Renegade Marketers Unite

In the age of 1:1 personalization, it might be considered heresy to suggest that persona-based marketing is a false idol. But hey, we’re renegades, so of course we’re going to challenge convention. The idea of personas is not necessarily bad. You can never know enough about your target audiences especially when facing 11-person buying committees as is the case with so many enterprise sales efforts. But there is a big difference between 1:1 personalization and personas, which are often an amalgamation of clichés by job title-- like all CFOs are risk averse and all IT people are data-driven.  Sure, many CFOs tend to be risk averse and many IT people like numbers. Now what?  Does that mean you present you product as the least risky to the CFO and the most data-rich to the IT person?  In a word, no. As it turns out the different story for different targets approach simply doesn’t work when you’re selling large solutions to large companies and Gartner’s Brent Adamson has the research to prove it. In this episode, host Drew Neisser gets on his anti-persona pulpit by interviewing himself. That’s one less persona to cope with on this show perhaps making the medium the message? Too meta? You decide.

When Intuit’s Mary-Ann Somers took over as SVP & Chief Growth Officer of the Consumer Group business unit, she wanted to build upon the success of her predecessor, and encourage a culture of experimentation. She wanted a marketing machine that led with inquiry, holistically understood the business, and got close to its customers. She wanted big things for the consumer business—of course, when you're Intuit, which pulls in about $7B in revenue annually, employs over 8,000 people, and has a consumer product portfolio with names like TurboTax and Mint, you're already going pretty big. Still, Somers and her team were ready to continue building on the software giant's momentum. On this episode, she discusses her past in consumer packaged goods, including championing digital marketing at Hershey's (and moving 35% of their efforts to digital in just 6 months), her commitment to clean, crisp, and single-minded messaging, brand management, and why marketers ought to operate with a holistic view of the company. Listen in to her interview, recorded in front of a live audience, to hear more!

At Drugstore Publicis, a luxury shop on Champs-Élysées, you’ll find more than a typical pharmacy. You’ll find Joel Robuchon’s L’Atelier Etoile restaurant, a bookstore, a cinema, imported olive oils, cigars, and wines. Plus, they are also actually a drugstore in case you need a prescription filled. This summer, you may have also found host Drew Neisser chatting with Corneliu Vilsan, Director of Marketing Operations EMEA & LATAM for Pernod Ricard. Running the marketing of an international beverage titan, with a portfolio ranging from Jameson Whiskey, to Malibu Rum, to Absolute Vodka and far beyond, is certainly a tall order. On this episode, listen in as Corneliu shares how he does it, and the wide range of tools he uses, from influencer marketing, to cultural analysis, new approaches to data analysis and social listening, and more.

If someone ran up to you and said, “Congrats, you’re now the CMO of a $165M tech company with about 500 employees,” what would you do? First, maybe celebrate a bit—that’s a pretty significant achievement—but next, you’ve got to form a plan. Are you pursuing growth? Acquiring companies? Rebranding? Pivoting away from tech and towards producing artisanal hand soaps? Granted, Sara Larsen, CMO of Brightcove (a $165M cloud video platform with about 500 employees), didn’t just get her role from some random guy on the street—she’d stepped into it after an extensive career in tech marketing at companies like IBM and SAP—but hopefully that thought exercise gave you just the slightest glimpse into the sort of decisions that need to get made when you take the helm of a ship like Brightcove. Coming into the role, Larsen wanted to aim for growth, but not just for the company; the entire category of online video could be expanded with the right approach. Now, ten months later, the company has grown and is hard at work pushing its category further. Tune in to this interview to hear how they’re approaching that, as well as other insights regarding career management, successful acquisition, customer experience, employee engagement, and more.

