Chapters

0:00 – Welcome Jeff Culliton
4:47 – Cleveland meets Silicon Valley
7:30 – What does success ACTUALLY look like?
11:01 – The birth of CMO Confidential
12:32 – Marketing curriculum needs a reboot!
16:53 – Cleveland’s robust marketing talent
17:28 – Career development advice for emerging marketers
19:43 – Here comes AI in marketing
23:28 – Having a P.O.V. and being vulnerable
29:09 – Marketing and Math

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Jeff Culliton, Executive Producer CMO Confidential. Although Jeff is a Cleveland resident and alma mater of John Carroll University, he is a die hard Buffalonian.  Following sales leadership roles at two different Martech SaaS companies (Mongoose Metrics and Pierry Software – formerly C.TRAC), Jeff spent 7 years at The Adcom Group in various roles including President.  Jeff shared several of his perspectives in our conversation including:

• His thoughts on improving curriculum for developing marketing talent
• Two key traits that all executive marketers should possess: Point of View and Vulnerability
• AI’s impact on marketing talent
• The mission behind the CMO Confidential Podcast

Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast – Jeff Culliton, Executive Producer CMO Confidential 

[00:00:04] Ron Laneve: Hello and Welcome to Episode 23 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast. Today’s guest most recently served as president of a regional marketing agency in Cleveland, Ohio. And prior to that, he led sales and business development efforts for two different Martech SaaS businesses. Currently, he’s pursuing his passion for content development. I’m very excited to introduce to you Jeff Culliton, Executive Producer of the CMO Confidential Podcast. Jeff, thanks for being here with me today. 

[00:00:36] Jeff Culliton: Ron, thanks for having me. And from here on out could we tape that? And then I’m going to put it on my alarm clock when I wake up in the morning. So I get some like walking music to the day.

[00:00:46] Ron Laneve: All right. I appreciate that. So I did a decent job at the introduction. Am I close? 

[00:00:50] Jeff Culliton: You are as dead on as I think I would be in describing myself. 

[00:00:54] Ron Laneve: All right. Obviously that was high level. My main motivations of doing these videos is to share, what I call the nonlinear progression of entrepreneurs and executives like yourself throughout their career and their career journeys, and then illustrate how that occurred, why those different moves occurred. What factors led to different changes and then how to lead you to where you are today. 

[00:01:17] Jeff Culliton: Yeah, this is particularly neat for me because, rewind 20 years and I thought the pathway like I think a lot of people do coming out of college is extremely linear. Get this experience, do better, get this experience, do better. And I’m the case study in the opposite. The neat thing for me is where that’s netted out now. 

[00:01:39] I’m from Buffalo. Diehard Buffalonian, like all Buffalonians were diehard Buffalonians. And I left home at a relatively young age, 17. Went out of town to college and wasn’t ready. I was ready for the social experience of being away. I was not ready for the the responsibility of being away. That being said, I was good enough at faking it that nobody ever noticed. And, so the grades were fine and this and that, but I just never found a passion for learning.

[00:02:18] So by the time I got out of school, I was wayward. I just, nothing had clicked for me. I didn’t genuinely enjoy a classroom setting. Although, from the exterior some people would say you thrive in this setting. It was complete Kabuki for all intents and purposes. And so when I graduated and I realized that I wasn’t going to law school, which was my initial thoughts, I kind of tail spun a little bit. The natural inclinations of people that were around me and the people that I respected was, Hey you’re personable, you should go into sales.

[00:02:54] And in the absence of advice that was my advice. It was a gnarly economy. I spent the few years after college, just doing that, just having sales jobs and having some success, but not really enjoying it. Enjoying the paychecks, but not enjoying the process. And happenstance meeting had me meet somebody who was an executive in an agency. And the agency was actually, pretty far away from where I was living at the time where I still do live, in Cleveland. And so I started at this agency that was an hour and a half away from my house and my now wife, our apartment. I drove four days a week back and forth to that agency. Which in hindsight, you only do when you have no responsibility. 

[00:03:44] The interesting thing about that kind of gritty experience was. Awesome experience. Awesome people. The thing I took was, you know what? I actually genuinely enjoy marketing. I enjoy Martech. I enjoy the confluence of how these things are coming together.

