Vercel appoints its first chief marketing officer
Vercel has brought on Keith Messick as its first Chief Marketing Officer. The hire comes as the company pushes beyond its frontend roots toward a fuller full-stack offering, with an emphasis on AI-powered applications and AI features inside its own developer tools.
Messick was most recently CMO at Redis, where he ran a 100-person organization spanning brand, demand generation, product and technical marketing, and marketing operations. Earlier in his career, he helped establish the feature management category at LaunchDarkly and led marketing at DialPad and Lucidworks.
His background blends commercial strategy with technical fluency, shaped by time as both a founder and a developer. Messick jokes that his early persona was “the world’s worst self-taught C developer with a marketing degree,” though Vercel notes that his coding skills have improved with assistance from its own tool, v0.
Marketing approach stays developer-first
Vercel’s marketing identity has leaned on direct, often informal community engagement — think exchanges on X or the one-sentence billboards along the 101 freeway. That ethos is expected to carry forward under Messick as the company positions itself at the intersection of creative work and technical infrastructure.
The marketing team Messick joins has recently overseen several product launches, including AI Gateway, v0 composite models, Vercel Blob GA, Flags Explorer GA, Chat SDK, and Fluid compute.
The department is also hiring, with open positions for Content Engineers, Customer Marketers, Field Marketers, and additional roles in marketing.
