#51: Promises, growth, giants, startups, and gentle ruthlessness
Happy Thanksgiving, friends! Here's a real photo of me from this year's holiday:
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In this edition of the World's Best Newsletter:
1. Hollow promises of 'femvertising'
2. Elle Woulfe's most important marketing hire: ops
3. A modern media movement: Sleeping Giants
4. Grow fast or die fast
5. Women, interrupted
6. Should you join a startup?
7. A woman at Tesla outnumbered by coworkers named Matt
8. Quote of the week: Gentle ruthlessness
1. Hollow promises of 'femvertising'
My recent talk at the Women in Digital conference in October was thoughtfully covered by Business First's Carrie Ghose, check it out: Feminist onscreen, mostly male in the boardroom: Digital marketer calls out hollow promises of 'femvertising'
2. Elle Woulfe's most important marketing hire: ops
If you're a B2B marketer, you probably know Elle Woulfe. If not by name, then by content. She's responsible for much of the great stuff that came from Eloqua before it was gobbled by the Oracle monster, and since then from Lattice Engines and now LookBookHQ. Or, you caught her Boston Content talk a few months ago!
In this AMA from GrowthHackers, someone asked the wise question "should marketing ops be your first marketing hire?"
Her response highlights a good point - ops and growth are similar, but different. Growth marketing may focus on building an audience and driving awareness/interest (I call it buzz), while ops develops the framework to support that audience and interest.
This is great advice. Attention and awareness has very little real impact without a framework to take advantage of it, and optimize it into $$$$.
It's a critical role, today. SiriusDecisions found that six years ago, companies spent 1% on marketing ops. Today? That number is up to 6%, even with headcount decreasing.
3. A modern media movement: Sleeping Giants
Ad revenue is power for media outlets. More money, more reach, more influenced by dangerous ideas.
I'm interested in what Sleeping Giants is doing to make companies aware their ad dollars are (often unknowingly) running on sites like Breitbart and other hate-fueled, divisive outlets.
For anyone not familiar with Breitbart or why it's so dangerous, this is Steve Bannon's far-right propaganda arm with a knack for racist content (like a "Black Crime" column), sexist opinions (like an article "Why there out to be a cap on women studying science and maths"), and unbelievably misogynistic points of view that I won't publish here.
(If you somehow don't believe me, google it. If you still don't think it's a problem, please unsubscribe.)
No modern brand wants to be fueling this, and Sleeping Giants makes it easy for you and I to let them know when their ads are putting dollars in the pockets of these kinds of organizations. Take away their ads, take away their power.
4. Grow fast or die fast
This is a great McKinsey roundup of perspectives on growth in the software industry. Some gems:
"I said from day one that we’re building a small, global company... I think it’s grow fast or die fast. In the world that we’re disrupting, the die slow is not really happening. If you have a solution that fixes a global problem, you have to go global right away. You have no choice, otherwise someone else is going to take that spot." - Anaplan’s Frederic Laluyaux
"...the sales and marketing aspects of the company—which is probably the other large investment both with respect to people and in overall capital that the company’s utilizing—have to be world-class in their ability to create awareness, buzz, brand appeal, and affinity as well as be able to take advantage of that from a selling and go-to-market point of view." - Jive Software’s Tony Zingale
"I don’t look at it as one company; I look at it as many different companies, because each stage is so different. The growth is what makes it possible to broaden the impact, and impact is what makes it possible to grow again." - Synopsys’s Aart de Geus
5. Women, interrupted
Guys, someone made an app that detects how often women are interrupted in a conversation.
Not familiar with "manterruption?"
Watch all these recent examples, WOW there's a lot, and go check out the app.
6. Should you join a startup?
I like Jeffrey Bussgang's advice in this HBR article... you're only ready for a startup if you have a clear point of view. Startups need ideas, every day, all day, as much as they need execution. Bring ideas to the table the very first meeting you have:
"Start-ups run lean, so they’re willing to take on only those people who can drive their success and have a point of view on their business."
TBT: Read my perspective of being employee #12, and advice to new college grads.
7. A woman at Tesla outnumbered by coworkers named Matt
Even in an highly innovative environment like Tesla, our male-dominated enterprises leave women feeling powerless. The full article in the New Yorker (h/t to Hannah) show what it's like to be a woman within Tesla.
One anecdotal piece: "One former Tesla employee told me that women made up less than ten per cent of her working group; at one point, there were actually more men named Matt in the group than there were women."
There are some moments of hope within the piece. A Tesla executive, Jon McNeill, president of global sales and service, said "I can’t help that I’m a white dude, but I can help the culture that gets created." I guess that counts as a progressive POV these days.
But, overall it's a sobering piece that reminds us this issue is nothing new, and likely not changing quickly.
Another former Tesla employee “...this is an industry that is supposed to be the future. They are so dedicated to making things different, and better. But this is a huge problem that they’re not addressing and not really trying to change.” She paused. “I don’t think they’re capable of changing, honestly.”
Quote of the week; a gentle sort of ruthlessness
This time of year is full of change, caught somewhere between looking back, and planning ahead. I always loved this sentiment from poem "girl of the earth" by Katy Maxwell:
"...you must allow yourself to outgrow
and depart from certain eras of your
life with a gentle sort of ruthlessness..."
Have a great weekend,
Katie