Ryan Coté is the director of digital services and partner at Ballantine, a third generation family-owned direct mail and digital marketing company based out of Fairfield, NJ. The business was started in 1966 by Ryan’s grandfather and great-uncle, and its mission is to make their clients’ marketing initiatives more successful through expert guidance, flawless execution, and remarkable service. He currently manages the growing digital marketing division, primarily responsible for sales and strategy.
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Ted Mann is the CEO of Slyce, the market leader in image recognition and visual search. Slyce has created the first computer vision system for visual product search and has led to customers like Macy's, Home Depot, JC Penney, Neiman Marcus, Best Buy, and Urban Outfitters to deploy image recognition in their apps. Before Slyce, Ted founded SnipSnap, the first mobile app to let consumers save printed coupons to their smartphone and redeem in store. At the time SnipSnap was acquired, it was profitable and the app had five million users, who redeemed more than 250 million coupons. Prior to starting SnipSnap, Ted was digital development director at Gannett, where he led the development of the company's first hyper-local network, daily deal websites, and blog operations, in addition to managing the core news websites.
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Erik Reynolds, vice president of product marketing and communications for Loot Crate, is an 18-year veteran of the video game, tech and entertainment industries. Erik has worked with some of the most impactful brands and talent to help them craft the public story of their IP, and deliver those narratives in an engaging and audience-friendly manner. From executive producing an hour-long special about 50 Cent and hip-hop’s influence on video games for Spike TV to scripting and shooting BTS materials for dozens of games, Erik has leveraged every channel for storytelling to get the job done. Previous collaborators and represented brands include 50 Cent, Katy Perry, Mr. Miyamoto, Wizarding World of Harry Potter, The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, and more than 100 other games/IP launches supported in his career generating billions in revenue for the companies he’s represented.
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“Give your teams time to be thoughtful.”
Erika Eklund is director of communications at HGA Architects and Engineers, a national multi-disciplinary design firm rooted in architecture and engineering. The company has more than 850 people in 10 offices from coast to coast and works to make a positive, lasting impact for clients in healthcare, arts and culture, community, corporate, education, government, and energy markets. In her role Erika oversees firm-wide internal and external communications, including brand strategy and media relations. She has an extensive communications and external relations background with creative organizations, and previously served as business developer for HGA’s Arts, Community and Higher Education Practice Group.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HGA ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERS, CLICK HERE.
TO FIND ERIKA EKLUND ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.
As chief marketing officer and chief operating officer at Steiner Sports, Kelvin is at the intersection of sports marketing and finance. A CPA, former CFO, and business owner, he utilizes his extensive experience in business consulting to help businesses grow and profit by identifying and leveraging sports, athletes and major events with a constant eye on the bottom line. Kelvin helps companies – from new startups to Fortune 500s – monetize their marketing spend by determining what sports marketing strategy will benefit the company the most, providing access to the right athletes and properties at the right time, negotiating contracts for the best deals, and measuring and analyzing results to ensure ROI.
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• How small and large brands can benefit from sports marketing.
• The benefits to smaller brands of using event marketing to earn implied endorsements.
• Using sports marketing to build audience affinity.
• His recommendations for integrating a sports marketing approach your marketing mix.
• How the power of sports marketing can enhance any product or service.
Kevin T. Payne is founder of kevintpayne.com and a growth and content marketing consultant. He helps early-stage startups implement growth marketing campaigns to increase their inbound leads, increase website traffic, and speed up their sales cycles by using marketing automation software. He is the creator of Growth Driven Marketing For SaaS Startups, a 12-week online intensive course for SaaS founders that teaches them how to double their leads, become influencers, and gain their investors’ trust. He also writes for several online publications including HubSpot, BlackEnterprise, Blavity, and Creativelive.
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Ed Graczyk is an experienced chief marketing officer for start-up companies as well as a 16-year Microsoft veteran where he launched more than a dozen products worldwide. He has built and led high-performance marketing teams and programs for award-winning consumer, enterprise, and business-to-business-to-consumer products and services. He has deep vertical market experience across Internet and online services, telecom and cable, TV and media, IPTV and Internet video, digital entertainment, and financial services, along with a huge passion for the travel space.
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Robert Galop is SVP, Product and Marketing, for IntelePeer, where he oversees product strategy and delivery to market of IntelePeer’s leading-edge communications products. His career has been focused on the high-tech industry, including roles in application development, project management, and product and marketing leadership. He drives delivery of successful products by focusing on customer value and end-user experience.
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Ben Petersen, marketing manager at Blade HQ, is a guerrilla storyteller with a passion for craftsmanship. Ben has spent the last seven years selling pocketknives on both the B2C and D2C sides of e-commerce, and now manages the in-house creative team at Blade HQ. Accolades include: consistent double-digit revenue growth at Blade HQ, receiving the Best Video Award from the American Marketing Association, and millions of views on YouTube.
