INBOUND 2016: David Berkowitz "A CMO's Survival Guide from a Marketer's Marketer"

Thank you. Who here is 110% focused? Speaking of focus, who here is 110% focused on marketing today? I just wanted to say Good. Wow, that is way more than I expected. So I'm sorry if I'm a little below that threshold at the moment, but it is really motivating and energizing being in here and I'll do what I can to keep things together for the next 45 minutes or so. I do like to make these things interactive and conversational, and it's like you come here with things that you plan to say, but the most important thing is what you want to get out of it. And I can't ask hundreds of people for questions. But. But I do want to break a little bit early. And so if there are are things that you have on your mind just want to get off your chest today, even then, then I'll make sure to leave at least a bit of time for that and happy to be responsive afterwards. So yeah, I'm David Berkowitz, really excited here at my third inbound and so gave a couple talks in years past on story making. I've only recycled one of the slides. So if you've been here in the and even doing so is intentional. So it's the magic behind the curtain. I also was very excited to go to some of the bold talks this morning, this afternoon and I saw Kit Pang speak and was anyone in that on listening and a really good talk on body language and highly recommended if you get to replay some of the sessions after. So he said that your feet don't lie and that your feet should be facing who you want to be listening to, talking to. So I shouldn't have my feet facing toward the door if I need to freeze. I'll just make my body language open to all of you and try to apply some of what I'm learning here at Inbound. And so I really do appreciate your time and I want to start diving into this just some basic contact info. I also can't resist noting that the bottom link there is to my chatbot. So it's just I love learning by doing and it's probably not the best chatbot you'll ever experience, but it is a functioning chatbot. So if you don't want to talk to me and talk to some kind of automated version of me, then you can do that too. And so I'll dive in from there. I'm going to talk a lot today, mainly about my time in my previous role at mri. Great creative agency. It's part of Hulas Group, and so spent a few years there as their head of marketing. And it was a kind of weird job being a marketer for a marketing agency. Since then, I've been doing some consulting under the serial marketer name, but I'm not really going to talk about that today. I did want to talk about the survival aspect. Who here is working in some capacity on the agency side of the business? So quite a few of you. So sometimes when you're lucky, you might imagine it feels something like this. Often it feels a little bit more like this, and sometimes even that feels like it is on a good day. And so my role was also a little bit unusual in that it was really focused on the branding and communications side of it, rather than directly as far as biz dev goes. So always a kind of role when you know, where survival becomes increasingly difficult. But it was also such a phenomenal experience because getting to try to market a kind of company that is, in my experience at least, one of the hardest things to differentiate when any kind of agency basically seems to be doing the same thing presented some kind of fun challenges along the way. And so that's what I want to draw from and share. Encapsulate those three years into 30 minutes and see where it goes. So what's funny is kind of fast forwarding toward the end of the tenure. This is the tagline that ultimately wound up with. And at least now that it's not part of my day job, I can share a little bit about how the sausage gets made, too. And, you know, the challenge with so much of this is that you wind up in meetings that feel a lot like this. And so one of the biggest challenges is trying to escape spending so much, much time on the stuff that doesn't really matter, because ultimately for us, my experience was that what our clients took away from and our prospects did as well, and our hires, too, was, what's the work we're doing? How are we getting that out there? Who are the people we have there and what's their reputation? And so talk a lot about the people side of the business, too, and then, you know, what ideas are we proactively bringing them. On the flip side, there was way too much debate internally about some of these things, like, what kind of agency are we, who we are, all of this. And what I came to appreciate was I've worked for a number of agencies, and I don't think I've worked for any. And even some pretty incredible shops where clients could recite our tagline back to us. But having some North Star for who we are, where we're going, was incredibly important for knowing why everyone should be there every day. And so a lot of the role wound up being, well, this might be something that we're doing so we could put it on our website, but it becomes infinitely more important for internal communications rather than external. And so getting that right mattered a lot more. So everyone there knew why they were there, rather than because we were going to win some client pitch for it. And ultimately the best part of marketing and agency is that is when you're able to tap into a lot of the talent there. And this is something that's going to pervade a lot of this talk here. But one of my initial goals coming in there was how do we market ourselves at least as well