Marketer Spotlight: James O'Brien - The StartUp Marketer

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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): In our Marketer Spotlight series, we’re sharing quick insights from top marketing leaders in the SUM community. We sat recently sat down with James O’Brien, a senior marketing and advertising consultant with executive-team experience specializing in content-forward projects.

Known for providing critical expertise to campaigns of all sizes, leadership consultation during times of significant change and growth, James blends empathy and relationship-building with a strategic, data-driven approach. With experience at top companies like Digiday, Verve, The Boston Globe, and Contently, James contributes his expertise as a member of the StartUp Marketer (SUM) Advisory Board.

1. Why did you join the SUM Advisory Board?

Startup mindsets are where I’ve spent most of my career. That’s where the energy and speed to market lies. The opportunity to expand and deepen my experience of working with smart and hungry entrepreneurs is the chief draw of the SUM Advisory Board. Getting to learn from the sheer depth of experience on the board would be enough, but that we get to help lift projects and dreams to the next level … irresistible.

2. One piece of advice you’d give your younger marketing self?

Success is often a start and stop process. You can be 100 percent correct and still lose a particular battle. Nobody ever learned authentic confidence and resilience from never falling off the skateboard.

3. What’s the most underrated marketing tool in your toolkit?

Generosity. The first thing I often see in the harried world of startups is a brevity and concision—born of time constraints and never-ending stressors—that flattens the ideas (and magic) of the project. Anyone who’s worked on my team will tell you that I emphasize it in almost every step, from emails to finished reports: Slow down and give more.

4. What’s your marketing superpower?

Deep listening coupled with a mind for making systems out of subtexts. That means searching, in all the practiced and unpracticed words that we say about projects, for the solutions that live inside the problems and challenges as the partner describes them. From there, it’s about building tactics and strategies that start with what those words can tell us about the client’s deeper (and often best) ideas.

5. What’s your go-to resource for staying ahead of marketing trends?

9,000 newsletters a day. The deep stuff is in the solo practitioners’ and small-shop chronicles of the industry and rarely well framed—or well framed soon enough—by the big, mainstream pubs (sorry, big mainstream pubs!). And never stop talking to the people who know more than you know.