I Learned Everything I Know About Marketing from Mad Magazine
Elsewhere on the blog, I present my work and areas of expertise. Here’s a (factual, but tongue-in-cheek) biography, along with a touch of marketing philosophy, to give you a better sense of how I got to where I am today and, I hope, encourages you to contact me for collaboration.
I didn’t realize growing up that AM radio was one of the original social networks. It had Top 40 formats (mashups), DJ shout outs (tweets), contests to win logo T-shirts (badges) and exclusive clubs to which everyone belonged (Facebook groups).
I got into late night talk shows, which had an intimacy and affinity with listeners that radio has lost and web social networks have yet to fully discover. My parents didn’t think it was such a great idea for me to stay up late listening on school nights and took away my TV privileges for one night as punishment. That was the night of The Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan.
My luck with media improved over the years and I found myself marketing technology for media companies. My training was much like everyone else’s in the field: a box of Mad Magazine “best-of” books, learning how to touch-type and a brief career teaching emotionally disturbed junior high schoolers.
From start-up to IPO, solo inventor to Fortune 100 enterprise
In the beginning, I worked with startups, turning underdogs into wonderdogs. Recently I’ve helped a few companies work through their mid-life crisis — that is to say, when they have reached a level of success and require assistance reaching the next plateau.
Whatever my responsibilities are for a particular company, my favorite part is finding ways to present a solution to the marketplace and having the marketplace react by saying, “Ah-Ha!”
Successful marketing means thinking outside the box while delivering campaigns inside the box. I leaped on the web-based and electronically delivered marketing platforms very early and with good success. Now, I’m neck-deep in social media.
As marketers, our first priority is to develop campaigns that are effective. If we manage to leave a slogan, image or song in our cultural collective unconscious in the process, that’s a great bonus.
On the personal front, I’m a New Yorker with a huge appetite for great songwriters and musicians of diverse genres. I’m told I’m a pretty good cook. Great microbrews make me say, “Ah-ha!”