as we're marketing our clients. So how can we lead by example? And a couple examples that are fun to share. One that's a little bittersweet right now with that monster image there was. Soon after I got there, I was talking to one of our copywriters who was a die hard fan of Vine. Now it's having a bit of a rough go right now, so we'll see. Now there's some reports that Twitter might be able to sell it off to someone else who likes it and that it will have another life to it. I hope it does. But at the time during Vine's rise. So I wound up in a meeting with him and so, okay, well, what do you want to do? I wasn't a Vine or appreciated where the platform was going and its kind of role in culture. So what do you want to do with Vine? And so there were some ideas that came up. Did we host a panel, get some vine stars in there to talk to the agency, maybe have kind of open an event for the industry? And then ultimately someone said, well, what if we did a Vine a thon? And my gut reaction was, I've got no clue what a Vinathon is, but it's something I can market, it's something I can get the budget for. And so let's figure it out. We ultimately had all these over a series of quarterly events. We had some great vine talent that would come through our office just. And we'd have some nights that would be kind of like open to anyone in the industry and make Vines and have all these props and fun ways to do it and various kinds of comedians and someone who was into parkour and all this kind of stuff. They just kind of come through and we just get to jam with them and create this stuff. So another that was really one of my all time favorite experiences was we had a strategist in her early 20s named Tony Dawkins. And so Tony did this weekly session called Tuesdays with Tony and she. So it was a meeting within the strategy team where she'd talk to her older strategist, meaning anyone over 25, and explain to them what youth culture was all about. And so my take was I really wanted to market the hell out of this. I didn't quite know how, but really wanted to do something with this and took a little bit of time and said, so, you know, what are. So what's a really organic way to do so? And Tony came back and said she really wants to do a podcast. Now. My initial reaction was, I don't listen to podcasts. I feel like I'm the only person in my social circle who could not get into cereal. All the more surprising given the name I wound up using. But ultimately I was like, well, let's try this out. Let's create a podcast studio, let's do something about it and let's see how this goes. And so Tony created 20 editions of this every other week for nearly a year. And so it was something that I actually learned a ton from in terms of understanding culture through her lens. And she had some great guests on the show and all that. And it's something that never could have come really top down. It's the kind of last thing I was thinking about putting out. I thought maybe it would be some blog series, video, whatever. It was definitely not a podcast. And so, so thanks to Tony, it was something that we could really start sending to our clients on a regular basis and build up her name in the industry as well. Flipping backwards a little bit, the first thing I did when joining MRI was I appreciated. This was my first time in this head of marketing job. I was coming from this kind of emerging media innovation role. Before, I never had this role. I was working for someone who didn't want someone with that cookie cutter experience. But I instantly knew when I got there, and I sure knew as I left too, I was in over my head. But so I decided to start reaching out to people and say, well, for those who've been around the block a bit before, what should, what should anyone know going into this kind of job? And after a few of the responses came in, I said, well, this is not only like, thank you for this, but I need to publish this because anyone and everyone could benefit from this. And so it's one of those things that's still live today. And every now and then I'll wind up turning back to. But it was also an interesting way to use what was initially just kind of like personal exploration turned into marketing for the agency because it was great to say, hey, not like, okay, look, I have a new job, but look, here's something of value for the industry. And then MRI could kind of piggyback along that. So this is something that I'll totally admit. I was going through my notes on the trip over here from New York. I have no idea why I included this GIF in the presentation. And I still like the gif. I still love Michael Scott. But I'm just going to skip ahead because I'm going through this. I'm like, what was I even thinking from when I first put this together to the final product? So even I actually put a version of this on SlideShare already. If you follow the inbound hashtag, you'll see my tweet where I actually have bit ly cmosurvival. I created an inbound annotated version of the talk. So if there's anything you want to go back to later, or if you're too busy scanning election recaps to go and pay attention to every last word, then it's like, okay, then you can see what you missed. But I'm like, okay, I've got to take a couple things out. Because I honestly was like, where was that fitting in here? This one, I knew where it belonged. So again, some of this and learning by doing an opportunity came up. I knew someone who was creating the first ever international drone film festival. And my agency wasn't really one to sponsor events. It was something