[00:04:03] I didn’t, I don’t really know it at that time. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that way at the time, but there was a piece to it that I was genuinely enjoying. There’s a series of people in my family who have been investors and entrepreneurs, and I had a seed in the back of my head, I need to be a part of a startup. Why that exactly happened who knows? But after a while the travel started to wear and I started to look for things and I got into a marketing technology startup. Like many Martech and many startups in general wild west while you’re trying to find market fit and all those kind of things. You’ll learn a tremendous amount. You also You learn a lot of how not to do things. 

[00:04:47] That transitioned in into another startup this one had you know some better underpinnings, got purchased by a company on California in Redwood City in the Silicon Valley area and that to me at the time was like, okay I have I’ve crested this thing, coming from the Midwest, you have to get out to one of these one of these bigger locales, especially when it’s Silicon Valley.

[00:05:13] There I had one of the most like rude awakenings of my career. I got out there and I’ve always thrived on relationships like I need to know people. I need people to know me. I need to be able to operate as such. And I knew nobody and I found that everybody was very focused on working at Facebook, working at Google, working, when whatever walled garden literally and figuratively they were working in. Yeah, I found it super hard. To make those relationships and what we’re doing some pretty cool stuff we’re in the Salesforce ecosystem.

[00:05:50] Ron Laneve: But you are from Cleveland you didn’t know anything like why would they possibly talk to you come on. 

[00:05:55] Jeff Culliton:

What I think the interesting thing about it is Silicon Valley needs more Cleveland and Cleveland needs more Silicon Valley. The two would so deeply benefit from commingling more.

You would see Cleveland be more aspirational. You would see Silicon Valley generate revenue faster. I’m saying this now after some years of mental anguish of like, why don’t I fit in this thing that I always was supposed to fit it.

[00:06:21] I went through that experience and in the meantime, my wife and I had our first child and the travel once again became, a hard thing. So I began looking at ways that I could come back, make where we were a home base, but still have tentacles outside. I found a fantastic agency environment, like you said, of which I, ended up becoming the president of for three or four years and it’s been jagged. I think one of the tough parts about higher ed is, we espouse this linearity, like we were talking about before, do well put in your time move up. That is that’s pretty counter to the reality of the situation. It causes a lot of people to be very cautious You do these things for the organization and I think it tamps down some entrepreneurial spirit. Mine personally interestingly enough like as much as I maybe tried to focus it in one area has been like that alien that pops out of the chest Sigourney Weaver’s chest, an alien or whomever’s chest it is it was in there, it just it needed to get out. 

[00:07:30] Jeff Culliton:

I think the interesting thing to me is, I’ve reframed for myself what success looks like, in that, the setbacks used to be these huge mental loads for me. Looking around and thinking everybody else is progressing down this pathway and, success after success and realizing when I was fortunate enough to get surrounded by some extraordinarily good people that’s kind of bullshit and that’s a facade. That’s not the reality. And all the people that we kind of deify fail constantly. The difference is their relationship to it is better. Their relationship to it is progressive. You still get some of the pain. You still get some of the mental gymnastics, but you realize you’ve figured out a different way of not doing it that ultimately catapults you to the way of that’s right for you to do it well. And the fact of the matter is there isn’t a pathway. The pathway is continuous movement forward. And then you find some wins, you find some losses. 

[00:08:37] Ron Laneve: agreed. I’m curious, you said when you started, you didn’t really like sales, right? It wasn’t my thing. But 2 of the roles I mentioned, you led sales, you led business development. So what didn’t you like about it? And then how did you overcome that to be successful at the same time? 

[00:08:53] Jeff Culliton: It wasn’t that I didn’t like sales cause I loved that. Like I feed off of it. Now. The particular way my brain works, which I don’t think is unique. I think there’s a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs who are like this. I need to know the whole field. If somebody just says, go sell this thing to this person, I have no attachment to it and therefore it doesn’t mean anything to me.

[00:09:16] Therefore I can’t get up for it. And I went through those hurdles and felt like I was failing like constantly. Then you’d get a paycheck after you’ve done the thing that you’re not enjoying and you’re like, Oh, okay, it actually reinforces the negative behavior. And what I realized after being beaten my head against the wall was that it’s not that I didn’t like sales, it’s that I needed to be selling something that I was deeply committed to. And then I loved it. 

