Jennifer Roebuck

Chief Marketing & Digital Officer / NED - Innovation / Ecommerce / Retail / Consumer / Top 100 Fashion Tech. Web3 - CPG 🎈 Mentor | Blox Mentor | FWB Member | Real Vision Member - JROE.ETH

Part strategist, part technical marketer, part growth hacker, part creative. I've scaled businesses from zero to $100M+, led brand transformations, and managed over £300M in marketing investment. I'm comfortable in ambiguity and at board level.

For the past five years, I've been focused on AI and crypto, where I still advise and offer fractional leadership. Before that, I was deep in consumer growth, mostly in tech-enabled roles within lifestyle led organizations and brands. I’m typically responsible for large P&Ls over £100M or growth from a very early stage.

The leading women’s community in Europe driving success for women in the workplace.

I changed industries at 33. Then again, at 47.
 
Certainty is overrated. Curiosity compounds.... and your career is longer than you think.
 
I used to worry I was "starting over." Now I realise I was just acquiring insane amounts of knowledge - in a new direction. The skills transfer even when the context doesn't.
 
 If you're considering a jump ( many are right now ), you probably don't need more certainty. You need to accept that certainty isn't coming.

👋🏻

I’m a Brand & Commerce Innovator. I write about emerging brand strategies, digital commerce, business strategy and emerging technology. 

I have been in digital since 1998 and have 25 years of consumer marketing and digital growth experience. 

My superpower is the combination of deep digital and deep brand experience - it is possible to be creative and understand technology while trading a business. As a result, I have worked on many consumer brand transformations, turnarounds and early stage growth businesses. 

If something has the potential to impact brand experience, brand development or media - I am probably researching it and experimenting with it.

More detail on my experience -
Consumer Innovation and Brand Strategy across fashion, hospitality, tech and consumer goods. 
Voted one of the top digital leaders in the UK & Top 100 tech leaders in fashion. 
Launched some of the most innovative digital fashion experiences from the first social commerce experience online to digital x physical campaigns before Web3 was a common term in the fashion industry. 

I have been a co-founder twice - in hospitality and tech. One of those businesses is the largest mexican food chain in the EU -Tortilla Mexican Grill.

I am currently working in venture capital as a value creation CMO + offer board advisory for consumer and enterprise facing businesses on brand, customer experience and growth.

CMO / CRO ▪️ Growth & Transformation Consultant ▪️ AI ▪️ Crypto ( Digital Assets )▪️ ✍🏻 I write about the intersection of culture, technology and business

Average CMO tenure fell to 3.9 years, down from 4.1 last year. Still trails the C-suite average of 4.9. 65% of exiting CMOs were promoted or moved laterally. 10% became CEOs. 37% of Fortune 500 CEOs now have marketing experience.

So CMOs aren't failing. The role is often set up wrong from the start.

Most CMOs are hired during change. New strategy, turnaround, "fresh thinking." = a short clock. The board wants marketing to solve problems that have nothing to do with marketing. Product-market fit issues. Founder conflicts, etc.

The CMOs who last are the ones who spend half their energy making sure the board actually understands what marketing can and can't do. It's the difference between 18 months and five years.

CMO / CRO ▪️ Growth & Transformation Consultant ▪️ AI ▪️ Crypto ( Digital Assets )▪️ B2B/B2C ✍🏻 I write about the intersection of culture, technology and business

I used to think the people above me had clarity that I didn't. That with seniority came some kind of settled confidence about what to do next.
Turns out it's more complicated than that. Experience gives you pattern recognition. You've seen versions of this before. But that's not the same as knowing the answer. It's just being less surprised by the question.
This was terrifying for about five minutes. Then, kind of freeing.
Because if nobody has the answers, then not having them isn't a disqualification.

Scaling a company taught me something that most people don’t discuss - most problems are people problems dressed up as strategy problems. 
The strategy stuff is usually straightforward. 

The hard part is getting people aligned, resolving the tensions nobody wants to deal with and having the conversations everyone's avoiding.

Fix the people dynamics, and the strategy often fixes itself. But it's easier to commission a strategy deck than have a difficult conversation. So that's what most companies do... 

It’s also why it’s amusing how little companies value leadership... it’s an invisible job..

Saw someone post: "Just hired 3 interns to upload AI-generated content on 150 TikTok accounts. $37k monthly revenue so far." You can farm engagement with synthetic content until the algorithm changes. Then you have nothing. No brand. No audience relationship. Every platform eventually cracks down because it degrades user experience. People running these operations know they're on borrowed time. Don't fall for their advice because it looks like a shortcut.

Agentic commerce is coming....

Here's how the infrastructure is actually being built...

There have been a lot of independent announcements in this space over the past few months. 
 
-Google launched two protocols. 
- OpenAI launched one with Stripe. 
- Coinbase and Shopify launched two more. 

