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.
GTM in the Age of AI
Popcorn AI, part of the generative video revolution, brought me on to help build a Go To Market, including segmentation, benefit by target market, partner strategy and MarTech stack.
What's different about building a GTM today? The tools are so much cheaper and better (e.g. Clay AI). They freed me and the team to focus on deeper strategy and planning. ​(I put part of that slack to use co-producing this launch video, made with Popcorn AI and some amazing human artists.)
Research that speaks "Customer"
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 have my team write 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.)
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.
Using data for Value Confirmation
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.
Booths do not need to be boring
One of the more soul crushing things I had to do as part of an earn out was to staff the event booth for the acquirer's SMB business unit. "Booth Babes" were still a thing in software back then, as was the utter banality of the messaging.
When I got to Akamai, I vowed to do it differently. With the help of Ian Munford, Shawn Michels and Peter Chave. I co-created AkamaiTV, an interview program live streamed from the show floor. More than 100 customers, partners analysts and experts participated. We even put on a concert.
How to show channel partners a great time
I suspect a lot of direct sales-led companies struggle to embrace the channel. Akamai was no different and its partner marketing was anemic. So the head of Partner Sales in Asia and I put together a week-long "Innovation Tour" for ~60 people that included visits to Union Square Ventures, NBC Sports, Harvard's Berkman Center, and Pepe's, the legendary pizza joint in New Haven, CT. It generated a $100K MRR in pipeline on a $15K investment. The tour went from "skunkworks" to "official" the next year.
Data that justifies premium pricing
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.
Research that generates institutional credibility
I kicked off this five year annual franchise because McAfee SiteAdvisor needed to be taken more seriously if it was going to continue to grow. Mapping the Mal Web 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 :)
Humanizing social marketing
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."
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.
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.
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.