[00:09:47] And then when I loved it, the things that are hallmarks of great salespeople that I was trying to force myself into before just naturally came out. So it wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t like sales as I was looking at it the wrong way. Now I’ve come to understand that everything in some capacity is sales and that it is an absolute blessing to love doing it. I just had to get myself into the right spot because I wasn’t in the right spots. those weren’t the organization’s faults. Those were my being a puzzle piece that had yet to understand where its edges were 

[00:10:22] Ron Laneve: We’re going to talk about this again in a couple minutes I’m going to bring up the sales thing trust me because i’ve had a lot of my guests successful like you Lean on the same thing, whether they were, sales professionals, entrepreneurs or executives or whatever, they all had a sales focus somewhere in their background and saw the value in that, but we’ll get there. 

[00:10:45] So catch me up to where you are now. you’re a guy that has a lot of passion for what you do and what you get excited about. And clearly you’re really excited about CMO Confidential and building the content machine. So can we talk about that a little bit? And, how you got there, what its mission is, where we’re going. 

[00:11:01] Jeff Culliton: Sure. Like all great things for me, this kind of happened by accident and I will always joke CMO Confidential, or at least my involvement in CMO Confidential started over a couple of Manhattans on a front porch.

[00:11:14] How better to start anything. Being in an agency environment, you very much focus on what the agency does. And then I think this is an issue for a lot of people is you start to mold your thinking around marketing, advertising, content through the lens of what that particular organization or what that client base does.

[00:11:34] And over a series of years, I just started to get very interested in how people take these things and really grow an audience with super valuable content. Because obviously we’re in the age where you can create Content that has no value and you can create it very easily. And so I became really fascinated with How to create content that had real value, but i’d never like i’d never found the other puzzle piece that made it fit for me. And allowed my brain to understand how I would, or how it really goes into practice.

[00:12:11] And a couple of Manhattans, a couple of meetings, and a mentor and my partner in CMO Confidential, Mike Linton, who is the CMO of eBay, Best Buy, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry. com, which, are Good if you’re into that kind of thing. 

[00:12:28] Ron Laneve: And so I’ve heard of a few of those before 

[00:12:32] Jeff Culliton:

And we started talking about something that made it click for me, which was marketing is being taught incorrectly. But there’s two pathways on this. There’s the thinking of marketing is being taught incorrectly tactically.

Which is you’re being taught how to buy search words or build websites or whatever incorrectly.

[00:12:52] I’m not really of that liking thinking that’s a little too in the weeds for me. The other side of it was marketers are not being taught how to live at the same level in the C suite as a CFO CEO COO. So they’re not able to take the value of marketing of which everybody in some capacity Is a consumer of and agrees with. Yet it gets squishy and non quantifiable. For one of two reasons. One, you’re taking in all this crazy data. You don’t know what it is and you don’t know how to attach it. Two, you don’t know how to tell a story to the business.

And this means that a marketer needs to not just be a marketer They need to be a business person who looks at the business through the lens of marketing.

So we started to have those conversations, at the same time Mike was you know, writing a book and he had taken one stab at doing a podcast which was and I will say this lovingly was wretched. Kidding. I can’t wait till he watches it. 

[00:13:56] Ron Laneve: I’m interviewing him next, so he’s got it. He’s got the chance to to fight back. 

[00:14:00] Jeff Culliton: He’ll have the chance to rebut. He and I were talking, we had the studios at the agency and we were just like, man, let’s, let’s give this a shot. We were coming out at one from the same mentality of, I get to work with CMOs all the time. I see them not be able to crack through the rest of the C suite. I see marketing not getting valued the same way as other tactics within the organization and more importantly, I don’t see CMO who are able to connect it to the rest of the business.

[00:14:28] Mike’s got this unbelievable resume of experience towards just that thing, but he’s also got a rolodex of people that are really willing to talk about it.