I wanted to bring them together so people can see how AI and crypto are converging and what it means for ecommerce. 👇

Google and OpenAI are building the agent layer. They want AI to shop for you, compare prices, and complete purchases on your behalf.

Coinbase and Shopify are building the payment layer. They're creating the rails that let those agents actually move money.

Stripe and PayPal are powering the traditional payment rails. They're already live with OpenAI's Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.

Shopify sits in the middle of everything. They're partnered with Google on UCP, with OpenAI on ACP, and with Coinbase on the Commerce Payments Protocol. 

Do agents need programmable money ( crypto ) to function?
Right now, most agentic commerce runs on traditional rails. OpenAI's Instant Checkout uses Stripe and PayPal. That works fine for buying a dress.

But agents work better with programmable money because -
It is instant, cheap, always on, autonomous and composable. 

This is why stablecoins keep showing up in these protocols. 

There are five protocols in total - this will make it easier to follow developments in this area and some publish their progress so you can get a sense of leading indicators - 

1. Commerce Payments Protocol (Shopify + Coinbase)
The settlement layer for ecommerce. Authorization, capture, escrow, refunds. All onchain using USDC on Base. $1M settled so far across 5,400 payments. Small numbers so far, early days.

2. x402 (Coinbase + Cloudflare)
The payment rail for the machine economy. 15M transactions, mostly API calls and AI agent interactions. When an agent needs to pay for data, compute, or a service, this is how it does it. Built on HTTP, so it works like the rest of the internet.

3. AP2 (Google + 60 partners)
The authorization layer. When you tell your AI "buy concert tickets under $100 when they go on sale," AP2 creates the cryptographic proof that you gave permission. It doesn't move money, it proves intent.

4. UCP (Google + Shopify + Walmart + 20 others)
The commerce layer. Launched last week at NRF. Handles discovery, checkout, and post purchase support. The protocol that lets agents talk to merchant systems.

5. ACP (OpenAI + Stripe)
OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol. Powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. Live with Etsy now, over a million Shopify merchants coming soon. PayPal joined in October. Open sourced so other merchants can integrate.

Where does it go from here?
The big players are building together but also competing. Agentic commerce is being built right now, and the question of whether agents need programmable money will be answered by what actually works at scale.

So far, I’m sending WhatsApp messages to my bot and it’s doing stuff for me. I’m giving Claude Code tasks to see how it builds without constant monitoring of the Claude Code terminal. 

Interesting if this becomes a reliable “helper”… I still think the “agents” everyone claims they have aren’t very good. 

You can configure Clawdbot it to use image tools, sound and a variety of LLMs. It can get expensive - so set limits and you can’t use your Claude Max plan ( I already tried that ). 

If you set it up - use an AWS server or a mini computer so you don’t risk your own device for now. 

Anyone else already using this?

Every generation has its "too early."
 
 Too early for email. Too early for social. Too early for mobile commerce. Too early for crypto. I've heard all of these in my career.
 
The people who were "too early" became the infrastructure. They built the roads everyone else drives on later.
 
If people keep telling you you're too early, you might be exactly on time...That's uncomfortable but also... kind of the opportunity....

CMOs can build things now...

I promised myself I would learn to code last year and build prototypes.
Some people call this "Vibe marketing" - in fact, I have seen this in job descriptions - "We are looking for an AI native or Vibe marketing leader."
A "Chief Growth Architect"

What does that actually mean?

Well - I can tell you what it means to me having spent many hours staring at AI interfaces and publishing stuff.

The ability to leverage your pattern recognition to make sound decisions coupled with the ability to make literally anything by having access to language models and coding tools is the most powerful combination I have experienced as a marketing / commercial leader.

It reminds me of old photoshoot sets where we would make prototypes, then long form assets, then short form and so on. If I didn't leave the set with 60 days of content - it wasn't a successful shoot.

Media channels are fragmenting quickly and you have to use AI to flood organic social media since paid digital marketing isn't what it used to be. Spin up hundreds of accounts, automate everything, scale content until the arbitrage closes. You have to do that well - with taste... and synthetic stuff isn't going to cut it for most brands.

On the other hand - you have to create belief, ensure things are insanely consistent, understand unit economics while balancing the speed of product innovation. The more hands-on you are with the tools, the faster and more strategic you become. It sounds counter intuitive to be hands on and strategic - but that is the world we are living in.

Vibe marketing is a 2026 thing. It is undefined by most still - so it is a good time to experiment and be prepared for the future. I read a thought provoking article last night by one of the DeepMind strategists - the only reason AI isn't moving faster is energy. AI academics have been ready since the 80s. 

This is all going to move fast - but honestly - it takes about four to five months of education and you are prepared for most roles in the commercial world. Then your education is incremental - so invest the time.

