On June 27, 2017, Triangle Marketing Club presents a marketing leaders panel featuring four accomplished names in the marketing industry. The panelists will give us information on what companies are looking for in a marketer, what skills are in demand during this time, and other great information you do not want to miss!
The Interview
We provide the TMC audience with the opportunity to get to know our speakers on a more personal level with our monthly speaker interviews! I got a chance to ask these inspiring people a few questions via conference call, so we can get to know each of them a little better. So let’s meet our talented panelists: Dan London, JT Moore, Greg NG, and Karlie Marlowe!
Dan London, Vice President, Revenue Marketing at Bandwidth.com
If you don’t mind sharing, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
“I’ve been in the area for 20 years. I have worked at a number of startups, most recently ShareFile that was acquired by Citrix, then Ansible that was acquired by Red Hat, and now I’m at Bandwidth.com as the VP of Band Generation.”
What inspired you to choose a career in Business/Marketing?
“Well, I came to the realization that being 5’10, American, and not being able to fight, I wasn’t going to have a hot career. With an English degree you can do pretty much anything, but you can also do nothing, so I kind of ended up falling into marketing that way. I tried teaching for a little bit, I loved it, but it was just the administrative and the lack of pay that drove me back into marketing. I think it was very helpful going into the teaching experience for a little bit. It helped me learn how to talk to people and it helped me with planning and coming up with strategy with the lesson plans. It was a short time of my life but it really helped me get to where I am right now.”
What is one key takeaway that you hope the TMC audience leaves with after hearing your presentation?
“I think that anything is possible in your career, if you just learn. I think I have been successful getting to where I am just by doing everything I can that I can get my hands on and trying to be as well rounded as possible. With the people that work for me, I try to get them out of their little style of doing emails, and they should really understand what’s going on with social, lab design impact, conversions, and things like that. Hopefully, people come out of there going: ‘I should learn different things even though I’m not going to be doing them’.”
JT Moore, Strategy Director at Centerline Digital
If you don’t mind sharing, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
“I think what makes me a little unique is that I’ve just always known I’ve wanted to be a marketer. Before going to college, that was just my deciding factor, I went to college for marketing and went back and got a Masters in it as well. It’s just what It has always been what I wanted to do and what I think I am here on this planet to do. I started off in an internship helping small businesses start their marketing department which led me to a technology training company where I helped kind of round up the marketing department and eventually took it over and ran it for a number of years. Then after about 9 years in that company, I left to come to Centerline because I have always had the dream of starting my own agency or being involved in agency world. Now for the last year and a half, I’ve been working in the strategy department doing marketing with large B2B Enterprises.”
What do you believe are necessary characteristics an individual should have to be a successful marketer?
“I look at the concept of the T shaped professional meaning that I want people to have a broad set of skills, and that may be in different disciplines and/or different programs. They need one really deep set of skills, so they have expertise that I can lean on that helps round out that kind of skills gap within a team and you can build those skills around each other. Along with that broad set of skills, there is a people and communications aspect that I think marketers for a while got away with being a little bit too technical at times. We have to sell to our clients and we also have to sell internally and really understanding to hold ourselves accountable as marketers, we need to understand the pain points of our clients, and more importantly how they are trying to drive their business. How I can be of service to my customer as well as to the business objectives. I kind of see that as the T shaped employee complex, deep expertise, but also having a strong small scale toolbox as well.”
What is one key takeaway that you hope the TMC audience leaves with after hearing your presentation?
“I think the biggest thing that’s probably gonna come out is that our industry is being and our current profession is being judged by minute things. I think we are gonna start getting evaluated more on how all of the pieces work together to really impact the business. How do you really connect all of the dots and show that you are driving business impact and that it’s not just a thing that you think about, but actually it’s not theory anymore if you can actually do it. So I hope people just takeaway that in our profession, we should hold ourselves a bit more accountable for the business and not just the fun, creative stuff that we might do.”
