Episode 57: Inside Fortune 100 Marketing Procurement – Privacy, AI, and Value

How can marketing leaders move past vanity metrics and build a measurement engine that earns total financial confidence from their CFO?

What happens when a veteran agency strategist who manages Super Bowl buys, affiliate campaigns, and complex MarTech stacks moves to the buyer side of the table? In this episode of The Digital Clinic, Aaron Burnett sits down with Fariba Shamim, Manager of Category Strategy for Marketing at Liberty Mutual. Drawing from her transition from high-stakes ad agency strategy to leading procurement for a Fortune 100 brand, Fariba reframes procurement from a traditional cost-cutting bottleneck into a strategic partner that protects brand privacy while enabling innovation.

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How Liberty Mutual Protects Customer Privacy in Marketing

Fariba Shamim: Like a lot of marketing and advertising orgs, we do use suppliers like LiveRamp that blind data and allow us to maintain anonymity while targeting audiences. Our targeting strategies tend to be broad as well, to maintain that privacy and risk prevention.

On most of the agreements that I work on and strategic initiatives I support, before any conversations even take place for evaluation with suppliers, we often consider putting DPAs in place. Customer privacy is the first and foremost measure and effort that we make, and that I have to make on a day-to-day basis.

Aaron Burnett: That’s Fariba Shamim, manager of category strategy for marketing at Liberty Mutual. For years, it was variety that kept her working in advertising and digital agencies, and she worked her way up to agency leadership roles by becoming deeply expert at everything from affiliate deals to Super Bowl ad buys.

But the increasing instability of the agency world sent her looking for a brand and an organization she could commit to over the long term. She found a marketing role at Liberty that, somewhat to her surprise, sat in procurement, and she landed it. Today she oversees anything that could reasonably be construed as marketing, leading evaluation and contracting for all marketing technology, services, and AI.

She’s also our first guest from procurement, which, given the pivotal role procurement plays in healthcare and medtech, is frankly an oversight on our part. In today’s conversation, Fariba shares what a regulated enterprise requires before a partner touches its data and systems, how she weighs value beyond cost, what she wants from the suppliers who call on her, and where she believes marketing is headed over the next five years.

You won’t want to miss this episode of “The Digital Clinic.”

This podcast is sponsored by Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group. Wheelhouse provides exceptional performance marketing for healthcare and medical device manufacturers. Every Wheelhouse client saw record performance in 2025, even after implementing HIPAA-compliant data solutions. Find out more at wheelhousedmg.com. 

From Advertising Agencies to Procurement: Fariba Shamim’s Career Background

Aaron Burnett: You have such an interesting history. You have operated at an expert and fairly senior level in several areas of marketing execution, and now you’re on the procurement side. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken with anyone from procurement. It’s very novel that we are. You have this interesting background, but also a very interesting purview in the procurement job that you have now, which I think will be very interesting to our listeners.

So tell me a bit about your background, and then we’ll go from there.

Fariba Shamim: Well, I appreciate joining you for this conversation. I started really just in university thinking, “What am I good at?” One of the things was just talking and that person-to-person connection. So that led me down the marketing and advertising route. And of course, at the time I was in school, Mad Men was all the rage, so I was enticed by the glamour and the excitement, the day-to-day changes, and really the creativity that comes with advertising.

So I landed at and worked my way through a number of agencies, pretty much any vertical you can think of: greeting cards, sportswear brands, luxury cruises, you name it. The variety and the challenges of problem-solving really kept me on this path. Ultimately, in recent years, there’s been a lot of upheaval in the advertising industry: lots of mergers, acquisitions, breakups. And I landed in a role in procurement, which is similar but different, in that the risk evaluation and the urgency and necessity to evaluate each partnership on a deeper level add a new challenge and layer of red tape every day. So from one type of challenge to another, I’m always problem-solving, always trying to find the right way forward.

How Affiliate, MarTech, and Super Bowl Buying Experience Shapes a Procurement Leader

Aaron Burnett: I think it would be interesting for listeners to understand that you worked through a number of agencies and also in a number of different contexts, which are pretty compelling: everything from affiliate marketing to enabling and executing Super Bowl buys, and all of the things in between.

