Most marketers spend their careers championing categories. Emily Ketchen is helping create something new.
As Lenovo's CMO, she is responsible for shaping the emergence of AI PCs on a global scale. She describes this shift as one of those rare moments when technology and marketing open up entirely new territory rather than incremental change. “This is a once-in-30-year opportunity in your career,” she says.
Ketchen likens the AI race to the early days of the web. “Rewind to when the internet started and everyone was like, oh, what is this? It's the end of humanity,” she says, affecting a mock dramatic tone. “Today, it's oxygen. So this is the opportunity we have in front of us. So far, I think it's been pretty good for Lenovo.”
Lenovo currently leads the Windows-based AI PC market, with about a third of its global shipments falling into the new category. Those numbers are important, but for Ketchen, the deeper challenge is more fundamental. How do you market something that consumers have never experienced before?
“We don't mean this lightly, but we're not talking about the next version of shampoo or conditioner or food,” she says. I'm talking about something you haven't concretely experienced yet. ”
Proving a new category with culture and performance
To make the benefits of AI PC tangible, Lenovo has relied heavily on partnerships with the world's largest cultural and technological arenas. F1 is at the center of that strategy.
“It creates a feeling of trust,” she says. “If you can do it for F1 and influence performance there, you can do it for me too. It helps us tell the story in a tangible way.”
The sport offers a rare combination of credibility and global influence. It's the sweet spot of being 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 large CIO, engineer, and technology-minded audience. In 2024, Lenovo said the partnership increased total media coverage by 53% and increased brand awareness by 17% among viewers who saw both brands together.
The company plans to take that momentum to an even bigger stage: next year's Soccer World Cup. Lenovo has signed on as a global partner of FIFA and will be active in 104 games during the expanded 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico. For Ketjen, the partnership is as much about culture as it is about size.
“The world has been a little at odds with itself lately,” she says. “Sports is a great unifying force. Our brand is about smarter technology for everyone, and these partnerships will help us achieve that.”
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ROI, trust, and the CMO-CFO relationship
Large partnerships like this don't come cheap. Which brings us to the question every CMO faces. How do you justify your investment to sometimes skeptical executives?
Ketchen is direct. “I'm telling you, I'm not confused. My job is to drive growth. I consider myself a chief growth officer, and I'm not looking for a better role. Believe me, I'm not confused about what's important to a CFO either. And what's important to him is the concept of price inelasticity. The less we discount products, the more profitable we are.”
Therefore, Lenovo evaluates sponsorship revenue through both tangible and intangible measures. The company calculates ROI based on the entire cost spectrum of the partnership, from rights fees to activation and media value. On top of that, metrics such as brand lift, affinity, and customer experience are layered.
A customer experience perspective is all about the details. After receiving mixed feedback about long travel times from race venues, her team took the decisive step. “We actually brought in helicopters,” she says. While it may seem like an extravagant expense to satisfy corporate clients, to Ketchen it was a practical solution to a real problem. A weak link in an experience detracts from the value of everything else.
“If you're going to do it, that's how you solve the problem. We only do it when we're in the title race, and the traffic is really bad. But can you imagine being able to justify it to the president of the division I work for, his CFO, and the CFO of the company?” she says. Lenovo takes a close look at the ROI that participating accounts bring. “If I've invited you, I'm going to monitor the performance of your account along the way. Did that aspect of the relationship, where we spent a weekend together with F1's CIO explaining exactly how our technology would impact the sport, have an impact on your account?”
The logic is that by investing wisely up front, you can avoid costly price pressures later. “If I'm driving premium and value and I can prove that through these experiences and connect the dots on customer performance, customers with higher propensity, customers who make recommendations, customers who buy more, that's a step toward fulfilling my role in driving the growth of the company,” Ketchen says.
The CMO-CFO relationship is a key element in avoiding the existential crisis that plagues many marketers over how seriously their roles are taken.
“The relationship with the CFO is so important, and what you need to do as a CMO is understand what keeps them up at night and what you can do to increase their value. Then you can partner with them and have a seat at the table.”
Reinventing marketing capabilities at the pace of AI
As Lenovo brings AI PCs to market, Ketchen is accelerating AI adoption within his own organization. To avoid the kind of bureaucratic roadblocks that have hindered AI adoption elsewhere, she created an AI Governance Council that brings together legal, finance, supply chain, and marketing. It's designed to give teams clarity and confidence rather than impose limitations.
She also secured enterprise-level LLM access for hundreds of marketers and launched a global training program led by an AI guru. In parallel, two Lenovo employees developed a prompt library. This library has grown from 50 entries to more than 1,000, allowing teams to more intelligently outline AI tools across insight generation, content development, and experimentation.
Structural changes complement skill improvements. An outstanding media center blends agency expertise with in-house capabilities. Insights COE is experimenting with synthetic audiences to shorten research cycles that once took nine months.
All of this predicts a world where discovery and decision-making are performed through AI assistants rather than traditional search engines.
“Marketers need to understand how to make their content discoverable by agents,” she says. She believes reviews can become more influential than owned content, and expects attribution models to change accordingly. She also points out that her generation may be the last wave of marketing leaders who have never directly managed an AI agent. “They don't sleep, they don't need to eat. They won't ask me for a raise,” she says. “What do they do there? And how do we use it?”
Creativity and the human core
Despite the acceleration of AI, Ketchen disagrees with the fatalistic view that human creativity will inevitably face extinction. She argues that while AI can assist, optimize and adjust, it cannot replicate the emotional and cultural insights that power great marketing.
“AI has no humor. It has no emotions. It doesn't cry,” she says. “Good marketing speaks to people where they are. AI can help you find your audience, but it can’t contextualize the real-life experience.”
So while Ketjen may be one of the most prominent advocates of AI technology, there is no doubt that marketing cannot be completely automated.
“The human touch is what makes marketing real.”
