A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 53 Nick Asbury is a creative writer, one half of the design partnership Asbury & Asbury , and the marketing industry’s most persistent critic of brand purpose. He’s the author of The Road to Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World (And How Human Creativity Is the Way Out) . It’s a title that tells you exactly where Nick stands. For 15...

A History of Marketing / Episode 52 Gian Fulgoni has spent 50 years as a pioneer in market research and audience measurement. From his work on scanner data at IRI in the 1970s to co-founding Comscore in 1999, Gian helped invent how marketing gets measured, first in supermarkets and then on the internet. His career sits at the center of two transformations that reshaped the field. At IRI, he helped...

A History of Marketing / Episode 51 My guest Tod Johnson , a market research pioneer who was among the first people to measure the Internet. He’s an inductee to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and former chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation. Tod is President and CEO of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera and is a member of the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts...

A History of Marketing / Episode 50 Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome . April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome . I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work a...

A History of Marketing / Episode 49 Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde . Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing. Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a comp...

A History of Marketing / Episode 48 This week, I’m joined by Scott McDonald , who spent three decades in the research trenches of America’s biggest magazine publishers before becoming president of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), an organization now celebrating its 90th year of trying to separate marketing science from marketing spin. Scott led consumer research departments during the Go...

I have an unusual update this week: I made a game! It’s called The CMO Game . You have 12 months and $5M to launch your product and climb from Director of Marketing to the C-Suite. But your CEO has aggressive goals and if you don’t meet them, it’s game over. It’s like The Oregon Trail , but for marketing (and with less dysentery). You can play it right now at cmogame.com . Why Make a Marketing Gam...

A History of Marketing / Episode 47 In 1967, a 30-second spot at the very first Super Bowl cost roughly $37,500. This Sunday, for Super Bowl 60, brands are paying upwards of $8 million. That is a price increase of over 20,000%. So… Is it still worth it? For Professor Tim Calkins , who’s spent 22 years studying this exact question, the answer is an emphatic, ‘Yes.’ Since 2005, Calkins has led the K...

A History of Marketing / Episode 46 David Reibstein has spent his career straddling disciplines that don’t always talk to each other: quantitative analysis and behavioral science, academic theory and management practice, marketing departments and finance teams. As a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the UPenn and the co-author of Marketing Metrics , Reibstein is a world-renowned expe...

A History of Marketing / Episode 45 Today marks exactly one year since I hit publish on the very first episode of A History of Marketing . I wanted to do something special for the anniversary, so I’m happy to share my excellent conversation with Rory Sutherland . You may know Rory from his Ted Talks which have been viewed by millions, or his TikToks which have been viewed by tens of millions. He i...

A History of Marketing / Episode 44 When I launched A History of Marketing at the start of this year, I had a vision of exploring the origins of our craft. But I never imagined that 2025 would be bookended by “The Father of Modern Marketing.” Dr. Philip Kotler kicked off the podcast as the first guest I interviewed. Now, it is my distinct honor to welcome him back to the show for our final intervi...

A History of Marketing / Episode 43 If you studied marketing in school, you likely carried Kevin Lane Keller’s work in your backpack. He co-authored Marketing Management , the all-time best-selling marketing textbook, alongside Philip Kotler . And with Strategic Brand Management , Kevin he defined how a generation of marketers understands brand equity. As a Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of...

A History of Marketing / Bonus Episode Earlier this year, I spoke with students at Syracuse University taking an “Essentials of Marketing” course. I shared stories from my non-traditional career in marketing that’s spanned filmmaking, virtual reality, robotics, trucking, and technology. I framed these stories into “five rules of thumb” for early career marketers. I’m releasing this as a “bonus” ep...

A History of Marketing / Episode 42 This week, I’m sharing my excellent conversation with Geoffrey Colon , a creative strategist and author of Disruptive Marketing . Geoffrey is a self-described “hybrid” marketer with a career spanning the full spectrum of the industry, from running street teams for Red Bull to leading brand strategy at Microsoft, with stints at Ogilvy, Dentsu and his own agencies...