Media planning, working in MarTech and implementation of that technology, developing marketing strategy for very large clients and mid-size clients. So you have much more background in marketing technology than is typical, I would think, for anyone in procurement. Certainly more than anyone in procurement we have worked with here.

Fariba Shamim: I’ve always been curious and hungry to learn more and to know what the latest technology is. Even from a young age, my family and I were always interested in the latest gaming system and the latest technology coming out on a personal level. So that professional curiosity just continued to grow. I started in affiliate, which is very deal-oriented and negotiation-based: What is the best offer you can put in front of the customer? How do you serve that to the customer in a way that’s clickable and engaging? That fed into the next stage, which was broader MarTech at Hill Holliday, all the way up to larger, more strategic buys like the Super Bowl. It all came down to: Where is the consumer that I am tasked to speak with? How do I get to them as technology is evolving? And on a more one-to-one level, one day Twitter is all the rage and everybody’s on Twitter, and the next day a lot of people step away for professional and personal use.

New platforms pop up, and new advertising lanes arrive. Now search engine queries on platforms like Google are completely different from how we used to search. Everybody’s asking questions; I’m asking questions. “Hey Google, plan a whole trip itinerary for me. I’m trying to go here on these dates, and I want to keep within a certain budget.” And you get a fully baked output that, before, you would have had to manage very carefully through SEO. So that constant curiosity, that goal to stay ahead and speak to the customer, has always been my goal.

Aaron Burnett: I am curious what prompted the transition from marketing to procurement. I don’t think I know anyone else who’s made that step before.

Fariba Shamim: If you want the real answer, it was security. The ad agency world and the ad industry in general were going through such an upheaval. At the agency I was at, there were four rounds of layoffs, and I was in the fifth one. So I was looking for a new opportunity and a way to expand my skills. Really, at my level, I wanted to find a really good client, a recognizable brand that I could get behind, and just continue to enjoy doing the work that I’m doing.

When I saw the procurement opportunity, it did say marketing, and I questioned it. I applied through the Ad Club’s website, which is an organization on the East Coast, and I saw that it was the only opening at Liberty. I was surprised that it wasn’t on their marketing team but on the procurement team for marketing. So I pursued it, and I found that there’s a lot of overlap with what I was doing as a strategic buyer and an integrated strategist at Hill Holliday. I fell into it because it was a new challenge, and that curiosity was reawakened.

What Does a Manager of Category Strategy for Marketing Do at Liberty Mutual?

Aaron Burnett: So now you’re manager of category strategy for marketing with Liberty Mutual. What does that mean? What’s your purview and your mission?

Fariba Shamim: Low-key humble brag, however you want to put it, but I lead the marketing category for Liberty Mutual. I’m very proud to have reached this position, especially coming from a completely different background. A lot of people study to be in sourcing roles and procurement roles, and I think I’ve been able to transfer my skills from the agency side and the MarTech side to this role, where sourcing technology and MarTech tools, as well as new up-and-coming AI technologies, is becoming the norm.

My purview covers any and all marketing at Liberty Mutual, whether that’s our US retail markets, any of our global risk solutions, our people and purpose brand, or corporate strategies. Anything that could reasonably be construed as marketing falls under my view. I tend to allocate more of my capacity, that strategic work, toward broader projects like AI adoption strategies and what makes sense in our creative portfolio for generative AI production. Those are really hot right now. Beyond that: Are there any strategies we can employ to reduce overlap among supplier subcategories? What do our agency relationships look like? How do I provide the best value for my internal stakeholders, for Liberty as a whole, and for the customers who purchase Liberty Mutual policies?

How Insurance Regulation and Third-Party Risk Management Shape Marketing Procurement

Aaron Burnett: Tell me about the regulatory environment for Liberty Mutual. We are very focused here on performance marketing for privacy-first industries, so highly regulated industries: healthcare, medtech. We also work with insurance companies. What’s the regulatory environment there, and what does that mean for your work?