[00:14:40] Because, when you start to pick at the scab, it’s not just the two of us dummies who think this is a problem. It is a pervasive feeling. And now we’re now sitting in an environment where we have more data. We have potentially more pre ability, but we don’t have people that have been trained to frame it, to story-tell it, to give the rest of the C suite the ethos of what all this should be.

[00:15:07] We always joke:

it’s the only job where every C level person thinks they can do it better. No CMO walks up to the CFO and asks them why they depreciated an asset in a certain way.

And so being a consumer of it, it just it makes it an interesting duality.

[00:15:25] So we started to have these conversations and these things just started to, for me personally, started to click. That this is a completely underserved niche. That the content creation that we were doing was hugely valuable. And when it’s hugely valuable, my brain automatically says it’s monetizable.

[00:15:45] You have two groups who teach marketing you have educational outlets and then you have organizations. The educational outlets are behind because marketing and algorithms move faster then higher ed. And organizations don’t have the content or the bandwidth to train unless you’re Nestle, Unilever, Procter and Gamble, where you are the hub of the wheel and they just continuously train you.

[00:16:16] So there’s some huge gaps and we started to do this as a way to fill those gaps. Not only did the people we’re talking to respond deeply, but other people in the C suite and higher ed started to respond as well. That was one of the first times I really felt a market fit and two, the juice you get as an entrepreneur when this stuff starts to come together. So that made me look and go, this is something that needs throttle and we just so happen to have two people in the position where we could do that.

[00:16:53] So it’s been absolutely amazing. And where we, you and I are located, we have a disproportionate number of extremely good marketers, high level, very accomplished marketers, whether it’s Joe Pulizzi or it’s Paul Roetzer, Jeff Rohrs or Paul Elliott, I know a guy that you’re close to. Mike (Linton). 

[00:17:12] We have people with horsepower here that far outweigh the size of where the location is. And goes to show you these things can come from anywhere and the market is behooved to not think that they just come from New York or Los Angeles or potentially Chicago.

[00:17:28] Ron Laneve: Yeah, for sure. That was excellent. I appreciate that. You actually teed up the next couple of questions. For college students or aspiring marketers, they don’t necessarily have to go to college or graduate, et cetera. For people entering workforce and thinking about the classes they’re taking or how to round out their skillset to be more attractive, to where they’re going to go to work or what they’re going to go do. Any suggestions for that cohort?

[00:17:52] Jeff Culliton: Yeah, this is, you want to talk about a unique time to be coming out into the market. There is core curriculum if you’re coming out of school as a marketer that I think let’s just table that for a moment because I think there’s groups that do it really well. But I don’t think there’s a lot of groups that do it really well from a higher ed perspective.

Then there’s the the Metas, the Googles of the world, the Amazons of the world have certification programs that are so good and so pertinent to what all of these businesses want and need that an aspiring marketer now has more access and free access to these things than ever in the history of the world. And it’s only getting better. The fact of the matter is every kid coming out of school or every aspiring marketer should be getting certifications constantly from these organizations.

Because ultimately they’re the ones who flip the switch on an algorithm change. They’re the ones who look and say, hey, we’re now going to prioritize acts or Google is going to look and say, search is going to look like this moving forward. 

[00:19:10] So the fact of the matter is they’re giving you the keys. They’re giving you the answers to the test. Every person, regardless if they’re coming out of higher ed, they’re coming out of somewhere else is inherently native to these platforms. They get it, they feel it, they understand it, they know what works. Maybe they understand what works a little too well. 

[00:19:27] So if they take that added extra step of getting the platforms guidance, I think that’s a huge benefit. I think everybody should do that. I’ve gone and done those things over and over again over the last five years, and I can’t tell you how beneficial it has been for me.

[00:19:43] The second piece of it is, we are taking our first infant steps in artificial intelligence as it Is it respective to marketing. On our show and CMO confidential yet to be released, but we have a recurring guest. A guy who used to be the chief strategy officer for Publicis, the largest agency holding company in the world.

[00:20:03] His name is Rishad Tobaccowala. And he’s just resoundingly, understood as this really amazing thinker about what’s next. To be called a futurist one day.

Rashad had a great line the other day, “he said your job’s not going to be taken by AI, your job is going to be taken by somebody who knows how to use AI.”