A History of Marketing / Episode 41 This week, I’m joined by Tracey Panek , the corporate historian for Levi Strauss & Co , a company that embraces its past as an active part of its marketing strategy. Tracey’s role sits directly within the marketing department. Among her many tasks is to mine Levi’s archives for authentic stories. “Authenticity” may be a buzzword we hear often, but Levi’s backs i...

A History of Marketing / Episode 40 Long before giant balloons floated down Broadway* at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a remarkable young woman with a prosthetic eyeball developed the beginnings of the Macy’s brand in the 1860s. Her name was Margaret Getchell . She was a marketing visionary who gave Macy’s its iconic red star logo, she captured customers’ imaginations with fantastical window...

A History of Marketing / Episode 39 A recurring theme on A History of Marketing is the tension between marketing as an art and marketing as a science. Lately, we’ve explored the former. David Gluckman shared how he invented Baileys Irish Cream in 1973 based on gut instinct and “the benefit of ignorance.” Scott Reames revealed how the team that birthed the Nike brand in 1971 had no formal training...

A History of Marketing / Episode 38 “Why should all alcoholic drinks taste punishing and challenging? Why shouldn’t they taste pleasant?” My guest, David Gluckman , asked himself this question in 1973. It led him to develop what became Baileys Irish Cream , a liqueur that’s now sold ~2.5 billion bottles globally. In our conversation, David shares the remarkably haphazard origin story of Baileys al...

A History of Marketing / Episode 37 This week, I’m sharing a special conversation with Scott Reames . Scott spent three decades at Nike and for 16 years was Nike’s official corporate historian, a role he invented. He even helped Phil Knight with research and fact-checking for Shoe Dog , the only business memoir I’ve read more than once. Nike is the first brand I remember embracing as a kid. I susp...

A History of Marketing / Episode 36 This week my guest is Ken Rufo , the owner and principal of Manchester Street , a marketing consultancy focused on B2B differentiation. Prior to this, he ran positioning and strategy at Emphatic Thinking, a consulting firm that’s now owned by Accenture. Ken earned his PhD in communication from the University of Georgia, and I met him back when he was my professo...

A History of Marketing / Episode 35 This week, I’m joined by Jon Miller , a Harvard-trained physicist turned marketing tech pioneer. Jon is best known as the cofounder of Marketo , and he helped define the playbook for B2B demand generation over the past 2 decades. A serial entrepreneur, Jon founded Engagio and was CMO of Demandbase . He’s busy building his next venture (which he not-so-subtly hin...

A History of Marketing / Episode 34 Today we’re talking about a phenomenon my guest, Kerry Cunningham , calls the “MQL Industrial Complex.” If you’re not in B2B marketing, that term might be new. It refers to the Demand Waterfall, a framework introduced has dominated business-to-business marketing for two decades. It’s shaped how companies organize their teams, spend their budgets, and ultimately,...

A History of Marketing / Episode 33 This week I'm sharing an excellent conversation with Russell W. Belk , Professor and Kraft Foods Chair in Marketing at York University. Professor Belk is recognized as a leading expert on consumption, materialism, collecting, and sharing. In 1988 he published “ Possessions and The Extended Self ,” one of the most widely cited papers in the field of consumer rese...

A History of Marketing / Episode 32 This week we’re diving into early internet history and the digital transformation of Hollywood with the one and only, Shelley Zalis . Zalis is the founder and CEO of The Female Quotient , an organization dedicated to elevating women in the workplace and closing the gender gap for good. With millions of social media followers and tens of thousands of global event...

A History of Marketing / Episode 31 Last time on A History of Marketing , Paul Feldwick celebrated advertising’s roots in entertainment and spectacle. This week, we hear almost the opposite perspective. My guest, Robert J. Herbold , spent decades leading marketing at Procter & Gamble and then served as Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft . From the client side, Bob values discipline and persuasiv...