What’s it take to be a marketing leader? Well, you can have boundless knowledge of metrics, have a mind for strategy somewhere in the neighborhood of Sun Tzu’s, and write copy that would make Hemingway blush, but just having the sharpest tools on your belt won’t cut it. Above all else, you need to able to mobilize your team. As Thomas Barta puts it, you need to be energetic, you need to inspire, and you need to be a role model. As the authority on marketing leadership, you’d be wise to heed his call. Barta was a partner and senior marketer at McKinsey, led the world’s largest study of marketing leadership (68k+ assessments!), published a book on the subject, and is a regular contributor for multiple news outlets. He’s consulted and marketed for 20+ years, in 14 industries, across 45 countries. You could say he’s picked up a thing or two on the way—tune in to this week’s special episode, recorded with a live audience of top-tier marketers and CMOs (who contribute along the way), to hear more about marketing leadership, effective attribution, learning from the customer voice, and more.

In this special episode, three accomplished CMOs share their experiences as women in the marketing world. The featured guests include Kathy Button-Bell, SVP & CMO of Emerson, Tolithia Kornweibel, CMO of Gusto, and Jean English, who was CMO of NetApp at the time of this interview (she’s now at Palo Alto Networks). While the glass ceiling seems to have been broken for CMOs awhile ago, distinct challenges remain. Each of the guests explore the barriers they’ve overcome and share hard-earned advice on navigating the modern workplace. It’s important to note that these women have been vocal advocates for change, having worked to organize and develop female leaders within their organizations. Tune in to hear more.

Bon jour, and welcome to the first-ever overseas RTU! This episode was recorded from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. Why? This beautiful airport, in the spirit of the show, serves as a perfect symbol of breaking into new territories, and acts as a wonderful hub for exploration. Well… That, and this week’s guest, Jan Huckfeldt, had a flight to catch after this interview. After all, the former Global CMO of Motorola and Lenovo, and current chairman of Ledger’s advisory board, has quite a few places to be. Still, his busy schedule didn’t stop him from taking some time to dive into a few crucial traits every great marketing leader should have. Jan helps break down how leaders need to approach inspiring and engaging employees, but also how to work towards a purpose, how to protect your marketing, and how to instill trust. He explores the subject in more detail, and also discusses broader brand strategy tactics, and his extensive marketing career, in this interview.

Lorraine Barber-Miller, CMO of ADP, has a tough mission: make ADP a category of one. That means helping push her legacy brand past its perception of just being a payroll solution. And, though it's a tough goal, ADP's marketing machine has been firing on all cylinders and getting it done. Lorraine and her team have been hard at work implementing the company's first-ever marketing plan. They've crafted a new brand purpose to help differentiate in a crowded field, made a new character the hero of their story, and have invested in massive outdoor, digital, and print campaigns to bring their reinvigorated brand to the world. Tune in to hear how they told a story that no one else could, and how they made it real.

In last week’s episode, we traced the career of Noah Brier from a copywriter who didn’t know what copy was, all the way to co-founder of an immensely successful content marketing platform that’s, to date, received north of $100M in funding. On the second part of the interview, Drew and Noah take a closer look at brand positioning and content marketing. Noah shares his thoughts on where brands are going too exclusive, and how orchestration is a thorn in content’s side. He also dives into the key storytelling alongside the customer journey, and in one ten-minute stretch, shares a veritable boatload of illuminating advice on how to improve your content. Listen in!

Percolate, a software company, has received north of $100M in funding. Not a number to be scoffed at. In this episode—a fairly atypical one—Noah Brier, the founder, recalls and examines the path he followed to get to this point. Noah started with a job at American Demographics, a now-defunct marketing and advertising magazine, moved into a copywriting position (despite not knowing what ‘copywriting’ was) at a familiar agency (Renegade LLC!), and wound his way through a few other roles and side projects, twists, turns, ups and downs before reaching the point he’s at today. Now, Percolate is making a name as a leading enterprise content marketing platform, and he can lay claim to a true wealth of experience.  Noah’s journey is, in many ways, extraordinary. It follows unconventional routes, shows moments of peerless creative intuition and spark, and can ideally help guide each and every aspiring marketing leader out there. Listen in to hear about Noah’s entry into marketing, how he advises developing and managing your career, and how he approached starting his own, now massively successful, company. Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy, but Noah’s model can offer some insights into how it can happen. As he says, “you can’t go through the experience of being an entrepreneur and not make a bunch of mistakes. You just hope to make fewer of them the next time around.”