Fariba Shamim: As you can imagine, there are a number of layers of risk review and protections that need to be evaluated before a contract can be put in place. A lot of our marketers, the folks I work with day in and day out, stakeholders across the org, need what they need: the tool that they want today, now. There’s always this extreme urgency, and I often have to pull them back and let them know that it’s not just a procurement decision. It’s an organizational risk and third-party risk management decision on how quickly we can move and adopt certain technologies.

There are many committees designed to evaluate everything from privacy, to the generative nature of certain tools, to the data storage and capture that’s happening, whether it’s internal Liberty data or customer data, which requires even more stringent review. So we’re very careful as an organization to maintain privacy at a very high standard, but that does come at the price of time, which is critical in marketing.

How Liberty Mutual Targets Audiences While Protecting Customer Data

Aaron Burnett: So a healthcare organization, for example, has to absolutely protect PHI. In a digital advertising context, they deal with the constraints that they can’t use most third-party tracking, they can’t share a lot of conversion signals back with platforms, and they can’t target audiences in the same way. Are you dealing with those same constraints at Liberty Mutual?

Fariba Shamim: There are those constraints in place. Like a lot of marketing and advertising orgs, we do use suppliers like LiveRamp that blind data and allow us to maintain anonymity while targeting audiences. Our targeting strategies tend to be broad as well, to maintain that privacy and risk prevention.

On most of the agreements that I work on and strategic initiatives I support, before any conversations even take place for evaluation with suppliers, we often consider putting DPAs in place. Customer privacy is the first and foremost measure and effort that we make, and that I have to make on a day-to-day basis.

Aaron Burnett: That makes sense. And for those playing along at home, a DPA is a data processing agreement.

How Procurement Structures AI Contracts and Manages Credit Utilization

Aaron Burnett: I was reading your background, and the role that you have is broader than I had understood procurement to be, or had encountered it to be. In particular, you mentioned that you work from sourcing through scaling. So in this strategic role, you’re doing more than finding the technology or the agency partner that’s required. You’re helping to implement and manage the relationship as it scales as well?

Fariba Shamim: To a certain degree. I am one person; I can’t do it all. I have a great number of resources, and the procurement team itself has many functional resource groups. Right now, the strategic projects with the highest visibility and demand are really the AI ones. I work with the business team to make sure that, whatever their business challenge is, we’re coming up with the right solution provider and partner to deliver and execute that vision.

And then also, as the AI space evolves: Do we have the right contract structures and commercial terms in place? Do we understand how the credits are going to be managed, distributed, divided up among the different business teams, and utilized? Because ultimately, we’re all still learning how to prompt and be really good prompt engineers, and there is a learning curve when it comes to credit utilization. We don’t want to be eating up all the credits that come with each license. We want to actually be forward-thinking and think through what we’re committing to up front, before we get to really test out and become experts in these technologies.

Is AI in Marketing Delivering Real Value? How a Fortune 100 Company Tests Generative AI

Aaron Burnett: So you mentioned AI. This wouldn’t be a marketing conversation if we didn’t spend considerable time on AI. It’s an interesting moment. I guess it’s always been an interesting moment with regard to AI, but I do feel like there’s a divergence in narrative around AI.

There are the enthusiasts who continue to say, “This will be earth-shattering, life-changing. It will upend all of marketing and make us all more efficient, and we’ll all work an hour a day and do 40 hours of work in that one hour.” And then there are the detractors, some of them quite well-informed, who are saying, “Listen, we’re watching very large corporations invest in AI. They have invested millions or tens of millions of dollars, and they’re now pulling back because they’re not actually seeing the return that they anticipated. Instead, they’re seeing lots of slop and inefficiency and low-to-mediocre-quality work.” What are you seeing in the realm of AI in marketing that’s truly delivering value, economic value, at Liberty? What’s really impressed you?

Fariba Shamim: I think as an organization, we have a test-and-learn ethos, and we’ve made a lot of effort to try out some of these new and emerging tools within our existing structures. As you can imagine, a Fortune 100 company like Liberty has relationships with all the big guys, like Adobe and Salesforce and all those large giants.

So they offer a number of betas as they roll out, and we get a taste of what is new and how things work. That is our safest environment to test things out. We also have a lot of consciousness and structure around putting anything out into the world that uses generative AI. There is a lot of scrutiny before anything comes to light for customers. So it’s definitely about managing the risks in as safe an environment as we can before we consider additional investment or rolling things out further.

