THE FOUNDRY
A place for marketing leaders to shape how marketing works next.
A private community and makerspace for CMOs and senior marketing leaders to challenge how marketing works, build what comes next, and learn from perspectives beyond their own. Human-centered by design. Brought together by Gradial.
Bring your assumptions. We’ll break a few.
The Foundry is built around human-centered design: start with people, challenge what we think we know, explore widely, then focus on what matters. We’ll break things. Build things. Prototype new ways of working. Test them with people who see the world differently.
Deep in marketing. Wide in perspective.
CMOs and senior marketing leaders sit at the center of the Foundry. At selected sessions, we intentionally widen the room, bringing in leaders from technology, product, design, academia and other disciplines to challenge bias, create unexpected connections and make the work stronger.
The community already exists.
Closed-door dinners. Working sessions. Keynotes. Candid exchanges between leaders navigating the same transformation. The Foundry gives those conversations continuity, and somewhere for the learning to compound.
Not another event. A makerspace for how marketing works next.
The Foundry turns conversation into practice. We go deep on the realities of marketing, then widen the aperture, bringing different disciplines and perspectives into the room to question assumptions, build and break ideas, test new ways of working, and turn the learning into something others can use.
Candor over performance.
Small, closed-door sessions for the conversations leaders rarely get to have publicly.
Make. Test. Learn.
Working sessions and experiments focused on real decisions, not abstract future-state theory.
Different perspectives by design.
Go deep with marketing peers, then bring in adjacent disciplines and lived experience to challenge the thinking and make the work stronger.
“AI cannot simply be added to a broken operating model and called transformation. We have to rethink how the work itself gets done, and we need different perspectives in the room to build what comes next.”
Stephanie FergusonFounding Advisor, The Foundry
Three questions every marketing organization now has to answer.
What should humans own?
Where judgment, creativity, customer understanding, taste and leadership create the most value.
What should the harness own?
Where governed agents, context, memory and orchestration can remove handoffs, carry the work and give teams time back.
How do we know it’s working?
How organizations govern autonomy, learn from execution, preserve brand and measure impact over time.
