Chava Ziff — Marketing & Brand Transformation Executive

§ About

About

Making the
complex human.

I turn 400-page strategy decks into four-word rally cries that execs whistle in the hallways. That's not a metaphor for simplification. It's a discipline for building brands that actually move people.

The last eight years have been in financial services, retirement, and wealth management — industries where skepticism is baked in, regulation is constant, and the stakes of getting it wrong are real. At LPL Financial and Transamerica, I led brand transformations that moved business metrics, not just perception scores — managing up to $20M in marketing budgets, building and leading teams of 17, and navigating three M&A integrations.

The pattern across both: complexity is not the obstacle. It is the brief. The brands that break through in high-stakes, regulated categories are built on genuine conviction about who they serve and why it matters.

Before the client side, I spent a decade at creative agencies, including BBDO New York, Droga5, and TBWA, building the craft that makes the corporate work possible. Today, I'm equally fluent in AI, working in Anthropic's Claude from strategy through execution, building everything from research frameworks to finished deliverables. The next chapter of brand transformation belongs to leaders who understand both the discipline and the technology.

Brands

LPL Financial · Transamerica · Visa · HP · Pepsi · Mars · FedEx · Pfizer · Kraft · Nestle · Susan G. Komen

§ Case Study 01

The Work

LPL Financial · Brand Transformation

Known to Advisors.
Invisible to Investors.

The Situation

96% advisor awareness. 2% HNW investor unaided awareness. Same company.

LPL had earned deep trust in its B2B channel. The advisors knew them. But the high-net-worth investors those advisors were trying to reach? LPL was invisible. In wealth management, when a client doesn't recognize the name, it undermines the advisor's credibility and the firm's growth.

The Strategic Shift

Selling products → Offering advice

Listing capabilities → Articulating what LPL enables

The Insight

LPL's audiences had bold ambitions in an industry full of obstacles. The brand's purpose: remove those obstacles and make possibility feel real, not aspirational.

Brand Strategy & Visual Identity

Before the campaign could land, the brand had to feel different. We rebuilt the visual identity from the ground up, moving LPL away from a generic financial-services template toward an editorial, human, distinctly-owned system. New typography. New color discipline. A pattern language tied directly to the strategy.

Before · 2023

LPL Financial visual identity, before — bold orange and navy chevrons, condensed bold sans-serif, generic financial corporate stock photography.

High-contrast primary palette. Loud chevron pattern. Condensed sans headlines. Reads as functional financial corporate — not a brand investors would seek out.

After · 2024

LPL Financial visual identity, after — refined navy and terracotta system, Chronicle serif type, LL Brown sans secondary, more human photography, textured paper backgrounds.

Chronicle serif as the brand voice. LL Brown for clarity. Navy + terracotta + paper texture replace primary colors. Photography is observed, not posed.

The Pattern System · Four pillars of the brand strategy, made visible.

Power

The advisor's independence and conviction.

Strengthen

The advice relationship at the center.

Amplify

The reach of every practice we support.

Perpetuate

Outcomes that compound across generations.

The Campaign · "What If You Could?"

Spokesperson: Anna Kendrick. "More familiar than famous": approachable enough not to distract from the message, credible enough to break through with a leaner media budget than legacy competitors.

Channel Mix

Linear TV · CTV · OOH · Print · Social · Online Video · Search

LPL Financial — Print ad: Anna Kendrick, “What if you could have the greener grass on your side?”

+50%

Aided Awareness

Among HNW investors

+27%

Brand Favorability

Across target audience

+13%

Lead Conversion

Improvement in downstream pipeline

+5%

NPS Improvement

"LPL's reputation aids my practice"

§ Case Study 02

The Work

Transamerica · Brand Strategy & Campaign · MIT AgeLab Partnership

130 Years of Legacy.
Zero Emotional Connection.

The Situation

Advisors knew the Transamerica name. They had no emotional reason to care about it. Product perception scores were declining on every key driver of consideration. Known for insurance. Invisible on retirement planning, investments, and everything else.

The Opportunity

No brand in financial services had claimed the intersection of wealth and health. The category talked about money. We talked about what money enables: aging in place, an 8,000-day retirement, leaving something behind. The white space was open.

The Insight

Retirement isn't just a financial event. It's a life event.