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Brian Massey is the founder and Conversion Scientist™ at Conversion Sciences, as well as the author of Your Customer Creation Equation. His rare combination of interests and experience were developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, international speaker, and writer. Conversion is the science of turning website visitors into leads and sales. As a Conversion Scientist, Brian has helped dozens of businesses redesign their online strategies and focus their budgets in the places that will deliver bottom-line results.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CONVERSION SCIENCES, CLICK HERE.
TO FIND BRIAN MASSEY ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.
Brandi Starr is the COO and managing consultant of the Tegrita Consulting Group, an Atlanta-based company focused on providing a Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) and securing their clients’ success. Brandi is a true Modern Marketing Maven. She believes marketing magic happens at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and technology. Brandi's 15-year career has spanned a variety of industries and marketing disciplines. Her expertise includes demand generation and nurture strategy, business process transformation, controlling email frequency, and custom security, and she is the SME for the Higher Education vertical.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT TEGRITA CONSULTING GROUP, CLICK HERE.
TO FIND BRANDI STARR ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.
Michelle Levitt has been the marketing and creative director for Heil Sound for over 13 years. Michelle’s background is as a musician, an artist, a marketer, and a creator. She knows from experience that personal development is professional development. At Heil Sound, Michelle is responsible for oversight of all advertising decision making, design, and execution; management and presentation of company social media; website layout and design; campaign design for special events and contests; and graphic design of large-scale trade show displays.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BRILLIANCE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, CLICK HERE.
Lori is the founder, president and CEO of Brilliance Business Solutions. Brilliance specializes in B2B eCommerce - setting up websites for manufacturers and distributors that allow their customers to order from them online. Last year the company won a Future 50 award, recognizing the 50 fastest growing companies, from the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, and Lori was awarded a Woman of Influence award from the Milwaukee Business Journal. Before Lori started Brilliance, she was a flight controller at NASA-Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BRILLIANCE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, CLICK HERE.
In his role as director of product marketing at Datorama, Jay Wilder supports more than 2,000 leading brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms worldwide, and brings a radically different approach to marketing analytics with an (AI) machine learning powered end-to-end platform that integrates, standardizes, and visualizes marketing data for deep analysis and insights. He is an expert on digital marketing, content marketing, customer stories and community building, sales enablement and readiness, market/competitive analysis, and all things data-driven marketing.
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David Sasson is the president of overstockArt.com. His strengths are business strategy, innovative solutions, marketing and sales, and general business management and leadership. His leadership focus is on building a team of individuals that are committed to their growth goals and the exciting environment that they are building.
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Holly Gage is a UK-based independent marketing consultant. She has worked in B2B marketing for almost 20 years, including for companies such as Bluewolf (a partner with Salesforce), and as head of Marketing Services for EMEA. She has developed marketing strategies and executed campaigns across Europe, Asia, and North America, and is passionate about helping organizations make sense of marketing technology, and use it to improve the way they engaged with their customers.
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TO FIND HOLLY ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.
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Caitlin Halpert is the Growth Engineer at 3Q Digital. She’s responsible for driving growth, efficiency, and new ideas to enable 3Q to best serve current and future clients. She has worked in digital marketing since 2011 and held positions at Dealer.com and iSearchMedia before joining the 3Q team in March 2014. Her experience includes management of paid search, paid social, comparison shopping, Amazon Marketing Services, YouTube, and Display. She’s worked with a variety of clients from eCommerce to subscription services to B2B lead generation.
Caitlin specializes in data-focused digital marketing experimentation to push past “best practices” to drive the performance for agency clients. As an industry thought leader, she has spoken at HeroConf, SEMpdx, and SMX East, West, and Advanced.
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With over 13 years of global digital media experience, Kellie has worked at some of the industry’s top agencies and media organizations including Publicis, Universal McCann, and News Corporation. With her various strategic and client service roles, Kellie brings a wealth of experience ideating, executing and analyzing innovative advertising campaigns.
In her role as the Vice President of Advertising at Unified, she oversees the Strategy, Account Management, and Campaign Management teams that provide best in class Advertising Services for some of the world’s largest brands. Kellie was recently named as one of MarTechExec’s ‘50 Women You Need to Know in Martech.
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With over a decade of experience in digital advertising and marketing, Rick Martira has extensive knowledge in emerging media and creating effective marketing strategies for global brands. Rick joined Unified in 2011, where he currently serves as VP of Marketing and leads all product marketing, content and marketing strategy for the company. Prior to his time at Unified, Rick worked for some of the top advertising agencies including MediaCom, Omnicom and Digitas, where he deployed successful campaigns and strategies for brands such as Delta, Hasbro, Electronic Arts, Ghirardelli and more.
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Phil Singleton is a self-described “SEO grunt” obsessed with tweaking websites for search engine optimization and functional performance. He is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant and holds a B.S. in Finance from Fairfield University, as well as an MBA from Thunderbird, The Graduate School of International Management in Phoenix, Arizona.