Greg Ng, VP, Digital Engagement at PointSource, LLC
If you don’t mind sharing, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
“I started as a designer, I went to school for graphic design and became an art director and then creative director. I have worked in small agencies, big agencies, client side, consultancy, analytics, user experience, and strategy. I am currently VP of Digital Engagement at PointSource in North Raleigh.”
What inspired you to choose a career in Business/Marketing? 
“I think I have always been fascinated with advertising and marketing. In particular, just how a TV commercial or radio ad could make you as a viewer or listener think or behave in a very specific way. I’ve said it in the past that in a way, it’s very much like a manipulation game, and I use that in a very positive way. Marketing is such a great opportunity to create an environment or message for the end user to understand exactly what you want them to know, not necessarily the truth mind you, but exactly what you want them to know and then cause them to act to do something. And so, even though I’ve been in many different departments, starting off in design and then working through advertising, I’ve always been addicted to creating something that other people consume.”
What is one key takeaway that you hope the TMC audience leaves with after hearing your presentation?
“So I’m gonna say three things and they’re all related. The first is that the importance of being skilled in certain programs or applications or different skill sets are becoming less and less important, at least in my eyes. I certainly don’t hire for them anymore. Particularly because experience or certification, and stuff like that, I can pay for someone to have. That’s not what’s gonna stand out in the market. It’s the understanding that the market is changing. A lot of people are asking ‘what is the difference between now and two years ago’, or ‘what will be the difference between now and three years from now’ and the reality is the thing that people forget is it’s the journey that is gonna make you a very nimble and successful marketer. You need to understand that every day the market is changing and it’s changing because every day there is a disrupter in the market that is resetting expectations for customers and therefore having a trickle effect on everyone else. And then the final part of that is that people need to ‘have an out of body experience’ or always remember to put themselves in the mindsets of the end user. Now, marketers have to play a role in a bigger, broader ever changing ecosystem. I am looking for people who are able to evolve their thinking and be nimble and responsive to the market very quickly.”
Karlie Justus Marlowe, Director of Marketing and Visitor Services at North Carolina Museum of Art
If you don’t mind sharing, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
“I grew up in Asheville and came to Raleigh a little over ten years ago, to go to NC State where I majored in communications. I wanted to either be a journalist; I minored in journalism, or work in PR. I really fell in love with Raleigh and I knew I wanted to stay around the area after graduation. My first job out of school was at the NC State fair in their press office, so I was working in the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, but a big part was focused on social media relations. By the time I graduated, social media was becoming a thing that businesses were doing, so it was a really fun place to engage on social media, fried food, pig racing, rides, and all that fun stuff. About two years ago I started at the museum of art here in Raleigh. I had interned here while at NC State. I knew it was a place that I wanted to be and I was sort of looking for a career change. I started as digital marketing manager, and then last fall moved into the director of marketing and customer services role. Outside of work, my husband and I live in downtown Raleigh, we love the area and we are huge NC State Sports fans. The Raleigh Rescue Mission is also somewhere close to my heart.”
What do you enjoy most about your current job?
“I think at the museum I enjoy the variety. We always have new, interesting, and exciting stuff going on whether it’s one of our two bigger special expositions that we do each year. Coming from sort of a marketing, storytelling perspective, it’s fun to really dig into the niche and figure out how do we root to people who aren’t traditional museum goers, because the show really runs itself. And, just the place of the museum, and the energy and landscape of Raleigh, I just feel like it’s just an important piece of the Raleigh experience. I love being involved in something like that because I love the city so much.”
What do you think are some difficulties that marketers face today?
“I think one, being competition. Just the competing factors for people’s money, their time, their attention, and all the different messages that are out their because of all the different channels that are now out there. So just breaking through the noise and being able to stand out, and making sure we are wisely cutting through all of that. I think the other difficulty is having to be the jack of all trades. It can kind of be hard to wear all the different hats all the time.”
It was great getting to know these awesome individuals and see their different perspectives! Dan, JT, Greg, and Karlie will be sharing some valuable new knowledge you won’t want to miss, so don’t forget to RSVP! Hope to see you at the next TMC event on June 27, 2017 at KnowledgeTree in Raleigh for our Marketing Leaders Panel!