Renegade Marketers Unite

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 Brig...

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, a...

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 chall...

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 Glo...

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 craf...

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...

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 'copywritin...

Millions of data points. A singular vision. Those are at the core of the new NetApp campaign, and the results were pretty significant. Over 70% of folks who saw the campaign saw NetApp as "a new company," while website traffic tripled. So, yeah, pretty successful. So how'd they pull it off? A blend of tactful digital rollouts, account-based marketing, and more. It also came down to the idea of bei...

How do you become a $4-billion company by selling free software? It almost sounds like a trick question, but it's been done. Just ask Tim Yeaton, CMO of Red Hat, a $4-billion, open-source software company. The marketing's been a major driver of success, and as Tim Yeaton puts it, has been the glue that permeates across the company and enforces everything—from product, to community, to end user. Th...

How can a brand save the world? They could do something flashy, like repel an alien invasion or topple Godzilla, or they could do something real and substantive, like the World Surf League. When the WSL isn't helping pro surfers shred the next big curl (are we saying that right?) or giving sports fans a great way to soak up some rays, they're preparing for the future. As a sport deeply intertwined...

What does a B2B brand's website have in common with a SuperBall? A significant bounce rate! Okay, maybe not the funniest joke, but it does transition well into discussing a pretty real issue with many B2B brands: they're boring! There are plenty exceptions, of course, but far too often, B2B brands end up being, as this week's guest puts it, "B2Boring."  Ryan Urban is the CEO & Founder of BounceX,...

Email is still innovative...right? One might argue that email marketing has become the Facebook of marketing strategies— It was cool at first, it hasn't declined yet, but everyone and their grandmother is now on it. So what are the trendy marketing kids using now? Erik Huberman, CEO & Founder of Hawke Media, gives us the answer: SMS. As it turns out, customers only engage with marketing emails abo...

What do you need to make a big splash? A big ship, one would assume, is a terrific place to start. So that's exactly what Agari used to launch their new brand, the purpose of which is written loudly and proudly on the walls of their headquarters: "Agari protects digital communications to ensure humanity prevails over evil." That's a pretty bold way of explaining that your company is an advanced cy...

How do you effectively lead the marketing efforts of a 20,000+ employee tech giant well enough to make it into the American Marketing Association's Hall of Fame? Sure—the question may sound a bit specific, but that journey is chock full of valuable takeaways for marketers at any sized company, in any line of work. Lucky enough for RTU listeners, this week's episode features Ann Lewnes. Ann is a re...

Customers: What are they? Where do they come from, and what do they want? These are some of the great, cosmic questions we humans may never be able to answer. Just kidding, it's actually (from a high-level, conceptual viewpoint) pretty simple. We're all doing business with people, and people matter. If you keep your customer happy, great things happen. Going a little further, companies need to spe...

When you order a pizza, you want it delivered quickly. It should prepared, placed in one of those fancy heat-retaining delivery bags, and be at your door within the half hour. Boom. Simple. A brand transformation is not a pizza (stop the presses!). Most marketing endeavors, in fact, benefit immensely from first slowing things down. Do your research, let ideas cool off while you consider them, and...

What's your brand truth? Actually—let's pull back a bit: what is a brand truth? You could give it a few different names, but in essence, your brand truth is a concise guiding principle that informs virtually every aspect of the company's operation and, importantly, can't be dismissed. In the case of UTAK, a toxicology quality control provider (serving chemistry labs, forensics experts, and more),...

About 5 years ago, Rebecca Stone joined LiveRamp and the CEO said, "I want you to be as sophisticated as possible in advertising, and how you use it." At the time, the company had two sales development reps, a funnel that wasn't necessarily feeding leads properly, and a young tech stack and tons of potential, so Rebecca got to work on the company's digital transformation. Now, the company has a te...

You might think the first step to asteroid mining is get a rocket ship. Usually you would be right. But on this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Sean Regan, Head of Product Marketing at Atlassian, is taking a different approach. To Sean, mining an asteroid speaks more to the idea that a portion of your marketing, or overall company strategy, has to seek out untapped, sometimes hard-to-reach are...

If you were constructing a bingo board based on the lingo in tech company discussions, you'd have "disrupt" right in the middle square, as it's basically a freebie. What's far less common, is seeing a company actually follow through on that disruption, but that's what SAP has managed to do. Alicia Tillman, CMO, has been hard at work trying to re-envision how SAP presents itself, largely driven by...

In the utopian holster of magical marketing bullets, employee advocacy is right up there with viral videos (think Ice Bucket Challenge) and real-time marketing (remember Oreo's 'dunking in the dark' social posts?) But, unlike the last two options, employee advocacy is actually something most companies can execute consistently, assuming they follow a few critical steps. First, you have to run a com...

What the heck is a purpose-driven story statement and why are they so critical to successful marketing? These are the question Drew answers on the first-ever installment of Drew's Takeaways, a special RTU episode where he distills and discusses key topics and themes of recent interviews. On this episode, Drew breaks down why and how a company can rally behind a powerful, purpose-driven story state...

A true, purpose-driven brand doesn't happen overnight. What it really takes is a goal, specific actions, and at times, a bit of sacrifice. For Bank of the West, their mission meant, in the short-term, potentially leaving money on the table in the name of responsible investment of customers' money, and transparency as to what that money was doing. That initial cost was worth it, as the long-term be...

Payroll tends to be a purely transactional moment between employer and employee, but Gusto is working to shift that to being a "life moment," potentially one of delight (as receiving a paycheck should be!). Effectively reaching their audience while balancing internal alignment, a hefty tech stack, and their mission statement—to create a world where work empowers a better life—can be something of a...

Silicon Valley is home to thousands of B2B startups—and one of the the newest B2B  unicorns. Brex offers a corporate credit card more built around the ever-changing needs of a startup, and they've been valued at over $1 billion. One of the secrets? Champagne and chocolate. Brex's overall success has tied heavily into their bold marketing, and on this episode of RTU, Chief Sales Officer Sam Blond,...