Meet Benjamin De Castro

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their careers, insights, and accomplishments.

This week, that marketing leader is Benjamin De Castro, Chief Marketing Officer at Gardyn. Ben’s career spans industries, from fintech to medtech to AI-powered photo books.

Along the way, he’s developed a reputation for creating new categories and getting people to consider a new way of doing things.

Here are the need-to-knows about Ben:

• He helped launch ING Direct, a Canadian company, launch across nine countries, including the US, France, Italy, and Spain.

• He led marketing for Kobo, expanding its e-reader and e-book business to over 23 countries and 10M+ customers.

• He took the D2C hearing aid company Eargo to IPO in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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From Pre-Med to Performance Marketing

When Ben first started his bachelor’s degree, he was pre-med. 

“I was volunteering in hospitals and then one night, I had a really bad experience that turned me off of practicing medicine.”

That turning point led him to Yellow Pages, where he joined the company’s nascent internet services group. It was the late ’90s, and the internet was still new. “We had Toronto.com, a bunch of sites—I was managing all of that,” he said. His manager saw potential and encouraged him to go back to school for his MBA.

It was during his MBA that Ben took his first marketing course. “After that, I realized that is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was the first thing that let me use both sides of my brain—the creative and the analytical. It taught me that great marketing is just matching the right message to the right person at the right time.”

Building Brands, Breaking Barriers

After stints in the agency world during the dot-com boom, Ben joined ING Direct. The company was small at the time, but its ambitions weren’t.

“We started the bank in Canada and then took it global—France, Italy, Spain, the US. At first, we used performance marketing to prove the business model. But once we knew it worked, we flipped the script and went brand-first.”

That decision paid off. Countries that led with brand grew faster, though at a higher cost. But Ben saw the long game.

Later at Kobo—aka the second-largest e-reader company in the world behind Kindle—Ben took those same lessons global again. “With a team of 70, we expanded across 23 countries. We were doing all this global marketing out of Toronto and sometimes that meant some 3 am nights. But we were all so deeply passionate about it and driven by that, we never noticed.”

Experimenting with AI + Emotion 

Ben took his first role as CMO at Mixbook, a 17-year-old photo book company with a loyal customer base. In the very early days when AI was still called machine learning, Mixbook was exploring how the tech could modernize an old-school product. That intersection of storytelling and AI tools caught Ben’s attention.

“This is a space where people easily spend eight hours creating a photo book. And at Mixbooks, we started using metadata—time, place, facial expression—to craft a story using AI. We could say, ‘Here you are with your cousin Bob at the Eiffel Tower on a sunny day in Paris,’ and turn that into a story for you. I thought it was phenomenal because 7-8 hours of work gets condensed to 7-8 minutes”

Fortunately, Ben’s experience with launching new categories helped him navigate customer skepticism in the early days of new technology. “AI wasn’t as mainstream in 2022. But Mixbook made it purely optional and we focused on showing—not telling—how much easier and faster it could be.”

A standout campaign 

Of all the campaigns Ben’s led, taking Eargo public during COVID stands out.

The company was aiming to disrupt the hearing aid space by going direct-to-consumer. But Ben’s main blocker was the pervasive denial and stigma throughout the industry. Most people don’t believe they have hearing loss and they certainly don’t want to be treated for it. 

When COVID hit, Eargo became the only hearing company available since they were virtual and D2C, and every clinic was closed. Suddenly, the company was the main option for consumers and the business took off. Bankers who told them not to go public on their originally planned date of April 2020 reversed course.

“In two months, we went from pause to IPO. It was the first company I ever took public. I didn't realize that an IPO is just as much a marketing exercise as it is a finance department exercise. ”

Ben worked hand-in-hand with NASDAQ to craft the investor story, execute creative assets, and prepare Eargo’s marketing operations for the scrutiny of a public company. “It was a ton of work with a lot of back and forth, but with a good partner like the NASDAQ, they really helped me in achieving everything in just two months. It was incredible.”

Advice and takeaways

1) Push until legal says stop.

Ben credits one of his earliest corporate lawyers at ING with helping him how to be bold and push the envelope, even in regulated spaces. “He told me, your job is to push. My job is to tell you when to pull back.” In that role, Ben would routinely send ads to his legal team that walked the line. “I knew I was doing a good job when he came back and said, ‘You can't go there.”

Don’t assume you have to be safe and sanitized in all your advertising, even if you’re in a regulated space. Instead, look to your resources and legal partners for guidance on where your boundaries are and test them. 

2) Learn the foundation, then get to the frontier. 

Ben found marketing through formal education, but he didn’t stop there.“You need to learn the foundation, but also immerse yourself into the forefront of what’s cutting edge. And you can do that through reading newsletters and being a part of groups. I'm part of one called AI Trailblazers and it’s basically a group of CEOs, CMOs, CIOs who talk about the latest trends in AI. We just chat and try to help each other because nobody really knows how this is going to evolve—but we all know that it will impact everybody”

Getting grounded in the basics is important but marketers today can’t afford to never stop learning there. Instead of overindexing on hands-on experience or formal education, invest in both. There are countless opportunities for self-learning and peer-to-peer learning, and the lessons can all have a huge pay off.

3) Category Creation Isn’t a Lightning Bolt. 

Ben has built new categories throughout his career, from online banking at ING to e-reading at Kobo to DTC hearing aids at Eargo. But he’s quick to clarify that creating a category isn’t about having a single big idea, it’s about relentless testing. “You have to really understand the consumer, understand the category, and then try. At Eargo, we tried several things before we found something that worked. And that’s the same approach we’re taking here at Gardyn. We’re trying many different angles.”

If you’re aiming to create something truly new, don’t expect instant clarity. Build systems that let you test fast, learn early, and adapt often. Sometimes the breakthrough only comes after five other ideas fail quietly.

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