The Partnership

Transamerica × MIT AgeLab — “Caregiving and the future of financial advice” whitepaper cover

Whitepaper · Caregiving and the future of financial advice

MIT AgeLab · Dr. Joseph Coughlin

Author of The Longevity Economy. A multi-year thought leadership ecosystem: advisor CE events, proprietary whitepapers, a social video series, and a Caregiving Hub that changed how advisors opened retirement conversations. Advisory firms began requesting Dr. Coughlin for their own client events.

The Campaign · "Where Wealth Meets Health"

TVC · Social Video Series · Whitepapers · Advisor CE Events · Caregiving Hub

34% → 44%

Brand Consideration

Among aware audiences, year over year

3×

Category Growth

Above category average

+15%

Aided Awareness

Lift across target audience

§ Thinking

My Thinking

The Trust Problem.

In regulated categories — financial services, insurance, retirement, healthcare — the product can't sell itself until the category is credible. Traditional brand-to-demand logic breaks down here. The audience isn't indifferent. They're skeptical, with good reason. Decades of predatory players have earned that skepticism.

The job isn't to advertise. It's to reframe. Educate before you persuade. Build category trust before brand trust. Win the intermediary before the consumer. These aren't tactics — they're the strategy.

"The job is not just to advertise. It is to reframe."

My Approach

The same six practices separate brand work that moves the business from brand work that just looks good. I've seen them hold true across agencies and brands, B2B through B2B2C, regulated and not. I build all six in from day one.

Start with audience excavation

Persona development and deep audience research come before the creative brief, not after. The job is to mine for the human truth that sits underneath the product need, and let that insight write the brief. When the audience truth is the input, the work has somewhere honest to land.

Integrate brand-to-demand from day one

Measurement architecture gets built before launch, not retrofitted after. Brand investment without downstream attribution is a conversation you lose every budget cycle. Aligning spend, messaging, and measurement across the full customer journey from the start is what changes how the organization values brand work.

Treat thought leadership as infrastructure

Paid media creates awareness. A thought leadership platform builds belief. They aren't the same thing, and they don't follow the same investment logic. An owned content and earned experience strategy runs in parallel with the campaign. In skeptical categories, credibility is the asset, not reach.

Build sales enablement in parallel

The field team gets its toolkit before the campaign drops: conversation guides, objection frameworks, talking points, training. Brand work earns attention; the people closest to the customer have to convert it. They need to be ready the day the ads run, not three weeks after.

Pressure-test the message early

Messaging research happens before the brief is final, not mid-flight. The sharpest motivator for an audience is rarely the obvious one, and you don't want to discover it after the campaign is in market. Test the frame before you commit the budget.

Use AI to deepen the work, not shortcut it

AI is the most significant shift in how brand strategy gets built since digital. I use tools like Claude as research partners, messaging co-pilots, and creative accelerators. Not to replace the thinking, but to make it deeper and faster. The leaders who integrate AI into their strategic practice now will define how brands are built for the next decade.

What People Say

Recommendations.

Chava is a seasoned leader who can flex altitude effortlessly between strategy and execution. I appreciated her passion for brand strategy — particularly in a regulated, complex industry. Chava's leadership style centers on culture-carrying while challenging the status quo. I experienced her as effective and well-received in the C-suite ranks while driving transformation and gaining alignment to her vision. What I enjoyed most about Chava was her optimism in the face of challenge — dedication to driving and creating change.

John Hutto
Marketing Leader · Chief Marketing Officer · Entrepreneur
Managed Chava directly · Nov 2025

I had the privilege of working with Chava Ziff, and she is one of the most impactful leaders I've worked with. She invests deeply in her team's growth — creating opportunities, offering thoughtful coaching, and recognizing both big wins and quiet contributions. Chava is exceptional at cross-functional collaboration. She brought alignment to complex, long-stalled projects by building trust, gaining buy-in, and keeping teams focused on shared goals.

Brittany Rothmen
Vice President, Marketing
LPL Financial · Reported to Chava · Nov 2025

I build brands
people believe in.

Making the
complex human.

Known to Advisors.
Invisible to Investors.

130 Years of Legacy.
Zero Emotional Connection.

The Trust Problem.

Recommendations.

Let's talk.

I build brandspeople believe in.

Making thecomplex human.

Known to Advisors.Invisible to Investors.

130 Years of Legacy.Zero Emotional Connection.

The Trust Problem.

Recommendations.

Let's talk.

I build brands
people believe in.

Making the
complex human.

Known to Advisors.
Invisible to Investors.

130 Years of Legacy.
Zero Emotional Connection.