Phil is a co-author of the award-winning, Amazon best-seller The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Local Lead Generation and author of the Amazon best-seller How To Hire A Web Designer: And Not Get Burned By Another Agency.
In addition to providing inbound marketing consulting services to companies across the United States, Phil provides custom SEO-friendly websites under the brand Kansas City Web Design® at KCWebDesigner.com and online marketing and search engine optimization services under the brand Kansas City SEO® at KCSeoPro.com.
Phil is an active blogger, and his content has been featured at Duct Tape Marketing, Freshbooks, SEMRush.com, Ahrefs.com, AdvancedWebRanking.com, WebDesignerDepot.com, and many local Kansas City and Midwest regional print publications and media sites.
Over the course of his career, Phil has helped dozens of US start-ups and tech companies raise millions of dollars in strategic venture capital investment and cross-border licensing agreements in the Asia Pacific region; run the global retail and online sales divisions for a best-selling line of consumer software products; and started a software company in Asia, raising over $1M in venture capital funding, growing it to profitability with 25 employees, and then selling it three years later. The latter experience is what got him into SEO and Internet marketing — in short, by following the ROI trail to SEO.
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TO FIND PHIL ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT KANSAS CITY WEBSITE DESIGN SEO AND TO FIND PHIL'S BOOKS, CLICK HERE.
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As President and Chief Executive Officer of Visto, Kerry is responsible for driving strategic direction and business execution across the entire organization. Kerry joined Collective (now Visto) in 2015 and held the roles of both Chief Operating Officer and President before assuming the CEO role in 2017. She is a 2017 Silver Stevie Award winner for “Female Executive of the Year, Business Services – Computer Services and Software” as well as a past winner of Brand Innovators “Top 50 Women in Brand Marketing.”
Kerry brings to Visto over 25 years of experience in media, advertising, and consulting. Prior to Visto, she was at E*TRADE Financial overseeing the company’s paid media, agencies, martech, and analytics partners. Prior to that, she was Managing Director for the global media management consulting division at Accenture, leading business development and services for its enterprise media and analytics practice. Earlier in her career, Kerry held senior leadership roles at Reader’s Digest, Time Inc., Hill Holliday and TBWA Chiat Day.
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Min Wang is Vice President of Digital Marketing for Brocade globally, where she leads the teams responsible for the company’s digital and customer experience transformation, marketing operations, online marketing, Web, Search, demand generation and pipeline, marketing technology, data, and analytics.
Min has 20 years of high-tech industry experience spanning software, hardware and cloud services. As a transformative, passionate and result-driven marketing executive, Min has a track record of successfully leading customer experience and digital transformation across global IT and marketing organizations. She is obsessed with data and technology, and use them to grow revenue and improve marketing efficiency. She is also proficient in building and leading highly-motivated multi-disciplinary global teams.
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Kae Penner Howel is currently the Creative Director for Green Chef, the first certified-organic meal kit company, Kae has many years of experience leading teams and inspiring great work on global brands. At Green Chef, Kae leads a multi-disciplinary team developing advertising, photography, video, packaging, and content for a wide array of marketing platforms.
Before that, at DanoneWave, Kae led an award-winning in-house creative agency focused on design, storytelling and creative strategy. Kae specializes in creative brand positioning and equity work, helping to bring every brand’s essence to life, establishing a strategic advantage.
Kae’s passion is making smart, beautiful things that people can’t ignore. Before working in the natural foods industry, she worked at creative agencies in both Chicago and Denver. As a strategic leader, Kae inspires others to find their best creativity and bring it to life.
Kae is a published writer, has been an adjunct professor at several colleges, and holds a B.A. in English Literature from Mundelein/Loyola, and an M.A. in English from Northwestern University.
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Kelly Charlton is a senior leader with a background in customer-centered marketing, sales operations, and sales management. Adept at grasping big picture concepts in large companies and complex industries, Mrs. Charlton is skilled at creating strategic marketing plans from high-level visioning, and then implementing those plans to achieve company targets.
While serving on a leadership team, Mrs. Charlton is as a role model. Within the start-up environment, her optimistic mindset, hands-on change management experience and tenacious pursuit of goals are tremendous assets.
A decade of experience in sales, sales management, and sales operations have prepared Mrs. Charlton for her role as a senior marketing leader. She effectively incorporates sales goals into marketing strategy and appropriately communicates between both teams.
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SHOW NOTES
Paul Geiger helps businesspeople communicate clearly, overcome their fear of public speaking and promote themselves and their ideas with effective speech techniques. He is currently a Senior Associate Instructor at New York Speech Coaching in New York City.
Paul uses his training, his experience and, more importantly, his intuition to figure out the key action steps that work for each individual client. Paul is also an accomplished actor, voiceover artist, and on-camera host. His new book, Better Business Speech: Techniques and Shortcuts for Public Speaking at Work, provides readers with the tools necessary to make lasting changes that will enhance speaking skills in all facets of business life.
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