioning.

It is one thing to know what happened. It is another thing to know what to do next. That leap is where so much of modern marketing gets messy. Marketers are pulling from experiments, MMM, attribution, platform reporting, spreadsheets, customer data, seasonality, business constraints and their own judgment. Then they are expected to turn all of that into confident budget decisions across channels, campaigns and markets.

That is hard for humans. Especially when organizational inertia gets in the way. 

It is also exactly where better systems, better data and better decision-making discipline can change how a business operates.

And now, as CMO, I get the fun and slightly terrifying job of making sure we tell that story well.

My priorities are pretty simple:

First, I want Haus to continue representing the voice of advertisers, of our customers. I want us to be the independent voice marketers trust when data gets noisy and conflicts of interest leave you wondering what’s real and what’s not. Whatever the next hype cycle is, our job is to bring signal, nuance, and honesty to the table.

Second, I want more marketers to understand that incrementality is not a niche measurement tactic. It is the foundation for decision-making in your organization. If you are not optimizing toward incremental outcomes, what are you actually optimizing toward? If the first chapter of our story was convincing marketers that incrementality is important, the next will be about helping businesses use incrementality to drive business outcomes. 

And finally, I want to practice what we preach.

That is the funny thing about becoming CMO at a company like Haus. I now have to take all the advice I have been giving other marketing leaders and apply it to our own business.

We need to challenge long-held beliefs. We need to turn those beliefs into hypotheses that we test. We need to experiment boldly, and more importantly, have a bias to action on the learnings. And we need to constantly be pushing ourselves to ensure that marketing is delivering incremental value to our customers. Customers are at the center of everything we do.

We have our own incrementality problem now.

That is a pretty fun little milestone.

I will report back.