Who is Karen O’Brien? A look at Trufan’s new Chief Marketing Officer
On Friday, August 14th we announced Karen O’Brien as our Chief Marketing Officer. Karen is an award winning international marketing executive with 15+ years of experience in the industry and we could not be more excited to have her come on CMO.
We wanted to dive a little deeper into this exciting announcement and tell you more about who Karen is and the tremendous experience she brings to Trufan.
Trufan’s First Investor
Karen has actually been involved with Trufan from the beginning. She was our very first investor back in early 2018. She first learned about the company after connecting with our CEO and founder Swish Goswami. After meeting him in person and learning more about the concept Karen decided to invest in the company. This was also Karen’s first investment.
In an interview in March 2020, Karen was asked why she decided to make that investment into Trufan and she had his to say:
“I’m very excited for what the Trufan team is building. I think it’s of very high value and Swish is a phenomenal entrepreneur. His vision of how technology can really help marketers to engage in a way that is difficult to do otherwise.”
Karen’s Past Experience
Karen co-founded her first business, Roundpeg in San Francisco during the Dot Com Boom and ultimately sold prior to the bubble bursting in the early 2000s.
Following that Karen spent the next decade consulting both independently and for various companies before being brought on by one of the world’s top marketing agencies Wunderman Thompson in 2011 as their Director of Emerging Media in Seattle. While there, Karen worked with a multitude of clients including Microsoft, the Seattle Storm (WNBA), T-Mobile, Dell, Starbucks and more on social, digital and mobile marketing.
After her time with Wunderman Thompson, Karen joined Western Union as VP of Marketing, Global and Social Media. One of the highlights of Karen’s time with Western Union was the work she and her team did with influencer marketing. While Karen has had experience with influencer marketing prior to Western Union (when she first started, they weren’t even called influencers - they were called community advocates), the campaigns she ran with WU was some of her finest work.
Karen and her team focused on identifying influencers who were aligned to the values of the brand and did so by engaging a small group of micro-influencers that were also customers of Western Union along with traditional celebrities and social influencers. Through these campaigns Karen helped Western Union build up to 12M highly engaged followers across social media and on top of that, the brand had 5–7x the engagement of their competition. It was during her time at Western Union when Karen was heavily involved in influencer marketing that she made her investment into Trufan because she wanted a platform that could help her understand more about social audience data.
Following Western Union and prior to joining as CMO of Trufan, Karen served as Signet Jewelers Vice President of Media and Social Media for two years.
A Full Circle Moment
Karen joining Trufan brings things full circle — from helping the company get started to helping take it to the next level, a point Trufan CEO Swish Goswami hit on when asked about Trufan’s new CMO.
“Karen was Trufan’s first investor and given that, has seen pretty much every part of the business since we started. As CMO, she brings a wealth of experience and knowledge around storytelling, thought leadership and branding. We’re excited to have her onboard to help us take Trufan to the next level.”
Karen saw potential in Trufan in the beginning and sees even more potential now.
“I’m very excited to join the Trufan team as CMO and to bring deep experience from the brand and agency side to help the company grow in the next step of our journey. Over the past 2 years I’ve been a involved as an advisor and I have been impressed by the team as well the direction of the platform and the value that businesses of all sizes can get from leveraging audience data.”
We could not be more excited to have Karen on board and are excited to see what she has in store to help us take these next steps as a company.
