Cheesecake & Content Chats — 2025 Denver Recap
The latest stop in our Cheesecake + Content Chat series took Comma Copywriters to Denver, Colorado. On May 14, 2025, our team hosted local marketing leaders at Kiln Littleton, a suburb of the Mile High City.
Comma has expanded our signature content event series into a multi-state series in 2025 with recent stops in Phoenix, Lehi, and now Denver. These chats create a collaborative community through sharing marketing expertise (and always a delectable dessert; cheesecake in 2025!) across industries.
We owe a huge thank you to the team at Kiln, who provided a beautiful and collaborative space with no detail forgotten. Liz Cho from Kiln best captured the coworking space magic when she said, “If your ideas are half-baked, a little like cheesecake, come to Kiln, where you can really bring your thoughts together.”
We are grateful to the marketing leaders who came to share, learn, and connect. The networking and cheesecake were sweetened with takeaways from top-tier marketing experts, plus thoughts from Comma’s founder, Crystalee Beck. Here’s a recap of the event program.
Top Takeaways from the Kiln Denver Event
Comma’s own Crystalee Beck emceed the event and kicked it off with a poignant question:
“Are you content with your life’s content?”
She fueled connection at the event when she shared about her stepdad's recent passing, acknowledging that what is most personal is most universal. With the mindset of being intentional with our lives' content and priorities, we then learned key insights from four marketing leaders.
Speaker 1 – Blair Romain of TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions)
Blair Romain, content enthusiast and marketing expert from TIS, walked us through overcoming obstacles in the relationship between sales and marketing, which she knowingly referred to as “a tale as old as time.” Romain acknowledged that the friction between sales and marketing departments often comes from forgetting that the two have common goals.
“It’s really time to recognize that sales and marketing are a team,” Romain said. “A SalesForce survey shows that 80 percent of customers value the experience a company provides just as much as the products or services they offer. That means we need to focus on both revenue AND the overall customer experience.”
To make that happen, Romain suggests strategically engaging with the right accounts while tracking what matters. She sees the role of quality content as an opportunity to resonate with the customer before a sales team is ever involved.
“I’m always listening. I know I’m not always right,” Romain said. “That’s why I want to understand the needs of both sales and customers, and make sure my content serves its purpose.”
Speaker 2 - Anish Raul of Sling
Anish Raul, an award-winning marketer, brought invaluable experience and perspective to the panel. He shared all about how creativity and data-driven strategies can drive real impact.
As a recent recipient of the Disruptor award at the 2025 Adobe Experience Maker Awards, Raul understands how to make intelligent marketing and tech innovation unlock the customer experience.
He walked through the ways creative marketers will be left behind if they ignore data, showing us instead how to use that information to shape our content and direction.
“My tipping point was the day I saw that we’d used the exact same stock image as a top competitor for some widely distributed marketing,” Raul said. “That’s when I knew we needed to not just make something that looks good, but really understand the bottom line.”
He went on to illustrate how all marketing imagery is worth nothing without focusing on the main IDEA:
Impact
Data
Efficiency
Alignment
Without understanding these elements, we’re just tossing marketing materials into the world and hoping they land. But focusing on these four factors is a better, strategic way to develop marketing that makes a measurable difference. When he focused on implementing this strategy, he pivoted to using more videos on landing pages and saw conversion rates rise 30 percent.
“Creativity combined with data will produce influence,” Raul said.
Speaker 3 - Caleb Rountree of 8x8
Caleb Rountree, a digital marketer and enterprise IBM leader for 8x8, focused on how Account-Based Marketing drives real revenue. He shared how creativity and data-driven strategies can drive real impact.
“The best way to learn the business is by talking to customers,” Rountree said. “Then build a bridge between content efforts and the sales team using those tools.”
He said when he first started in his current position, he looked at where sales were happening the most naturally, then focused more strategic efforts on similar spaces. He understood the value in building a targeted list for where you are already a precise fit.
He also discussed the growing challenges with email marketing and referenced gifts as a way to break through the noise and really reach the right contact.
“Email is getting harder, but gifts are rising in effectiveness,” Rountree said. “You need to do something that breaks through. What’s going to be memorable and shareable? You’ll get further with that than digital ads or email campaigns.”
The next step is to deal directly with your data if you truly want to understand a campaign's success.
“Make sure your benchmarks are your own data, not external averages,” Rountree said. “Compare where you are to where you’ve been, then you can build on what’s working.”
Speaker 4 - Jen Velarde-Menary Raul of Schneider Electric
Jen Velarde-Menary, an AI product marketing strategist at global energy management and digital automation leader, Schneider Electric, gave a career-oriented focus on visibility and establishing your value.
“It doesn’t just matter what you can do,” Velarde-Menary said. “It matters who knows you can do it.”
She discussed how unrecognized use of AI can lead to career invisibility. Adopting AI as a tool is only the first step. We need to then communicate the work we’re doing in three areas:
Knowledge: What AI knowledge or skills have you gained?
Methods: What are your methods for refining and troubleshooting when using an AI tool?
Results: What are the tangible results you’ve achieved in AI-assisted work?
When marketers communicate what they accomplish with those three factors in mind, they establish their expertise and make their value understood.
“When you’re sharing these things, you’re building trust,” Velarde-Menary said.
She went on to illustrate practicable actions that can transform AI skills from invisible to visible, such as showing a coworker how you’ve utilized AI at work or posting an article about a recent AI development you’re following.
“Quiet or unrecognized AI-use leads to career invisibility,” Velarde-Menary said. “Your value is the combination of your actual impact and your intentional visibility.”
Join Us for Cheesecake & Content Chats in the Fall
Thank you again to Kiln, our talented panel, and all the local marketing leaders who came to connect at the event. We walk away from these content chats fueled to be better creators, and we value the community we’ve built together.
We hope you can make it to our next content chat in the series this fall in Provo, Utah, on September 10. We have limited spots.
Register here to reserve your spot. See you there!
