How I Made it in Marketing

Would you ever launch a campaign celebrating your brand as second best? That’s exactly what Sandy Rubinstein did at Nick at Nite. I sat down with Sandy Rubinstein, CEO, DX [https://dxagency.com/], to discuss that story, and many more lesson-filled stories, in this episode of How I Made It In Marketing. DX is a 20-year-old company with $20 million in revenue. Rubinstein manages a team of 70 across...

Sometimes we overlook the ends , because we’re so focused on the means . Today in marketing, that means can be algorithms and machine-built lookalike audiences and automations. But as our latest guest explained in her podcast guest application, all that technology doesn’t matter if you don’t focus on the right ends : “It's all about the story – and it needs to include empathy.” To hear the st...

How do you stand out in a sea of competitors when margins are thin and trends shift overnight? For Jaci Volles, the answer is: serve your customer’s customer – and innovate when the budget is tight. Jaci Volles, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Jelmar [https://www.clrbrands.com/] shared the lessons and stories from her career journey in this episode of How I Made It In Marketing. Jelmar is...

What if collaborating with a competitor could significantly boost your revenue? That’s exactly what Sagnik Roy, SVP at Times Internet [https://timesinternet.in/], did. In this episode, he shares how listening before selling and prioritizing soft skills reshaped his career. Times Internet has 571 million monthly users and a US audience of five million. It is owned by the Times Group, publisher of T...

To me, every customer touchpoint is a thing of value. And yet, some brands will pour millions of dollars into a Super Bowl ad while at the same time cutting customer service to the bone. Yet, both ads and customer service are valuable customer touchpoints. So I saw a kindred spirit when I read this lesson in a recent podcast guest application that came across my desk – “Brands are built by how you...

Your first day at a new job. Sounds exciting, right? Now imagine it's at a major bank in crisis, fresh off a £40 billion taxpayer bailout. Oh, and you're in charge of sports sponsorships – an easy target for public outrage. That’s exactly where Louise Johnson found herself. What did she learn from that experience? 'You must be a master of yourself during uncertain times.' To he...

In marketing, it’s easy to become a manager and lose touch with the craft. Val Riley, VP of Marketing & Strategy at Unbounce [https://unbounce.com/], has embraced the ‘Player-Coach’ mindset, blending leadership with hands-on execution to stay relevant and drive results. I sat down with her to discuss how she learned that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories from her career. Stori...

There’s a great Chris Rock bit where he says educational leaders lie to kids when they say kids can be anything they want. He says to – tell kids the truth, “You could be anything you’re good at. As long as they’re hiring. And even then, it helps to know somebody.” The good-at part, hopefully we help you with that everyday on MarketingSherpa. But the “it helps to know somebody,” that ties into one...

“Incorporate lessons from others' mistakes into your business strategy.” I read this lesson in a recent podcast guest application and I thought, ‘well, that is actually a pretty good summary of what we do here on How I Made It In Marketing.’ You can tune in and learn from others’ mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself. And, of course, their triumphs as well. What fun would it be to...

Come with me if you will, for just a moment, to the small shtetl of Anatevka, in Tsarist Russia, the year is 1905, and we are in the barn of Tevye, a dairyman. In his reality, he is poor. But in his imagination, ah in his imagination, he is a rich man. I thought of that famous musical number when I read this lesson in a recent podcast guest application – “Never forget the independence of your imag...

When this CMO's team proved her wrong about their ebook program, she didn't just accept it – she made them broadcast their victory to everyone.  Hear that lesson – “let your team take a chance on testing it and prove you wrong” – and many more lesson-filled stories in my in-depth discussion with Susanne Rodriguez, Chief Marketing Officer, Auvik [https://www.auvik.com/]. Stories (with les...

We recently published data on interdepartmental collaboration by marketing teams [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/interdepartmental-collaboration]. More leading marketing departments had a strong partnership with the product team than with any other internal team. But for the lagging marketing departments, strong partnerships with the sales team fell in the middle – 4th out of 7 departme...

