Stop Using Someone Else’s Playbook

This episode features an interview with Tom Wentworth, CMO at Recorded Future, the world’s largest threat intelligence company, working with over 1,600 businesses and government organizations across more than 74 countries.

In this episode, Tom talks about building Recorded Future News, a separate P&L that has become one of the largest cyber intelligence news sites, and a trusted media entity that breaks important news in the cybersecurity/intelligence world.

Key Takeaways:

• Brand building is not just about creating awareness, it is about building trust and building relationships. 
• Sometimes, the only information you need to determine ROI is whether your clients and prospects feel your initiative provides them with value.
• A quick way to fail as a CMO is to run someone else’s playbook. Make sure that you understand the current company and context; create a bespoke plan. 

Quote:  “If you think about brand building, what most people do in cyber security, when they get to be Recorded Future size, we’re about over 300 million in ARR, which makes us a pretty good sized company. What most companies our size do, is they go buy an F1 sponsorship, or they go put their logo on some sports team’s jersey. And that’s cool. That’s a cool way to get in front of people, but I don’t think it builds trust. