CMO Spotlight | Brian Canning - Hertz
The CMO Spotlight offers an inside look into the minds and journeys of high-performing marketing leaders.
Setup CEO + Founder, Joe Koufman, sat down with Brian Canning, the Chief Marketing Officer at Hertz, to talk about collaborative leadership, listening to different perspectives, taking smart creative risks, building a brand people actually like, and how AI is helping Hertz move faster and scale more effectively.
Watch + Read the Recap Below
Q1 | What is your superpower?
Canning is hesitant to call it a superpower, because he does not see himself as someone who “spike[s] in one specific area.” Instead, he sees his strength in being well-rounded enough to move between very different parts of the business and help those teams work better together.
As he explains, he enjoys “mixing it up with my martech guys that are super analytical,” just as much as working with “the creatives that are idea generators and have that creative brain,” along with partners in finance and legal.
That ability to understand different perspectives is what allows him to bring people together and help specialists do their best work. In his words, “my biggest strength is being able to take all of the areas of the business and push people who do spike in those areas to really spike and collaborate well with the rest of the team.”
Ultimately, Canning sees his role less as having the biggest individual superpower and more as drawing those strengths out of others: “I feel like I'm pretty good at getting superpowers out of other people and making the end product.”
Q2 | What advice would you share with marketers?
For Canning, the best marketers know when to listen and when to speak up. His advice is simple: “Don't try to be the smartest person in the room.” Instead, “sit back and listen and listen to different perspectives,” because “the earlier you learn to listen to all those different perspectives, the faster you'll grow.”
At the same time, he believes marketers should not be afraid to challenge the room when they have something valuable to add. As he puts it, “it's okay to be kind of the contrarian opinion” and “speak your mind, as long as you're listening to others around you.”
Q3 | What values are important to you?
Canning points to self-awareness, passion, and accountability as the values that matter most. He believes it is important to “really care about what you're doing,” while also being willing to “admit when you screw up” and learn from it.
For him, self-awareness ties those qualities together, especially in a collaborative field like marketing.
Q4 | Tell us about an impactful campaign.
For Canning, the Hertz Gold Squad is a strong example of what can happen when a team takes a creative risk and then listens to the customer response. The campaign was built around a simple idea: using golden retrievers to “bring joy to people and make travel less stressful.”
He describes the launch as “a big swing” and “a risky swing,” but the response validated the idea. As the campaign expanded across paid media, Hertz.com, and influencers, the team kept testing it against more traditional rental car messaging, and “Gold Squad wins every time.”
The bigger lesson, he says, is that marketers can “over-complicate things.” Sometimes the better answer is to create something simple that makes people feel good and then trust yourself. “You trust your team and trust your instincts.”
Q5 | How is AI changing your work at Hertz?
AI is helping Hertz move faster and make data more actionable. Canning says it is having “a massive impact on our business,” especially when it comes to efficiency and analytics.
He points to Hertz’s internal tool, Carrot, which “helps us do everything faster” and gives the team “instant feedback” they can quickly act on. For Canning, that speed is one of the biggest ways AI is helping the team scale.
Q6 | What brand do you admire?
Canning admires Liquid Death because “their marketing is their difference.” In a crowded category, he believes the brand has stood out by being willing to take risks and approach marketing differently.
He also points to the way Liquid Death inserts itself into culture, including the music festival scene, “as an addition” rather than in a way that feels “overly branded” or “cringy.” For Canning, that ability to earn attention while still feeling culturally relevant is what makes the brand so impressive.
For more marketing leadership advice and insights into the mindset of marketing executives in various industries, be sure to watch the full interview with Brian Canning, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.
If you know an impactful marketing leader who would be a good candidate for the #CMOSpotlight series, nominate them here.
Watch the Full Interview to the right.
Setup CEO + Founder, Joe Koufman, sat down with Brian Canning, the Chief Marketing Officer at Hertz, to talk about collaborative leadership, listening to different perspectives, taking smart creative risks, building a brand people actually like, and how AI is helping Hertz move faster and scale more effectively.