CMO elevation and SVP appointment signal the automotive lifestyle brand is ready to manufacture deeper brand experience across physical and experiential channels.
Published April 30, 2026Source HagertyFrom the chopped neck
CMO elevation and SVP appointment signal the automotive lifestyle brand is ready to manufacture deeper brand experience across physical and experiential channels.
Marc Burns moves into the Chief Marketing Officer role at Hagerty, with Matt Teshera appointed Senior Vice President of Marketing. This dual promotion—not a lateral shuffle—indicates the company is preparing for expanded brand activation across multiple touchpoints. Hagerty has built itself as the custodian of automotive passion, moving beyond auction mechanics into lifestyle positioning. This structural elevation means marketing now sits at strategic parity with revenue operations. The signal is deliberate: brand infrastructure requires investment.
What this restructuring produces, structurally, is permission to architect the physical layer of Hagerty's identity system. A CMO and SVP division of labor typically means one builds strategy and narrative, the other operationalizes presence. This allows the brand to move beyond digital-first posturing into territory where collectors actually gather: events, partnerships, proprietary experiences, packaging systems that imprint value onto objects and moments. Heritage automotive brands—and their owners—respond to tactile intelligence. Hagerty now has the organizational scaffolding to deliver it consistently.
For principals and operators with aligned audiences, this is a compressed window. Leadership transitions create 90-day gaps in vendor relationships and activation budgets. Experienced operators approach new CMOs with a single artifact: a case study showing how structured identity work moved their last brand's needle on premium audience retention and event ROI. Not a pitch deck. One object that proves the method. Hagerty's next move will likely require a third-party perspective on what their collectors actually keep, display, and mention to peers. That's where the strategy opens.
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TikTok / Reels hook
"Hagerty just split marketing into two leadership roles. What does that actually mean for how you experience the brand next year."
LinkedIn post
Hagerty elevates Marc Burns to CMO and appoints Matt Teshera as SVP of Marketing—a structural move signaling the automotive lifestyle brand is ready for deeper physical and experiential activation. When a company separates strategy and operations at this level, they're building toward something that collectors will actually touch and keep. What's your read on where heritage brands go when they finally prioritize the tangible layer.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.