Which I think is just really pertinent. There’s hurdles to AI becoming ubiquitous. Absolutely. The free things that you can have access to right now are transcendent. You should never as, and I’m speaking for myself here, you don’t have to start looking at a blank page. Which is just massive. The other advice that he has, which is something that I hold pretty deeply is there is going to be a very low hurdle of a paywall on these things.

[00:20:53] They are going to keep the best of the best new features behind that paywall. If you have to pay 20 a month to get access to GPT 4 instead of GPT 3 or three and a half, do it and invest in yourself. Because the functionality upgrade is massive. It’s so big.  You’ve got somebody who’s been in this business for 20 years who has seen, the end of maybe the traditional reign of tactics, social becoming this extraordinarily prominent thing and now moving into AI. 

[00:21:27] I use it every day all the time for all sorts of things. In fact, one, one time you and I used it to try and come up with a drink recipe, which is maybe not its best and highest usage, but is very useful, nonetheless.

[00:21:40] Ron Laneve: It matched the day and the environment perfectly. And we had three options, I think. So it was great. 

[00:21:47] Jeff Culliton: A fine point on that is I think the thing that especially younger users of these platforms are really going to need to wrap their arms around is this is an efficiency to getting started, but it is not a replacement. You still need to hone all of these things.

[00:22:10] I’ve talked to a lot of college students from some work I do with my alma mater, and they are still really starting to figure out how you prompt, they’re prompting once. People who are really advanced at this are prompting. They’re looking what they get back. They’re altering the prompt They’re altering the prompt. They’re altering the prompt till they get to a point where they go Man, that feels like it’s 70 of the way. And then they’re extracting it and they’re molding it and I think the people who are doing that and are approaching it as a preparation for something that is just going to get bigger that is we are not even remotely quantifying how Important it’s going to be are going to be hugely successful. 

[00:22:53] Ron Laneve: I know the curriculum topic is a subject matter that’s near and dear to your heart and to Mike’s and I think we could do a whole show just on that probably.   For experienced talent, in your career and your history what have you seen that helps, one person differentiate themselves from another person, whether it’s in an interview and application process, because especially in the climate we’re in now, it’s hyper competitive, the supply and demand curve is shift and it’s tough to get noticed. Do you have any advice or suggestions for experienced people? 

[00:23:28] Jeff Culliton: So I think there’s a lot of different answers to this so let me just give you two. Point of view and vulnerability. Let me dig deeper into both of those. Having a point of view is hard in marketing.  And there’s the experience. Hey, some people have been in search. Some people have been in social. Some people have done all these things.

I think the point of view of how they fit together for a senior person is more important than tactical proficiency. I think the understanding and be able to articulate your point of view of how these things fit together, which is what all organizations want from their senior people. 

[00:24:08] It can’t be perfect. These things change too fast. If I’m hiring a senior person and all they can do is talk about social content creation. And can’t talk about how to grow an audience via an email list, how to, get people to your site and create a form that has the best user experience, minimal hoops, how to create, how to do the things around a tactic.

[00:24:35] That to me is typically an indication that person has been really focused. And that can be great. But I think most people, even senior people in our business, overestimate their ability to connect the dots if they haven’t actively tried to do that. Because it’s a hard thing. It really is a hard thing.

[00:25:00] When I’m really looking for a senior person I’m not looking for somebody who can give me the absolute best search strategy. I’m looking for somebody who can say, how does this search strategy parlay into an on site experience? What kind how should I test money against this search strategy? I don’t want to drop a huge stone in the water I want to figure out if this works if it doesn’t. I want somebody who can have that.

[00:25:24] Now this leads into my second piece of things which is vulnerability. I value In a massive way not just in business, but in all of my personal relationships. Because I was somebody for a very long time who faked that they knew it all And I know how stressful it was and how many times I overreached on what I was trying to accomplish because I thought at that point my career was supposed to know it all. And the stuff changes so fast. 

[00:25:55] If three years ago we were having honest conversations about major fortune 500 brands, having a TikTok presence. When three years ago, it was still high school kids dancing. And you’re looking and you’re like, why the hell would Procter and Gamble, why would Tide be on on TikTok? That would be a reasonable stance to take.

