Executive: Adriana Gil Miner, Chief Marketing Officer
Company: Pindrop
Industry: Digital communications security (fraud, deepfakes, authentication)
Company Snapshot: Enterprise platform helping detect deepfakes, prevent fraud, and restore trust across contact centers and virtual meetings
Format: CMO Journeys Interview
Why It Matters
Adriana Gil Miner is the kind of marketer who runs toward uncertainty. She’s Chief Marketing Officer at Pindrop, working on a trust problem: when voice and video can be faked, how do people know what’s real? Her story is worth studying because she blends the discipline of data-driven marketing with the power of storytelling. For agencies, she offers a practical view from both sides of the table.
Their Path, in Short
Gil Miner breaks her career into chapters. The first was early digital marketing, when e-commerce was maturing and measurement was still catching up. At Digitas, she worked with American Express and took over an affiliate program that became the company’s number one acquisition channel. That work also pulled her into product problems — moving communications from old systems into digital.
The second chapter was a pivot into brand and storytelling. As user-generated content began to reshape how information spread, she moved to Weber Shandwick and learned what she calls the “incredible power of storytelling.” One client she supported during that period was Tableau. Later, she joined the company and focused on brand building and community — work that also tied into Tableau’s data storytelling and data journalism efforts.
Her current chapter merges those worlds: the science of technology and the human craft of narrative, applied in high-growth environments where change is constant.
Watch CMO Journeys Interview
Big Themes From the Conversation
She treats discomfort as proof of growth. Every leap, she says, makes her uncomfortable, and if she isn’t uncomfortable, she isn’t growing. So she builds a career (and a team) around learning fast.
She also lives by advice from former Tableau CMO Elisa Fink: “people are the plan.” To Adriana Gil Miner, marketing isn’t a set of tactics. It’s what capable people can build together, especially when the tools and the market keep moving.
Pindrop’s Story
Pindrop’s work starts with a hard truth: it’s getting harder to trust what you hear and see. Gil Miner says deepfakes aren’t just celebrity headlines. It can take seconds of someone’s voice to generate a convincing fake, and video is getting harder to verify, too. When voice and video can be copied, the usual identity checks stop working.
Fraudsters impersonate customers and call retailers to push through refunds — “$20, $30 at a time” — then scale it with bots. It’s not a niche problem: Pindrop’s 2025 Voice Intelligence and Security Report notes retail fraud surged +107% from 2023 to 2024 (reaching 0.79% of calls as confirmed fraud), and the team forecasts it could climb to 1 in every 56 calls. Or they impersonate a family member and drain bank accounts — another channel where phone-based attacks keep rising, with fraud at U.S. banks occurring in 1 out of every 650 calls and up +61% cumulatively since 2020.
That pattern is why Pindrop’s work has started showing up in public-facing moments, not just behind-the-scenes security stacks. In this Al Jazeera segment, CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan breaks down how quickly deepfakes are getting cheaper and more convincing — and why humans are already bad at spotting them.
It’s a useful lens on the same trust problem Gil Miner is focused on: when a fake voice can trigger real-world outcomes (from stolen refunds to election misdirection), the “verify first” mindset stops being a nice-to-have and becomes table stakes.
How They Choose the Right Agency Partners
When she stepped into the CMO role, she says the priority was to “get the message out about the problem.” This is white space — there aren’t “deepfake budgets,” and buyers don’t always have language for what they’re facing. So her job is to “sell the problem” first, because the public needs to understand that “you and I are at risk.”
Of course, awareness isn’t the only scoreboard. Leaders still want pipeline, and they still ask for predictability. Her answer is a three-part go-to-market “stool.” One leg is awareness. She talks about showing up inside communities and social channels, plus channels like podcasts and out-of-home that build word of mouth.
The second leg is direct pipeline: a strong ABM program that blends outbound SDR work with LinkedIn and digital performance. She adds a line that feels like her whole philosophy: digital is “more like a cat.” When someone is interested, you can catch it. To create momentum, she leans into events because events put “people in front of people.”
The third leg is partners. Pindrop is “very partner-heavy,” she says, embedded in platforms like Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams. For her, partners aren’t a checkbox. They expand distribution and selling routes, and she describes increased investment in marketing and selling with them.
That operating model shapes how she works with agencies. Internally, her team is lean — about 20 people — organized into brand and community (plus customer marketing), product marketing, and a demand-gen engine that includes integrated campaigns, martech, and events. She’s also restructuring for an AI world, with an initiative to “democratize creative,” where everyone in marketing is expected to be their own writer and designer, supported by tools and training.
Externally, she uses agencies, consultants, and fractional talent. She says an outside view helps organizations move faster.
But she’s clear about where agency value is going. AI can replace a lot of production, she says. Execution isn’t the differentiator. The differentiator is strategy, clear goals, and the ability to guide transformation — helping teams adapt when old habits break, and when messy realities like legacy data get in the way.
So what makes an agency stand out? Understanding. She says her inbox is packed with outreach, and most of it sounds the same. The agencies that win “deeply understand you.” They do real research, bring intelligence, and teach her something. What falls flat are generic claims like “we’re the best” or name-dropping without insight. She’s also skeptical of the B-team problem: she wants to know the people who will actually show up. She jokes that on the agency side, clients looked clueless; in-house, agencies looked clueless. The point is humility — nobody gets a pass. The work is to show alignment, not slogans.
What Stood Out
She holds optimism and vigilance at the same time: she loves AI for creativity and productivity, and she’s clear-eyed about its dark side.
And then there’s her joy in learning. To mark turning 50, she set a goal to learn 50 new things, as long as she can learn each one in a weekend. It’s a small moment, but it reveals a leader who treats curiosity as a daily practice.
Inside Scoop
This article focuses on the journey, the leadership philosophy, and how this CMO works with agency partners.
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