Aaron Burnett: Have you seen anything that’s really impressed you?

Fariba Shamim: Well, most recently I’ve been looking into generative voiceover tools for some of our internal learning and development efforts. Liberty has an in-house creative agency, but its capacity is directed more toward consumer advertising. So the internal creative groups need resources as well, and we’ve been looking into ElevenLabs and some of the other generative video solutions. I saw a beta for Vyond Turbo recently, which is still coming along, but there’s a lot of great technology on the way. I think the humans upskilling right now is the critical piece. We really need to understand how to prompt and get better, what tool to use when, and how to best utilize credits to ensure that we’re getting the right value out of those investments.

Aaron Burnett: Yeah, that makes sense.

Advice for Regulated Organizations Evaluating and Adopting AI

Aaron Burnett: So what advice would you give to other organizations with similar data privacy constraints, sensitive operating environments, and fiduciary responsibility? What advice would you give them as they think about, evaluate, and begin to adopt and roll out AI?

Fariba Shamim: From a procurement perspective, my first priority, my customer, is the internal business teams that are looking to utilize these services. My best advice would be: talk to them. Talk to those people and really understand what it is that they’re trying to accomplish, so that you can utilize the right resources, your privacy teams and any of the risk teams that are involved. Be their advocate, translating the business team’s goal into procurement language and privacy language.

The biggest barrier that I come across, and that some of my peers I’ve spoken to have mentioned, is really just miscommunication, that gap that we need to help the business teams overcome. It really comes down to that. That’s what marketing is. And for me, in this role, that’s what this role is too.

How Marketing Procurement Weighs Long-Term Value

Aaron Burnett: Let’s jump back to the purest procurement perspective that you have and the role that you play. I think the conventional perception of procurement is that the prime aim is to ensure that costs are as low as possible. So people might have a preconceived notion that, as a vendor, if I’m working with you, your principal concern is going to be to reduce the costs of whatever services or MarTech I’m providing. But I know that the role you play is much more nuanced and sophisticated than that. So describe how you approach procurement, and how you balance the needs of the organization with an understanding of what it takes to deliver MarTech or services, which I think you’re unusually capable of understanding, and deliver the outcome that you need.

Fariba Shamim: Cost ultimately is a key factor. That’s no surprise, and there’s no hiding that. I am tasked, and most folks in procurement roles are tasked, to procure goods and services at the lowest possible cost.

But when it comes to marketing, it’s indirect procurement. Some of the classic principles do apply, and I’ve had to learn them as I’ve come into this role. It’s really about long-term value. Beyond the monetary, what are the other forms of value that working with a specific supplier can offer us?

Is it a more advanced product that is going to provide us efficiency, or a managed service team that’s going to work as an extension of our internal team and provide additional brains to think things through and hands on keyboards? There are other ways, beyond dollar value, to assess long-term value and to try to justify costs that might be outsized. And from a MarTech perspective, because that space is continually evolving, keeping an eye on the landscape and connecting with the business team to see what their ever-changing priorities are when it comes to their supplier relationships is what helps me stay ahead and make sure that whatever I’m trying to accomplish day-to-day in my role is as effective as possible.

Aaron Burnett: I would imagine that in procurement, the outcomes are fairly metrics-driven. You just referenced wanting to be sensitive to other forms of value that might be present in a relationship with a particular MarTech provider or service provider. How do you measure value so that it can be part of the assessment across MarTech, service providers, and all of these supplier relationships?

Fariba Shamim: Liberty does have a standardized structure for each kind of engagement or effort to track value. Those are the metrics that I’m evaluated on. But I continue to advocate for myself and for my category that it really isn’t one-size-fits-all when you compare marketing to telco or to legal or any number of categories. Marketing has to meet the moment and really stay ahead of things. That means spending could be outsized from the outset, and ROI is hard to measure and sometimes intangible. So for me, it is always a conversation with my leadership and with the leadership in our marketing orgs: “Can we agree that this is still valuable, or that this adds value in another way? And can I be evaluated a little more gently, or have some more consideration put into my exact performance? Because I feel I am delivering.” You just can’t put everything in the same standardized format.