[00:26:17] Now you understand that the attention, the frequency and all age demographics are there in a massive way. And you need to have vulnerability to reset. You need to have vulnerability to say, Ooh shit, I missed that one.

[00:26:31] There’s a perfect example. My former Chief Strategy Officer, guy by the name of Jim Ganzer was brilliant guy. Most people won’t even remember this now, but there was a platform, a show or a network that was coming out called Quibi. Quibi had massive backing and all it was 10 minute episodes of shows. Huge people with huge money backing it.

[00:26:54] And Jim is smarter than me and I can’t even begin to count the ways. But I looked at him and I’m like, dude, this is it. People are going to be on the subway. People are going to be doing this. People are going to be doing that. This is, I’ve never seen somebody look at me and a friend look at me. Like I was dumber.

[00:27:14] And so we began this hilarious battle that we’d go back and forth. Quibi died so fast and everybody lost their money. All the programming went out the window and he just the nana moments that he has on me because of it. But in our business we’re following attention. There’s a lot of different ways to do that.

And you have to look at the field. And you have to take some calculated bets, some calculated risks. And that also means that you’re going to have some calculated failures. I am hyper nervous of anybody who looks like they’ve got it all figured out. I’m even more nervous of anybody who articulates that they have it all figured out. Because I’ve been lucky enough to meet some smart people and the smarter they are, the less they espouse to having it all figure out.

[00:28:08] I think those two things are differentiators in when you’re talking about senior people who are looking, senior people were in these organizations. Because at the top of the top C level, everybody, you know that you’ve got smart people. And one thing that all smart people understand is that nothing’s perfect. And when marketing tries to sell a narrative of perfection, it mitigates any progress that they’ve made with the C suite. People want you to come in and say, I feel confident to this degree. Here’s the math backing it up. 

[00:28:45] However, when it goes the opposite direction, here’s what we’re going to do. When it goes in a positive direction, here’s how we’re going to step on the gas. When people come like that, I look and I go, okay, that mitigates upside mitigates downside. And that’s somebody that I can have a conversation with where I can raise my own hand and be like, I screwed up. I doubled down on this thing and it sucked.

[00:29:09] Ron Laneve: I just thought of another question. You mentioned it a couple of times. You mentioned the business side of things. And I’ll say math as it relates to marketing. How are you incorporating those things into your thoughts around curriculum and then I’ll let you go. 

[00:29:24] Jeff Culliton: So the marketing function. The biggest thing that’s changed is the amount of data that is being processed. But we’re still not threading that functionality, that ability, that curriculum, that teaching through marketing. We’re still too siloed in tactics. And on the other side of it, you have statisticians, you have these wonderful analysts that have the ability to pull those stories together with, factual basis.

[00:30:01] And I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job yet of forcing marketers, who are maybe creative, maybe a little bit more esoteric. We’re not forcing them into flexing the analytical muscle enough. In 15 years, you’re not going to find a CMO who doesn’t have the ability to call bullshit on data.

[00:30:26] You’re not going to be able to find somebody who has snuck their way through the process just by being a transcendent creative. I think that is one of the places for me that, higher ed it’s tough because it doesn’t move at the speed of a business necessarily. And as this is all happening, the people that are understanding that they need to take that time in that coursework in order to even if it’s uncomfortable, flex into analytics and flex into what is this data mean are going to be huge because the platforms are incentivized to give you as much data as possible.

[00:31:04] You and I both know that a lot of it is just fluff. What does an impression mean to me? Oh, it’s the biggest number that we get. So if I get a whole bunch of them, it’s great. Okay. How do, how does the platform declare an impression? How long does somebody have to look at it?

[00:31:20] Do they have to do anything with it? How many impressions do you need to get down to the math of somebody did something? And I just think that’s a, that, that’s a thing that needs to amp up pretty significantly. 

[00:31:31] Ron Laneve: And it’s been interesting for me to peer into that. Jeff, I really appreciate your time.

[00:31:35] This has been fascinating and I can’t wait to share it and continue to watch your journey. Obviously we’ll share the link and some videos to, to your podcast and you and Mike. So appreciate it. 

[00:31:46] Jeff Culliton: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. All right. Talk to you soon.

 

January 23, 2024