Being Popular Is Not a Strategy
With nearly two decades of experience shaping reputation, executive positioning and corporate narratives for technology companies, Tango's Global Brand & Communications Lead has built a career on one unflinching belief: credibility compounds, and no amount of clever wording fixes a reality that hasn't earned it.
There is a version of the communications executive the industry has come to expect: someone who polishes the press release, manages the message and keeps the narrative tidy. May Binstock arrived from a different direction entirely. She came through law, then psychology and governance, then the front lines of Israeli public relations, then the pressured interior of high-growth technology acquisitions - and she arrived at each new stage not because a clear path was waiting for her, but because she was willing to abandon the one she was already on. The work she does now at Tango, as its Global Brand and Communications Lead, is where all of those threads finally converge.
The career behind that role is deliberately nonlinear. Binstock began as Samsung's spokesperson in Israel, moved into the public sector as spokesperson for the Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv, joined OH! Strategic Communications as its first employee and spent four years growing with the firm. She then moved in-house to WalkMe, leading employer branding and global communications through the company's acquisition by SAP. She later joined AutoDS following its acquisition by Fiverr, ultimately serving as VP of Communications to the CEO. Between in-house roles, she founded her own independent strategic communications practice focused on executive positioning and reputation. Each move looked, at the time, like a departure. In retrospect, she has said, her career makes much more sense than it did while she was living it.
Her current role at Tango spans global brand strategy, social media, thought leadership, PR, reputation and crisis communications. Tango is a global live-streaming platform built around real-time human connection and community - and Binstock's remit is how the company is understood outside the product: the stories it tells, the conversations it enters and the way its executives show up publicly. It is, she has said, work that sits at the intersection of what companies say and what people actually experience.
Credibility compounds - and so does the gap when it doesn't
The central conviction that runs through Binstock's career is one she has stated plainly: credibility compounds. A clever message can win attention. A good campaign can shift perception. But over time, she has argued, people notice whether the story matches the experience. That observation has changed the way she approaches her work at every level.
She is less interested, she has said, in making something sound good than in understanding whether a company or leader has earned the right to say it. That distinction shapes how she enters a room. She is known for working closely with executives, asking the uncomfortable questions early and turning complex business realities into clear, credible narratives. Sometimes, she has noted, her job is to find the words. Sometimes her job is to tell an executive that no wording will solve the underlying problem - that what they are facing is not a messaging problem but a reality problem.
That willingness to say the difficult thing is, in her view, the most valuable thing a communications executive can offer. Being liked and being trusted are not the same thing. She has said she will choose trusted. The same principle applies to leadership more broadly: she believes feedback should be useful rather than ceremonial, and that one of the most valuable things she can offer an executive is not agreement but judgment.
A path built from argument, behavior and systems thinking
Binstock has traced the origins of her career to a moment most people would not think to look: age 16, when she became the spokesperson for her high school's student council. A year later, she was elected to lead it. At the time, she has said, she had no idea that communicating on behalf of people and organizations would eventually become her profession. In retrospect, she has noted, perhaps the signs were there earlier than she thought.
What followed was far less straightforward. She was academically strong and drawn to serious-sounding paths, so law seemed like the obvious choice. She started studying it and discovered that being capable of something was not, by itself, a good reason to spend a life doing it. She moved through psychology and governance before eventually finding her way into PR - the first professional environment, she has said, where all the different parts of her brain had somewhere to go: strategy, language, human behavior, pressure, curiosity and a slightly obsessive interest in why people believe what they believe.
The skills she gathered along the way were not wasted. Law taught her to interrogate an argument. Psychology made her curious about behavior. Governance made her think about systems and power. Communications gave her a place to combine all three. She has said she did not enter the field with a grand plan to become an executive in it - if anything, she found her way back to something she had instinctively started doing at 16, only this time she knew it had a name.
The milestone that didn't fit on a resume
Among the accomplishments Binstock counts as most meaningful, one stands apart from the titles and the acquisitions: while leading employer branding and global communications at WalkMe, she founded the company's Women's Employee Resource Group. She has described wanting to create a space where women could share knowledge, learn from one another and have access to some of the confidence, tools and perspective that can make navigating a career easier. The value of that work, she has said, was not measured in coverage, brand awareness or a business KPI. It was about using what she had learned to make other women stronger.
Other milestones carry more conventional weight. She is a two-time recipient of Roaring Lion Awards from ISPRA, the Israeli Public Relations Association, recognizing her contribution to campaigns named among the best PR campaigns of the year. She has been a panelist at Google, speaking about employer branding and AI, and at JFrog, speaking about CSR and ESG, as well as at the G-CMO Academy. While leading employer branding at WalkMe, she helped secure the company's inclusion in Dun's ranking of the best companies to work for in Israel. She completed Harvard Business School's Design Thinking and Innovation program - on maternity leave. And she was invited, at age 17, to participate in the Global Young Leaders program in Washington, D.C. She is also a Dean's List graduate and valedictorian in Governance and Social Science.
But some of the accomplishments she values most are harder to quantify. She has built the kind of trust with executives that allows her into the room before there is a press release, a LinkedIn post or a public statement - when the thinking is still unfinished and someone needs to say what people are actually going to hear. That access, she has suggested, is the real measure of a communications executive's credibility.
Endurance is not the same as commitment
One of the recurring challenges Binstock has identified in her own career is learning not to confuse endurance with commitment. She has described herself as very capable of staying, performing and succeeding even when something is no longer right for her. Earlier in her career, she thought resilience meant pushing through. Over time, she came to understand that resilience can also mean being willing to disappoint expectations, abandon sunk costs and start again without knowing whether the next move will look impressive on paper.
That has meant leaving academic paths she had already invested in, changing professional environments, moving from secure executive roles into independence and later choosing to return in-house because she wanted a different kind of challenge. Building her own independent practice was, she has said, a milestone because it forced her to test whether her value existed outside the credibility of an employer's logo. It did.
She is also a mother of two, and she has been direct about the reality of building an ambitious career alongside a full life outside it. She does not believe there is a formula in which every area of life receives full attention simultaneously. There are seasons, trade-offs and choices. The challenge, she has said, has not been creating a perfectly balanced life. It has been creating one that still feels like hers.
What comes next - and why the tension is the point
Binstock has said she is watching what happens to trust as generative AI makes competent content abundant. For years, brands optimized for more content, more channels and more consistency. She believes the interesting question is becoming less about whether you can create content and more about why anyone should believe it came from a point of view worth paying attention to. Distinctiveness, credibility, live interaction and recognizable human judgment, she has argued, become more valuable when polished output becomes cheap.
At Tango, a major part of her work is helping articulate a brand built around live, human interaction at exactly the moment technology is making synthetic content easier to produce at scale. She has described that tension as fascinating: the more perfect and automated content becomes, the more valuable immediacy, personality and genuine human presence may become. It is a problem that sits directly at the intersection of everything she has spent her career learning to navigate.
Personally, she has said she is approaching 40 with more interest in depth than accumulation - not chasing the longest possible list of titles or achievements, but working on problems that are difficult enough to keep her curious, with people she respects, and continuing to build a body of work that is recognizably hers. Her advice to aspiring professionals is direct: don't build a career entirely around proving that you can do things. Competent people can become trapped by competence. Pay attention to what gives you energy, what makes you curious and what problems you keep thinking about after the meeting ends.
This profile is reported from publicly available information and materials provided by May Binstock. Nothing in this article is presented as a quotation unless it appears in quotation marks with attribution.