What Procurement Wants From Marketing Suppliers and Agency Partners

Aaron Burnett: What are the characteristics of a really good procurement supplier relationship? Ideally, what are you looking for from a supplier?

Fariba Shamim: I want them to come to me with what’s new and what’s exciting, and it has to come from a place of knowing our business and what the business team’s goals are. Once an agreement is signed, I’m generally more hands-off, and it is up to each business team to manage their own relationship day-to-day and ensure that they are getting what they’re paying for.

I support and jump back in if any remediations are needed or any tough conversations need to be had. I call myself a bit of a bad cop, if needed. But when it comes down to it, before a renewal, or if a supplier is trying to break in and knows that we have relationships with one of their competitors, I want to know that you understand what the ultimate priorities might be for Liberty or for whatever business team I’m working with, and really show up with something that translates that value. If you’re cold calling me, or if you’re just trying to have a hangout, that’s really very different from building an effective relationship and networking.

What Will Marketing Look Like in Five Years? AI Search, OpenAI Ads, and the Future of Procurement

Aaron Burnett: All right. You have this very interesting purview, as we talked about at the beginning: all of this extensive experience as a marketing practitioner, and now you’re in the catbird seat, leading procurement for marketing at Liberty Mutual. So I’m curious to ask you to project forward, call it five years. We’ll make this a conventional question. What do you think the execution of marketing looks like five years from now? Given all of the upheaval, and all of the potential, promised, somewhat realized innovation in AI, what will we be doing in five years?

Fariba Shamim: I think it’s a little hard for me to say. Most orgs the size of Liberty have full-blown procurement teams. They have a different person handling media and agency relationships, a different person handling events and sponsorships, and the subcategories go on and on. In my role, as really a team of one managing the category, I am not certain whether this role will even exist in five years, as consolidation continues to happen and new procurement tools that include AI features roll out.

So future-proofing my own role and the value that I provide to the organization is always top of mind for me. Like everybody else, I’m going to continue to make sure that the human touch, the insight that only a person and years of experience can bring, really comes through.

In terms of the actual sourcing side of things and where the industry might be, I think it will revolve around the consumer. How people consume media, at least in my life, is constantly changing. I’m now watching vertical dramas through TikTok. I’m querying search platforms to build out full summaries of things that I’m curious about, or travel itineraries. So we as advertisers and large organizations, especially those with a view to privacy, will need to find new ways to show up organically for the customer and meet them where they are interacting with content and media. OpenAI Ads launched this year, and I imagine there will be additional competitors in that space, so that we can show up when folks are looking for new homes or anything even vaguely related to insurance. There are going to be unimaginable leaps and bounds, because right now we have new tools cropping up pretty much every month.

Aaron Burnett: Yes, we do. Just keeping up is a full-time job at this point.

Fariba Shamim: That it is, day in and day out.

Aaron Burnett: Well, that’s great. This has been great. I’ve really appreciated the conversation.

Fariba Shamim: Thank you so much, Aaron, for having me. I really appreciate that I got to share a little bit about my trajectory from agency to procurement. It is surprising to me that I landed here, but with an eye to ever-growing curiosity and wanting to be challenged with something new every day, this is exciting, and I’m looking forward to the next five years.

Aaron Burnett: That’s great. I’ll look forward to watching what you do over the next five years.

Fariba Shamim: Thanks so much.

The Takeaway: Aligning Marketing Strategy with Risk Management in Regulated Industries

Aaron Burnett: As Fariba demonstrated today, successful marketing in highly regulated enterprises doesn’t mean dodging compliance or treating procurement as an adversary. Instead, marketing should build alignment, translating creative and performance goals into the language of risk, privacy, and long-term value. Whether you’re trying to roll out generative AI tools or onboard a new MarTech partner, the strongest growth happens when risk management and marketing strategy walk hand in hand.

You can connect with Fariba on LinkedIn to follow her work. And if you enjoyed today’s discussion, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review, and share this episode. I’m Aaron Burnett, and I’ll see you next time on “The Digital Clinic.”

Sponsored by Wheelhouse DMG