a little different. But I'm like, well, what if we could do something a little bit more experiential? And is there any kind of exploration we can do to get ahead? This was early 2015. So as drones were becoming more prominent out there and we're trying to see how they'd fit into a creative agency. And so the creative team ran with this, came up with a really fun script on what it would be like to hire drones working around the office and in turn even use this as a short for the film festival itself. So it was yet going back to a lot of this learning by doing, and then led to some coverage in Venture Beaten elsewhere, and also just wound up being one of those highlights for those in the office. First party thought leadership. A couple lessons from this study. So we put out a study on the connected car and how people are connecting to their cars. And so two things share about this. One of the better lessons and one thing that I wouldn't do again with this. And this was part of our interactive site that we created to share the research. But one of the challenges was we didn't have a deep background in the auto industry, so where could we add some value? And also ultimately what I wanted to do was create a storyline about mobility. It's like finding the thing that you're credible in and building on that and then tying in some new hook from there. So wound up being a series of research reports on mobility and how we connect to our cars. It was tying on a lot of the experience of millennials versus older consumers. The one big learning experience from this ultimately, though, was that so we were doing this first party research and I wound up talking to someone who had done some other kind of ethnography on the car purchase journey. And so I was able to somehow get the budget from our CFO to do two of these studies together. And it became such an unwanted. And it was one of those things, like my eyes got too big and just because I could do something didn't necessarily mean we should. And so it was something that I was ultimately happy with the finished product, but it also took way too long to get out. It was way more than anyone really needed out there. And so just trying to quit while we were ahead and focus a little bit, I think would have made the whole study far more effective. One of my favorite parts of the job, and as I kind of referenced, was being able to say yes to ideas that would bubble up through the agency. But this was also an important strategy, not just for going to market, but for hiring too, because I was talking to a great up and coming account executive who I knew who was thinking about joining the agency. And one of her big challenges was that she worked for a much bigger shop and kept getting this closed door from the. From the Corp Comms team. And so I told her, I said, you know, any of those things that they say no to, I'm going to say yes to. I knew she had a lot of good ideas, and my default, even to a fault, it got me in trouble a couple times when I kind of greenlit things before I totally knew exactly where they were going. Could share a little bit more on that as well. But, you know, but it became something that kind of embodied a lot of the culture going on there. And so while a couple of these people were directly part of my team, some of these people were in administrative roles or legal or SEO and became really vital to the function of the agency. The one thing I'll also say on staffing was going back to that idea of trying to market yourself as well as your marketing clients. The biggest challenge was when I joined in 2013, that was this content was. Was heavily shifting toward video and everything was really becoming visual at this point. So ultimately, hiring more for a marketing team and an agency was not the easiest thing to do to just. It's not a place where you can really easily do a land grab. But what I did make a deal with the CFO and a couple others there said, look, let's get a designer and then a video production resource in. Here they come. Half time working for the marketing team, half time working on client work. They'd actually sit with the creative and production teams respectively. And so they'd still be billable enough, but then we could still do our jobs and not be totally hamstrung and not have to go hand in mouth. And one of the things that surprised me was overall, I always feared that at some point I'd be screwed by making that deal because client work tends to cannibalize everything else. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But ultimately it worked for years as part of that arrangement. Now with another mantra that came up through all this was everyone contributes. And so I want to share a little bit of an example of all this because just to see what this looked like because ultimately at our annual meetings and for some external purposes as well, we pull together, you know, what is everyone actually doing for the agency and what are the various ways people get involved? And so let's see. I'm going to go. And from here I can play a little clip of this. We made the animated mri. Can we get the sound up a little bit more for something on my end? I've represented MRY in the UX community. By reviewing UX portfolios from General assembly to nyu, I can just kind of put words in the master of the community management. What's almost as important as what they're saying is even the kind of variety. I stock a beer fridge. That's what I do. I give you beer. In the span of two months, I've attended 15 conferences, given keynotes, spoken on.

