This article is based on a Q&A with 8×8 Chief Marketing Officer Bruno Bertini and Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
In B2B technology, we’ve mostly settled on a division of labor. The product owns the top of the funnel, from the launch film to the homepage hero. Customers show up later, as a logo bar or a case study PDF that a seller attaches after the second call. We tend to call that customer-centric. Really, it’s just a decision about where the customer is allowed to appear.
Bruno Bertini, Chief Marketing Officer at 8×8, the cloud contact center and unified communications provider, thinks that order is backwards. In August 2025, 8×8 launched The Power of You, a brand platform built on short, cinematic films about real IT and customer experience leaders from its customer base, produced with generative AI. His argument is that in enterprise software the buyer carries the risk of a transformation, so the buyer should carry the brand.
The Real Price of a Customer-Led Brand Is Trust
Bertini describes a habit most tech marketers would recognize. “The hero is always the technology, the magic,” he said, and vendors that do feature customers tend to “sprinkle customers around.” Flipping that meant asking people used to being case studies to become protagonists, at a moment when AI video was new and nobody had a legal template for it.
Before we could even approach our customers, we had to work hand in hand with our legal team to make sure we were being fully transparent about our use of AI. We weren’t trying to hide anything. But we were also creating a highly sophisticated piece of content in a world where there was no existing playbook that said do X and you’re legally protected. We had to write the rules ourselves as we went. … Would you trust any of your vendors with a few photos and your image to become a leading part of their brand? That is not a small ask. … We promised them editorial control. We promised it would not be a case study but a story of bravery, representing how much they cared about their transformation. And we promised it would be creative and fun.
For a marketing leader weighing something similar, the sequencing is the lesson. Legal comes before creative. The questions Bertini’s team worked through, like what happens to a customer’s photos and whether a model will ingest them, are exactly what that customer’s own counsel will ask. Have the answers in writing before anyone sends an invitation. Look at what 8×8 actually traded, too. It wasn’t co-marketing money or a discount. It was editorial control, which most marketing teams guard pretty closely. On budget, Bertini declined to share figures, saying only that a strong idea gives the budget conversation “more magnetic pull.” That’s a defensible position for a public-company CMO, though it leaves the efficiency question open.
Prove It or Lose It: Brand Is Capital, Not Decoration
One of 8×8’s own awards submissions is candid about attribution. It says The Power of You ran alongside an SDR overhaul, a scaled account-based marketing program, rebuilt sales enablement and disruption among legacy competitors, and it doesn’t claim the brand work drove results alone. Bertini isn’t a neutral party here. He built the campaign, and its results are part of his scorecard. So we asked him to make the CFO’s case.
Brand is one of the strongest powers any company has, but I don’t believe it should be treated as a mystical force. It has to be measured like everything else, and it needs to be treated as a strategic layer of capital allocation, like everything else in the company. … It’s an investment that, properly executed, has the potential to compound. But like any capital: prove it or lose it. … So if we’re not moving awareness, and over the longer term not seeing funnel expansion in the target segments, it’s more of a decoration project.
In practice, 8×8 tracks awareness, regard, meaningfulness and uniqueness through the brand-tracking platform BERA.ai, then feeds those readings into the pipeline reporting it already runs. For The Power of You, the targets were brand awareness and regard. It’s a useful discipline with a clear limit. It tells you whether the brand moved. It won’t separate the campaign’s pipeline effect from an SDR rebuild running in the same quarters. His answer on cuts is the surprising part. Forced to give money back, he’d return “the usual lower-funnel growth budgets first” and protect the customer-storytelling engine. Plenty of CFOs would expect the opposite. The move for a CMO is to write down before launch which brand metrics should change and what failure looks like. If you can’t name the failure condition, you’re asking finance for faith.
Using AI to Tell a Human Story Isn’t Having It Both Ways
There’s an obvious tension here. A campaign about people mattering more than software was made with generative AI, and in June 2026 it won Gold in the AI category at The Drum Awards for Marketing Americas, in a field of finalists that included Google and Adobe. Bertini didn’t hedge.
Being very direct here: I don’t think we had it both ways. This was not meaningless AI slop. These were real customers having their stories told at scale. We used AI to enable the creative abundance required to build it, but it’s an absolutely human story, and it’s a story about us as a brand recognizing that it’s their power. … Now, the bigger question is how long this type of content stays culturally accepted. It’s changing and still unknown.
The December 2025 Times Square placement is where that argument gets tested, and Bertini concedes 8×8 needs to explain it better. By his account, it wasn’t a regular media buy but a partnership with Every Monday Matters, a nonprofit that runs an annual billboard-for-good campaign supporting youth mental health resources. The film featured Genelle Chamberlain, a Service Desk Manager at PrimeSource and Dimora Brands and the program’s first customer, with her husband and office colleagues there to watch. “I was there,” Bertini said. “I cried with that team.” He then asks a question most of us in B2B software should find a little uncomfortable: when did a customer last describe buying software as one of the most powerful memories of their life? The takeaway isn’t about Times Square. Before any out-of-home or paid placement that features a customer, decide who else benefits and how that customer will feel seeing it. And take his own caveat seriously. If audiences sour on AI-produced content, the stories have to stand up without the novelty.
Start With the CEO, Not the Creative Brief
The final question described a familiar seat: a mid-market B2B CMO in a category where every competitor sounds alike, with a feature-trained sales team and a board asking about pipeline this quarter. Bertini’s first move has nothing to do with creative.
Behind every good marketing campaign there was a brave marketer, but also a very brave CEO who allowed the company to be creative and backed the team that wanted to do something different. Before you find your company, find out if your CEO shares that belief. … Identify whatever is standing between a good idea and something you can actually put in front of a customer, and remove it.
Most of us treat CEO alignment as something that follows the strategy. Bertini puts it first, and the logic holds. A brand platform built on customer stories will look slower than a feature campaign for a while, and a CMO who launches one without the CEO’s cover will lose it the first time pipeline dips. He didn’t name a single trap that quietly ruins this work, but his answer points to one: going ahead without that backing. So agree with the CEO on how long the bet runs and which early signals count, whether that’s awareness or share of voice against much bigger competitors. Then find the specific blocker. Often it’s a legal review nobody owns, or an approval chain built for product launches. His shortest line on the subject: “Budget buys reach. It’s never bought belief.”
The product-first default survives because it’s familiar and easy to defend in a quarterly review. Bertini’s case is that it’s also why so many software brands in one category sound interchangeable.
If that describes your category, start small and start this quarter. Have the CEO conversation before you brief an agency. Then ask legal to draft the customer data and AI disclosure terms, because those will decide which of your customers say yes.
