“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” - Alan Watts

Marketers are often viewed as change agents. There are a few reasons why this occurs. Many organizations are led by marketing. The standard marketing challenge is always “What new innovative idea can we bring to market?” Or one could say “What can we do to disrupt the status quo and create positive activity for our product or service?” After every campaign, initiative or...

Marketing to kids can be tricky. It can also be exciting and fun. My favorite agency experience was working on VERB, a social marketing campaign from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about getting tweens (kids 9-13 yeas old) physically active. It was a five-year campaign that had amazing results – we motivated millions of tweens to get moving and to do so with imagination and fun.

After the completion of the campaign I was...

Do you work in a fast-paced environment? Does every marketing project or task seem urgent? Are your sales teams/clients pushing you to go live ASAP? Dealing with conflicting priorities? Feeling like you are making mistakes in your haste to get things out the door? Republishing marketing materials because of those mistakes?

This probably sounds familiar to those in marketing, both brand and agency sides. While some industries are certainly more fast-paced than others, no vertical escapes the...

Implementing cross-functional change initiatives can be daunting. First you need to consider how to execute the change. Then you need to worry about what you can do to ensure adoption of the change by the organization. And beyond roll-out, how do you guarantee this new change becomes part of the daily job responsibilities for those impacted colleagues? Flawless execution alone won’t ensure adoption and alignment.

Breaking down the change efforts into smaller steps can help you reach your...

Do you have a growth mindset? Are you looking to learn and grow like me? Do you seek out big, audacious goals or do you phone (today, we’d say text) it in? I always find it rewarding to work in an exploratory environment where the emphasis is on new ideas and innovation. It may come from the start of my career at a variety of agencies, where that was the norm. It is something I took with me when I transitioned to the brand, aka corporate, side of the business.

I was hired to build a function...