Panels and even moderated panels.

I set up an inspirational whiteboard for the MrYCM team. Yay. I represented MRI at Shutterstock's Pixels of Fury event, designing against other designers. I worked in the front end for the MRI holidays site, which is our Christmas card. This year I helped organize the Pencils of Promise party. And we all know how much I like to party. Okay, we're rolling. I've been reading all your emails for the past six months. This isn't the video conventional. Thanks, Joe. It goes on from there's the short version of it, but it was also just a very tangible way to bring this together. And you know, it's like for better or worse, it was constantly exploring how do you really make everyone part of the marketing team. And I mean, there's a lot of lip service. The fact that everyone represents a company's brand. This we just did so in a very literal sense. But a big part of it. I intentionally found the. The cheesiest stock photo image I could of millennials. This one seemed pretty terrible. And there are a lot of terrible stock photos of millennials. But a big part of the value we're also providing is we always had this focus on how do you do something to further others careers there. And one of the things on the agency side that we talk about a lot is that ultimately when looking for their next job, pretty much everyone winds up with a decent list of brands on their resume and some work that they can legitimately take credit for, some things that, that Maybe someone was one of 50 people in the room and still kind of takes credit for. But ultimately a lot of these things look the same. So it's just what can anyone do above and beyond that? Whether it's contributing to the research or events or other kinds of things like that that we're putting out to give them interesting experience that was relevant to what they wanted to do, but also help them stand out from the pack and give them that kind of sense of accomplishment. Now, one of the, one of those maxims that I didn't quite appreciate until the end of my tenure there was Keith Barazi, wrote the great book Never Eat Alone. And so I've always, I definitely made the mistake there in particular of treating that more externally than internally and so doing so with other partners out there. And so earlier this year, as there were some changes at the agency, CEO, 14 years, finally leaving. And ultimately when I wound up leaving as well, there are all these people I was having lunch with and drinks and catching up. And I'm like, you know, it was so bittersweet because it became the biggest regret. I'm like, I should have just been spending far more time with the people in other departments. I was okay with the team lunches, but those in other departments who could have done so much more with and really just found ways to get to know them better. It's like we had our best conversations when someone was on their way out. And so it's like you see them when they're coming in and then when they're leaving. And a lot of that day to day was something I just saw as a bit of a missed opportunity. And I talked a little bit about the internal purposes of what we were doing and and ultimately this was just one example of a very rough approach I was sharing where actually it came up when we had a group of interns and they wanted to see what was going on in the marketing department. It's like how do you really categorize all of this and having the purpose behind what we were doing. I was actually even a little surprised going into the role how much the role dovetailed with HR and how much there was potential for it to give people a reason for being there. But again, just having that reason why behind everything you're doing made all the work far more important. A few pillars in terms of dealing with the press. This is what we're really focused on as this is that having that speed of response, just constantly fostering relationships and always having some strong pov whenever something would come out, some topic would come up. It's like all these together were ultimately what we're going to be successful with there. Metrics was another interesting issue. Well, why don't you come up to the mic? I'll take a question in the middle.

I know we only have like 18 minutes left. I wanted to know if you could like share those tips that you wish had been shared like before about being a cmo. Like could you just help us understand what those nuggets are and the short.

Timing of like from that slide back.

Yeah, just from just like rightful them off so we can, you know, just take those nuggets with us as well. Because I think you've got a lot of good things but you know, we're officer Burning moment. But we're on time.

Yeah, well, some of them. First of all, I'm happy to send the link to the dash to Anyone that's on SlideShare. Some of these are drawn from this as well, but. Excellent point. Some of it is just. It's even better in some of the contributors own words. So by all means, thank you. And in a couple minutes I also want to take any questions as well because I'll give a breather to the prepared slides. But the metric piece of it. The one thing became so important there, and this I do remember was the advice of Mark Naples with strategy, who contributed to that initial talk over there was just in measuring the value of everything. I wound up working at a place where that wasn't as essential for the internal work. And so it was. So it became far more important to, you know, for my own team to be tasked with that and say, look like we're going to do far more than what's asked of us for this, because ultimately we've got to determine the value of it. But I think just that constantly asking why becomes really important. Beyond the office space slide, though, the one other regret of sorts was, was coming in, I was trying to be a little bit too diplomatic. I was more of an innovation guy going into a marketing role. There was a kind of branding oriented person in a senior innovation role. And there was way too much turf that I ceded that was so hard to get back. And even in terms of who owns things like, like the ultimate positioning of the agency. And so just to constantly be fighting for what's yours from day one and make sure you have a clear understanding with whoever you're reporting into, becomes really essential. And I will close out on just knowing that the one thing I really miss the most about that environment, and this was the image I used in the previous year's talk, was just being part of a team and being able to constantly have that talent to bounce around ideas with and collaborate on. And so it's by far the biggest change of going from that kind of environment to a solo world. So one thing that I'll probably want to get back to again before long, this is just more of a recap of all that. And again, this is on SlideShare as well for anyone to see. Really want to thank all of you for coming today, and so I hope you enjoy the rest of the show.