When I started in crypto, the belief was that the sector had its own growth playbook. Traditional marketing didn’t apply. You needed to be “crypto-native” to get it.
Five years later? Every first principle from traditional business applies. I can’t think of one that doesn’t.
Crypto wasn’t different. It was nascent.
If you’re trying to break into an emerging sector and gatekeepers keep telling you that you need industry experience - remember that the skills from mature industries are often exactly what nascent ones are missing.

if you haven’t read The Last Economy - I highly recommend it. I read half of it last year and read it again last week. 

Why? I’m digesting the tech / culture / economic landscape. There are so many doom and gloom forecasts regarding AI and it’s interesting to look back on some notable essays and see what was accurate and what was wildly off. 

The thing that stood out to me the most - the way we measure success is backwards and AI could be the technology that rewrites our value system.

 I wonder if that’s what Elon Musk tries to say when he talks about abundance - clearly his way of communicating about the future is inflammatory - so it’s not resonating. I watched a British film clip last night too - all these children from 1966 talking about how the 2000’s will be boring because robots will get to do all the thinking.. doesn’t sound like abundance to me. Applying our knowledge = purpose. Unfortunately - the technologists behind the wheel have lost control. 

Anyway.. I wrote a summary of The Last Economy and where we are in 2026 - which I found interesting as a comparison - in just one year.

Have a read and subscribe too! My Substack is the place to read about future trends and the implications of those trends.. it’s usually focused on tech or culture - sometimes I go down a rabbit hole on new business strategies and opportunities. 

https://lnkd.in/ezYY_cB9

One word of advice to recruiters who do not have a relationship with the prospect you are headhunting. 

Do not suggest a candidate engage in the following - 

A capability assessment
An AI screening call / process
A survey of any kind
A call without understanding more information ( client information, role, etc. ). 

If you can't publicaly share who that client is - send a Docusign with an NDA.

There is way too much fraud - most people will not engage with you. 

If you are a genuine headhunter - find a way to look legit and verify who you are. 

Anyone coming from tech, crypto, AI - we are all really cautious. 

We will not engage with you if you do not have a solid reputation. 

✌🏻

2026 design trends are pointing toward a shift back to clay, fabric, ink. Colour!! 

Our rejection of tech equals a rejection of the hyper-polished look that screams clinical and tech.

"Cozymaxxing." More texture, warmth, tactile calm. Bouclé, chenille, deep rugs. Brighter colours. 

Ultimately, I don't think we could have gone any further when it comes to minimalism. 

If your digital life is increasingly synthetic, your physical life needs to feel more real.

CMO (FDM) / CRO ▪️ Growth & Transformation Consultant ▪️ AI ▪️ Crypto ( Digital Assets )▪️ B2B/B2C ✍🏻 I write about the intersection of culture, technology and business

Barrier to building a product has collapsed. But the interesting question isn't "can anyone build?" It's "what changes about decision-making when they can?"
The skills that made someone good at their job before AI are the same skills that make AI-assisted building work. You still need to know what to build and why. We'll see more products. Not necessarily more good ones.

All signals suggest the UK will adopt stablecoins and digital assets. It's happening bottom up, not top down. Bottom-up change is slower but more durable. When adoption comes from users and businesses demanding access, infrastructure tends to be more robust along with growth.

Q1 2025 had the lowest consumer VC totals since 2019. Both dollars and deal count. Median time from seed to Series A is now 3 years. Was 1.7 years in Q1 2024. Consumer is challenging because it takes longer to scale for 99% of concepts if you want stable unit economics. Patient capital supports this. Impatient capital = pressure to grow before you're ready = burn = failure.
I share this because I receive a lot of inbound from entrepreneurs raising - a large % of consumer is a lifestyle business. It is important to know the difference between what business you are building - only a small % of consumer is actually worth raising venture capital for.

Employee LinkedIn networks are 10x larger than company follower bases. Employee content gets 8x more engagement than brand channels. 
This is why founder-led growth works.  But there's a lot of god complex stuff with founders and investors right now. Just be yourself. Conversion works when employee accounts are less performative and more relatable - that includes investors.

The great thing about images is they can replace entire emails. This image was inspired by the famous Barr diagram. 
 
The word of 2026 is Attention. It’s oil. Platforms are engineered to take our attention. Products are designed to make us more productive and hide our devices to reclaim our attention. One cancels the other.. or does it? 

This is one reason why images are the best way to communicate this year - our cognitive load is the highest it’s ever been. LLMs made everyone a writer. We stare at walls of text..

 AI is going to abstract the interface and we will absorb information through sensing and visualization.

Prediction markets hit $702 million in daily volume on January 13, 2026. Polymarket relaunched for US users after settling with the CFTC. $9 billion cumulative volume for 2024. 314,500 active traders in December.

A $30,000 bet on Venezuela paid out $400,000 shortly after. No prohibition on insider trading in Polymarket's terms. Multiple US states now reviewing legislation to ban.

Polymarket = 67% accurate. Kalshi  =78%. PredictIt  =93%. 
Accuracy correlates inversely with stake size. When large investors can move entire markets, it stops being collective wisdom.

When the political moment passes, what's the actual use case?

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