How I work
I’ve been marketing incredibly complex technology for a long time and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of marketing is pretty broken. It’s forgotten that in front of every webpage, sales deck or keynote podium, there’s a human being who wants to be informed, challenged, inspired, even entertained.
Maybe that's because I used to be a journalist, and before that, I worked in government. Communicating to your audience in their language earns ratings, and votes.
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Here’s where I’ve landed. Marketing works best when it helps a company tell great, authentic stories, is grounded in data and authenticity, and honors the person being marketed to. That’s what leads to exceptional ROI. And I’ve had the privilege of helping companies that have been open to that vision.
Scraping Away Your Bottom Line
Akamai was ahead of its time in sharing proprietary data with industry and competitors alike. In the process, the State of the Internet series became a benchmark referenced worldwide. My contribution was to take industry-specific cuts and address concerns in the language of the business owner as well as the developer and technical lead. (Download an example report here.)
Bit Rate and Business Model
My colleague, Ian Munford, and I conducted the first ever biometric study of how bodies react to video streaming quality. It helped Sales make a quantitative case that Akamai's premium solution was worth paying for.
Mapping the Malweb
I kicked off this five year annual franchise because McAfee SiteAdvisor needed more institutional credibility if it was going to continue to grow. The series became a widely cited benchmark for internet safety and registrar accountability. It also generated its share of controversy. In 2008, the registrar of .hk called me a liar when my report ranked his TLD as the worst of the year. But I had the receipts :)
Streaming TAM
A casual hallway conversation inspired me to build Akamai's first Total Addressable Market analysis based on bit delivery. Until then, the company had relied on instinct and anecdote. Product got the data it needed to adjust roadmap given an increasingly competitive market. The C-Suite used the analysis to quantify opportunity size at Investor Summits.
The Ripple Effect
By the time I joined Akamai, its publishing customers were hemorrhaging ad revenue. I combined Akamai with real user monitoring pioneer Soasta to analyze the impact of tiny changes to webpage performance on advertising revenue. The study led to significant renewals for us, and more revenue for the customer. Akamai acquired Soasta a year later.
Most Dangerous Celebrities
When you're employee #4 and the first marketing hire, you need to get creative if you're going to put your startup on the map. I learned some basic SQL to grep our dB for celebrity + adware. The resulting "Top 10" list got us noticed by McAfee who acquired us in 2006. The series was a finalist for PRWeek’s Campaign of the Year, and McAfee still publishs the list, 19 years later.
Spyware Rubbernecking
SiteAdvisor did something revolutionary for its time: we crawled and tested every site on the web for browser hijackings, malicious downloads, spam, etc.​ But how do you get people to pay attention to the results? I made a music video about a PC getting infected.
>700K views on a $9K budget. Ironically, the video was rapidly pirated, generating more than 1 million additional views. McAfee bought the company later that year for $74M. Watch on YT.
Myth Madness
Akamai does some great marketing, but IMO, struggled with social. Susan McReynolds, a leader on my team, changed that.
With the help of her peers and our team's internal network, she produced the most effective social campaign in company history. #MythMadness is now in its third "season."
Who Broke the Internet?
Once SiteAdvisor was acquired, the SVP of Marketing asked me to try to grow McAfee's anemic Facebook presence (back then, it was all about getting likes).
I hired an agency called Love and War and the amazing Sandy Smallens and together, we came up with The Day the Internet Died.
This interactive, user-specific Facebook applet generated >100K likes in three weeks and generated a ~3% trial to paid conversion rate for the premium version.
Spamcapella
Not all of my experiments succeeded, but I personally think this one should have been a hit. I hired the insanely talented Moosebutter to put spam email to music. YMMV.
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Watch on YT.
