Most marketers spend their careers defending a category. Emily Ketchen is helping to create a new one.
As Lenovo’s chief marketing officer for the Intelligent Devices Group, she is responsible for shaping the emergence of AI PCs at global scale, a shift she describes as one of the rare moments when technology and marketing open entirely new territory rather than incremental change. “This is a once in a 30-year career opportunity,” she says.
Ketchen likens the AI race to the early days of the web. “You rewind to when the internet launched, and everybody kind of thought, Oh, what is this thing? It’s the end of humanity,” she says, affecting a mock dramatic tone. “Today, that is oxygen. So this is the opportunity that we see ahead of us, and so far, I think the results have been pretty good for Lenovo.”
Lenovo now leads the Windows-based AI PC market and roughly one third of the company’s global shipments fall into the new category. Those numbers matter, but for Ketchen, the deeper challenge is more fundamental. How do you market something consumers have never experienced before?
“I’m not belittling this at all, but I’m not talking about the next version of a shampoo or a conditioner or food,” she says. I’m talking about something you truly haven’t tangibly experienced yet.”
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To make the benefits of AI PCs tangible, Lenovo has leaned heavily on partnerships with some of the world’s biggest cultural and technical stages. Formula One sits at the center of that strategy.
“It creates a sense of trust,” she says. “If you can do it for F1 and impact performance there, then you can do it for me. It helps us tell the story in a tangible way.”
The sport provides a rare combination of credibility and global reach. A sweet spot that is both “popular and technical,” as Ketchen puts it. Its fan base has grown from 500 million to more than 850 million in recent years and includes a high concentration of CIOs, engineers and technically minded viewers. In 2024, Lenovo saw a 53% increase in total media coverage driven by the partnership and a 17% lift in brand awareness among audiences exposed to both brands together.
The company will carry that momentum into an even larger stage next year – soccer’s World Cup. Lenovo has signed on as a global partner for Fifa and will activate across 104 matches during the expanded 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico. For Ketchen, that partnership is as much about culture as it is about scale.
“The world is a little at odds with itself these days,” she says. “Sport is one of the great unifiers. Our brand is about smarter technology for all and these partnerships help us pay that off.”
Major partnerships of this nature do not come cheap, which raises the question every CMO faces: how do you justify the investment to a sometimes sceptical C-suite?
Ketchen is direct. “I’ll tell you, I am not confused. My job is to drive growth. I see myself as a chief growth officer, and I’m not looking for more titles, trust me on that one. But I'm also not confused about what’s important to my CFO. And what’s important to him is the concept of price inelasticity. The less I have to discount my products, the more profitable we are.”
For that reason, Lenovo evaluates sponsorship returns through both tangible and intangible measures. The company calculates an ROI based on the full cost envelope of the partnership, from rights fees to activation and media value. Layered on top of that are metrics such as brand lift, affinity and customer experience.
That customer experience lens extends into the smallest details. After receiving mixed feedback about long travel times leaving a race venue, her team took a decisive step. “We actually stepped up and brought in helicopters,” she says. It may seem an extravagant expense to keep corporate guests happy, but for Ketchen, it was a practical solution to a practical problem. A weak link in the experience undermines the value of everything else.
“If you’re going to do it, that’s the way to solve the problem. We would only do that for a title race, and only when the traffic is truly dreadful. But can you imagine justifying that to the president of the division I work for, his CFO and the corporate CFO?” she says. Lenovo looks closely at the ROI driven by the accounts that attend. “If I’ve invited you, I’ll be watching the performance of your account along the way. Has the relationship aspect of spending a weekend together, with the CIO of F1 walking you through exactly how our technology powers the sport, made an impact to the account?”
The logic is that savvy investment up front can stave off costly price pressure later. “If I’m driving premium and value, and I can demonstrate that through these experiences, and I can connect the dots to customer performance, or a customer who has a higher propensity, or a customer who will make a recommendation or who will buy more, then it’s one step in the journey to fulfilling the role that I have, which is to drive growth for our company,” Ketchen says.
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The CMO-CFO relationship is the critical component to stave off the existential crisis besetting many marketers about how seriously their role is taken.
“That relationship with the CFO is super important, and you need to work as a CMO to understand what is keeping them up at night and what you can do to drive value for them. And then you’re partnering, and then you have a seat at the table.”
As Lenovo advances AI PCs in the market, Ketchen is accelerating AI adoption inside her own organization. To avoid the kind of bureaucratic blockages that have impeded AI adoption elsewhere, she has established an AI governance council that brings together legal, finance, supply chain and marketing. It is designed to give teams clarity and confidence rather than impose restrictions.
She also secured enterprise-level LLM access for hundreds of marketers and launched a global training program led by a leading AI academic. In parallel, two Lenovo employees developed a prompt library that has grown from 50 entries to over 1,000, enabling teams to brief AI tools more intelligently across insight generation, content development, and experimentation.
Structural changes complement the skills push. A media center of excellence blends agency expertise with internal capability. An insights COE is experimenting with synthetic audiences to compress research cycles that once took nine months.
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All of this anticipates a world where discovery and decision-making run increasingly through AI assistants rather than traditional search engines.
“Marketers now have to understand how to make their content discoverable to the agent,” she says. She believes reviews may become more influential than owned content and expects attribution models to shift accordingly. She also notes that her generation may be the last wave of marketing leaders who have never managed AI agents directly. “They do not sleep. They do not need to eat. They are not going to ask me for a raise,” she says. “What are they going to be doing out there and how do we use them?”
Despite AI’s acceleration, Ketchen does not subscribe to the fatalistic view that human creativity inevitably faces wipeout. She argues that AI can assist, optimize and orchestrate, but it cannot replicate the emotional and cultural insight that gives great marketing its power.
“AI does not have humor. It does not have emotion. It does not cry,” she says. “Great marketing communicates to people from where they are. AI can help you find the audience but it cannot contextualize the lived experience.”
So while she may be one of the most prominent champions of AI technology, Ketchen is in no doubt that marketing cannot be entirely automated.
“The human touch is what makes marketing real.”
Emily Ketchen has been nominated for The Drum and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year Award 2025. You can find out more about the accolade and this year’s nominees here.
Previous winners of the award include Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal, who won for 2023, and Marcel Marcondes, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev, who won for 2024.