Wing, an Alphabet Company, Hires Minjae Ormes as Chief Marketing Officer

Before LinkedIn, Ormes spent more than three years as the first chief marketing officer (CMO) of Visible, a telecom brand controlled by Verizon. In that role, she built the virtual operator's marketing function from scratch — the status of "first CMO" implies precisely creating the department, not managing an existing structure.

Ormes began her career at YouTube, where she spent seven years. This background — a professional social network, a wireless carrier, a video platform — maps directly onto Wing's current tasks: the company needs to work simultaneously with B2B partners like Walmart and Lowes and with the mass end user, who must get used to the idea of a drone over their backyard.

The hiring decision reflects the stage of maturity Wing is going through within the Alphabet structure. When delivery technology had not yet reached the mass market, marketing played a supporting role and served pilot projects. As soon as national retailers and aggregators like DoorDash appear, the priority becomes brand recognition and shaping consumer behavior — and these are competencies at Ormes's level, who has proven her ability to reposition established brands and scale paid products.

For the B2B services market, the appointment serves as yet another signal: competition in the autonomous delivery segment is shifting from demonstrating technical feasibility to fighting for the consumer habit. In this fight, the bet is placed on marketers with experience building mass brands, not just on engineers and operations managers. Wing is the first of the major players in this space to fill the chief marketing position with someone of this caliber — future hiring decisions by competitors will show whether this becomes an industry standard.