Antonia Kasparek on Marketing Through Relentless Change
Antonia Kasparek, VP of Marketing Operations at AVEVA, has built a career out of walking into messes and putting them in order. From her first professional job mastering a now-extinct desktop publishing tool in North Dakota, to standing up websites, web teams, and demand-generation engines across three continents, she has spent a few decades turning marketing chaos into working programs. Today, she leads marketing operations at AVEVA, the industrial software company helping engineers design oil rigs, run nuclear plants, build ships, and predict when a plant needs maintenance.
In this Beyond the Brief Conversation, Antonia discusses the once-in-a-generation pivot from SEO to GEO or LLM optimization, the challenge of orchestrating an extensive global marketing stack, the real cost of working inside walled gardens like Adobe, and why adaptability is as critical to today’s challenges as expertise.
A career spent bringing clarity to what was chaos
Q: Your path runs from journalism to pricing analysis to global digital marketing. Was there a thread through all of it?
Antonia: Honestly, I’ve always embraced a challenge. I started at Thomson Reuters as an analyst in competitive intelligence, which included pulling giant computer printouts apart to answer business questions with data. That role evolved into database marketing, pricing strategy, and leading direct marketing to sell legal books. In my Thomson journey, I had the opportunity to move to London to build a web team and a new website for the financial division. My team coordinated building the new digital system. My goal was to fix the current mess and build a system that delivered results. That’s the common thread. I like to clean up messy structures and make things work better. Give me a mess, and I’m happy.
From SEO to LLM
Q: You mentioned the shift from SEO to LLM. How are you getting AEO and GEO ready?
Antonia: We’re an Adobe house, so we’re testing their LLM optimizer, plus many other tools to figure out how to structure our content and determine whether what we publish is being pulled into agentic searches. We also just switched our SEO agency for a GEO agency to leverage expert guidance in reconstructing content to be LLM and people-friendly. I wouldn’t say we’ve mastered it, but we have definitely started the journey. We’ve learned a lot in the last six months, and it keeps changing. Just as we think we know how to master this new paradigm, things evolve.
Orchestrating a global, multi-tool machine
Q: Your title is marketing operations, but you’re clearly running a complex global engine. How is it built?
Antonia: I’ve got a team running our Marketo instance, which is deeply embedded in Salesforce. I also have a digital team that’s very Adobe-centric, with web developers and an outside vendor for core development plus a content group leading our LLM optimization work. A lot of the job is deciding what lives where. The marketing space does not have a shortage of tech to solve our problems. In my experience, magic tools take dedicated focus to deliver results.
The cost of the walled garden
Q: You’re investing heavily in Adobe. What’s your honest take?
Antonia: Make sure you understand the vision and value of your purchase. Adobe is expensive. We are moving from managed services to Adobe Cloud in the first quarter of next year, and there’s no shortage of new extensions that we can buy. I appreciate Adobe, but my experience is their tools need to be in place more than a year before you buy them, or it can be a painful early journey. Typically, once you’re in the ecosystem, there’s always room to expand.
Planting before the harvest
Q: Looking ahead, what’s the mindset you’re carrying into all this change?
Antonia: Change is not going to stop. It’s only going to accelerate. It’s almost more important to have adaptable skills than deep expertise in the tools you have today. Fortunately, I have experts across my team who know how to leverage the power of marketing tech. Even with consistent tech, the same tool is different now than it was three years ago. The pace of change is accelerating, and it’s not going to slow down.
One of my early jobs was growing cucumbers for the Gedney pickles in a rural Minnesota town. It was dirty, hard work, and you made all your money in the final weeks at the end of the summer. Before I made any money, I had to plant, weed, and water for weeks. This early job taught me how important initial planning and execution matters. Solid outcomes require planning and nurturing the project the whole way. That truth has held true in every role.
Antonia Kasparek is VP of Marketing Operations at AVEVA, the industrial software company behind the “unlock your industrial intelligence” platform, serving engineers and operators across energy, manufacturing, marine, and process industries worldwide. Over her career, she has lived in Minnesota, London, New York, and now Texas, building digital and demand-generation functions at organizations including Thomson Reuters before joining AVEVA. She’ll tell you she still prefers olives to pickles, and that the only thing she grows these days is flowers, nothing she has to eat. Connect with Antonia on LinkedIn, and learn more about AVEVA at aveva.com. Thank you, Antonia, for sharing your perspective on leading marketing through relentless and ever-accelerating change.