We’ve all seen it in the movies. A character has an invisibility cloak, or drinks a potion, or perhaps turns into a ghost. And then, oooh how tantalizing, they can see what goes on when they’re not around. Well as our latest guest explains it, we shouldn’t just think of that kind of moment as some sort of sci-fi fantasy. We should work as if we’re trying to optimize that conversation. As she puts...

I would never read so much text. This is long and boring to me .  Versions of this have been said to me throughout my career from designers. And not to pick on designers, but I really don’t care. Because they weren’t the ideal customer for the product. So of course they weren’t interested in the copy. Like my old boss Mike Morgan used to tell me – you never read the refrigerator ad on page 3 of th...

One of the biggest transformations in my career came when I went from trying to sell people with my writing, to trying to help them. Helping people understand whether a product or service is truly right for them creates long-term trust. So does helping them even when they don’t buy from you. Not only is this more effective, but my work is part of my life. My soul doesn’t magically leave my body du...

Think branding and demand generation are separate functions? Jim Kruger, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Informatica [https://www.informatica.com/], discusses why they shouldn’t be on this episode of How I Made It In Marketing. Informatica is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It reported total annual recurring revenue of $1.63 billion for 2023. And Kru...

Marketing is about helping your ideal customer perceive the value your products deliver. But before they can perceive that value, you have to create it. When I received the podcast guest application for my next guest, in my due diligence I found that Consumer Reports named its Stratami mattress one of the 9 best mattresses of 2024. To hear key lessons and stories from building the company behind m...

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore." That quote is from Nobel Prize winning novelist André Gide. And I think there is a great lesson for marketers here. For 25 years, MarketingSherpa has published case study articles. And sometimes when I talk to marketers, they are so myopically focused on just the case studies from...

Imagine this: you've spent months ideating, planning, and crafting the perfect marketing campaign. The creative is stunning, the messaging is on point, and the target audience has been meticulously defined. But as the launch date approaches, things start to wobble. A key department is out of sync, a crucial piece of technology isn't ready, or the timeline starts to slip. We've all b...

“Writing is never done, it is just due.” This is a common sentiment from anyone who has ever worked in a deadline-driven field like journalism or academia. And it certainly holds true right here in the marketing industry as well, made all the more difficult in my career personally when I transitioned from print to digital…which could be changed an infinite number of times. Or as my next guest puts...

My latest guest represents the perfect dichotomy of what it takes to make it in marketing. On the one hand, the word rockstar is half the name of her company, which connotes to me, Mick Jagger strutting around on-stage crooning “I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Or perhaps for a newer generation, Adam Levine in the spotlight belting out “I got the moves like Jagger.” But then when I went through her...

When I started in B2B, my mentor told me, “We call this business to business, but make no mistake, people buy products, not businesses. It’s people who make decisions for these businesses.” Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you’re only focused on businesses as accounts, you’re overlooking opportunities. For example, as our latest guest shared in his podcast guest application, “Track when...

Content Warning : On How I Made It In Marketing, we delve beneath the buzzwords of our industry to uncover the biggest lessons from successful careers. Our guests share detailed, hard-fought, in-the-trenches stories of how they learned these lessons and put them into practice. Today's guest has spent a significant part of her career selling condoms. As a result, our in-depth conversation may...

Look, let’s face it, our industry can have a bad reputation. And I can see why. Just scroll through YouTube or social media and you’ll see self-appointed gurus shouting about tricks and hacks and shortcuts. But sustainably successful marketing is not about shortcuts, it’s about digging into the very essence of what it means to be a human being. Sounds pompous, I know, but hear me out. Effective ma...

The Accidental Recycled Poop Marketer! That’s the headline of a recent podcast guest application. And it came from someone leading marketing for an interesting product – a paid B2B and B2C product, sold by a nonprofit, that is run by an independent city government authority, a water and sewer utility formed in collaboration with the federal government. So no matter what type of marketing you do or...