One might think that a conversation with Chandar Pattabhiram, chief marketing officer of Marketo, would eventually lead to the aspirational, grandiose vision of someone who believes automation is the future of marketing. While Pattabhiram certainly does feel this way, he also touts the power of a more human side of marketing, in the form of storytelling. Recently, Pattabhiram helped Marketo rebrand…
Truth by told, most brands dabble in content. Sure they’re cranking out blog posts, images and even videos but few have allocated the resources to truly capture the hearts and minds of their target audience. Here’s when you know things are serious: The CEO believes in content enough to create a separate production department & fund it The CEO hires a content…
Every once in a while I stumble upon a marketing campaign that makes me proud of my chosen profession. You see, after more than three decades in this business, I still believe that great marketing can be a force of goodness for both brand and society. Admittedly it’s a lofty goal and not one a lot of marketers care about….
When I first met Dan Marks in 2011 during his days as CMO at First Tennessee Bank, he blew me away with a model his team had built that accurately predicted the impact of an increase or decrease in ad spending. This was a particularly useful model as the bank like most businesses at the time was still in recession…
If you ever wondered about the validity of the old proverb, “necessity is the mother invention,” then you’ll want to read word for word my extensive interview with Dara Royer, Chief Development and Marketing Officer of Mercy Corps and winner of The CMO Club‘s Officers Award. Like her organization, Dara works miracles on a minuscule budget and in the process…
By 5pm, I’m typically famished. If we don’t eat dinner until 8 or so, I’m approaching demonic, ready to rage at the slightest provocation especially if it threatens to come between me and my pointy fork. So you can picture the scene the other night at an otherwise lovely restaurant as our persnickety waiter decided to take several minutes to…
As the employer of numerous millennials and proud parent of two, I’m quite conscious of a generational tendency to change jobs with frequency. Various research studies back up my first-hand observation of this trend. Deloitte reports that younger millennials ages 20-24 are on the job for an average of 1.3 years and according to Gallup: Millennials most likely generation to…
Last Friday, I was in one of my “oh we’ve nailed it” gleeful moods as we contemplated a new business plan to focus on “agents of change.” Our logic was airtight, or so we thought. If we could just figure out how to isolate change agents as a personality type via a line of questioning, then we could narrow both the…
Both of my older brothers learned to diagram sentences from Mrs. Armitage, an unforgettable 7th grade English teacher at Heinz Kaiser junior high in Costa Mesa, California. Not I. By the time my turn came around, this diminutive Southern-born chain-smoking firecracker with the gravelly voice that turned a-r-m into “airem,” was already suffering from lung cancer which meant we had a…
As chief Renegade for the better part of two decades, I’ve witnessed first hand the innumerable variations client-agency relationships can take. Some have been multi-dimensional like our phenomenal 15-year partnership with Panasonic. Others have been more focused like the BankCab guerrilla marketing program which drove customers to HSBC for 13 years. Some clients have given us a clean slate to…