Episode #230: Sara Wallace — Repositioning a consumer cashback app into a B2B platform
Ibotta is known as a cashback app. It’s also a white-label promotions platform for the largest retailer in the world.
For marketers at consumer companies standing up an enterprise or platform business alongside the one that made them.
Sara Wallace is Head of Brand Marketing at Ibotta, which runs both the consumer cashback app and the Ibotta Performance Network. Five months into the role, after building executive marketing and global AI go-to-market strategy at Google Cloud, she’s working the problem of building B2B awareness for a company whose recognition lives almost entirely on the consumer side. We get into why she treats the two audiences as genuinely separate rather than migrating one into the other, the one channel where that split breaks down, how she handles AI thought leadership under legal and compliance constraints, and why she argues brand is the engine that makes performance marketing work rather than a luxury line item. She also walks through Ibotta’s annual State of Spend findings, including a decline in grocery list-making as shoppers plan loosely and let promotions fill the gaps.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– Why Ibotta doesn’t try to convert cashback users into a B2B audience, and where the two narratives still collide (social media)
– What Google Cloud taught her about selling to CIOs and CTOs: show how you support the work their org is already doing instead of proving you’re the smartest in the room
– Why public AI messaging stays stunted at most companies — legal exposure, and stories that aren’t fully baked yet
– How to make the case for brand investment when leadership is pushing for immediate ROI
