The Numbers Come First
When Kellyn Smith Kenny joined AT&T as CMO in November 2020, the telecom giant was mid-pivot — shedding its $85 billion Time Warner acquisition, separating DirecTV, and redirecting capital toward 5G and fiber. She walked into a company that, in her own words, had 'lost its way a bit.' Her mandate: make marketing a measurable engine of growth, not a cost center.
Nearly six years later, she also carries the title of chief growth officer. And she has the data to back up the dual role.
Putting a Number on Sentiment
AT&T tracks what Kenny calls 'brand love' — a seven-point consumer survey scale, from hate to love, where only respondents selecting a six or seven count as brand lovers. Over the past five years, AT&T's brand love score has risen 13 points. For context, Kenny says a one- or two-point gain in a single year is typically considered strong performance.
The more consequential finding came when AT&T cross-referenced those survey scores with actual customer behavior. Prospects who report loving AT&T are 1.6 times more likely to become customers within the following 12 months. Existing customers who love the brand are three times less likely to leave and roughly 50% more likely to purchase a second service — say, adding home internet to a wireless plan. In markets with higher brand love scores, converting prospects into paying customers costs roughly 50% less.
Those are not soft metrics. Those are retention rates, acquisition costs, and revenue per customer — the figures that move earnings calls.
Research Driving Product, Not Just Ads
Kenny's oversight extends beyond advertising. Her team runs customer research, insights, analytics, and digital operations, and that work feeds directly into product roadmaps. One finding: roughly 40% of consumers are extremely price-sensitive, either by financial necessity or by preference to pay only for what they use. Many felt penalized by bundled services — entertainment add-ons, international calling — they never wanted, even when marketed as free.
That insight produced AT&T's Build a Plan offering, starting at $15 a month, letting customers configure their own service. It is a textbook free-enterprise response: let the consumer choose, strip out the cross-subsidy, and compete on value rather than lock-in.
The same research shaped the AT&T Guarantee. Eligible fiber customers who experience an outage of at least 20 minutes receive a full day's service credit. Certain technical issues carry a 24-hour resolution commitment. The program followed a roughly $1 billion investment in customer service and technology improvements. The payoff, according to Kenny's data: customers who have experienced the guarantee after a service problem report higher satisfaction than customers who never had an issue at all.
What This Means for the Market
The AT&T story is a case study in what happens when a large enterprise treats marketing as a profit-and-loss discipline rather than a branding expense. Kenny did not ask for a bigger budget and a softer KPI. She built a measurement framework that ties consumer sentiment directly to churn, acquisition cost, and cross-sell rates — the core economics of a subscription business.
Free enterprise rewards exactly this kind of accountability. When marketing can demonstrate that a 13-point rise in brand love translates into measurable reductions in customer acquisition cost and three-times-lower churn, the C-suite stops treating the CMO as a creative director and starts treating her as a revenue officer. Capital follows clear rules. AT&T just wrote a few worth reading.
