How Turo Plans to Become Unignorable

A sit-down with Turo’s Global Head of Brand Strategy, Matt Kerbel

Author

Carlo Palomino
November 21, 2025

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! Welcome back to The Friday Fortune. Thanksgiving is around the corner, the group chats are arguing about who’s cooking what, and everyone is pretending to work while mentally checking out. If you’re sneaking in a quick scroll before the mashed potatoes hit the table, consider this your guilt-free break.

Each week, we share sharp insights from top CMOs, marketing legends, and operators who actually move the needle. Think of it as the rare thing you can consume this week that won’t put you to sleep. From standout brand wins to useful end-of-year marketing steps, we’re here to help you finish 2025 strong while the holiday chaos ramps up.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

  • A sit-down with Turo’s Global Head of Brand Strategy, Matt Kerbel

  • The secret sauce behind Taco Bell’s sustained social engagement

  • OpenFortune x Liquid Death

📈 Marketer of the Week

If there’s anyone reimagining what it means to build a modern marketplace brand, it’s Matt Kerbel, the Global Head of Brand Strategy at Turo. With a career spanning gaming, CPG, DTC, and the early rideshare battles between Lyft and Uber, Matt has spent his life studying people. First at dinner tables in multicultural Toronto, and now on a global stage where he brings humanity back into mobility.

When the pandemic forced a career reset, Turo checked every box Matt cared about—visionary leadership, a warm and award-winning culture, a category in desperate need of disruption, and, as he put it, a role where he could “actually build out a function” instead of inheriting one. Brand strategy didn’t exist at Turo, Matt built it from scratch. Three years later, the company has grown from $150M in net revenue to nearly $1B.

What makes Turo different is the humanity baked into every trip. Hosts leave baby bibs for parents on babymoons. They deliver cars with thoughtful notes, snacks, and recommendations. These are moments that feel more like Airbnb than the DMV-of-the-airport that traditional rentals have become. And while the company has scale, there’s still enormous upside… one in two people still don’t know what Turo is. That’s the challenge (and the opportunity) that drives Matt’s team.

To build a household brand, they’ve embraced a simple philosophy: be unignorable. In Canada, that meant listing a backyard ice-resurfacing machine and sending it around neighborhoods to create childhood-dream-level, NHL-quality ice. In the U.S., it meant partnering with Sarah Michelle Gellar before Halloween to “slay” outdated car ownership while launching Turo’s new flexible monthly rental model. The category is ripe for reinvention, cars are more expensive than ever, ownership is less practical, and younger consumers want flexibility, not five-year contracts.

One of the clearest proof points of Turo’s brand strategy came from a massive experiment in Philadelphia. Matt’s team blitzed the city, out-of-home, creators, sports ties, events, partnerships, until Turo became impossible to ignore. At first, only awareness and consideration jumped. But months later, as major travel moments hit, Philly turned into Turo’s fastest-growing U.S. market by a mile, peaking at 50–70% year-over-year growth.

Matt studies disruptive brands like Chime, Goodles, Liquid Death, Crocs, and Duolingo, not because Turo is similar, but because they all share a pattern: they stand for something, they move with culture, and they show up everywhere at once. That’s the path he sees for Turo, not just the Airbnb of cars, but a brand that changes expectations in a category consumers long ago accepted as “just the way it is.”

Matt’s Takeaway

“We feel like we’re just getting started… the flywheel is starting to crank.” His advice for scaling a disruptive brand? Be unignorable, stay human, and never underestimate the power of showing up in the right cultural moments.

To hear more about how Matt and the Turo team are building the future of mobility and challenging everything we thought we knew about car rental, listen to the full episode of CMO Weekly.

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team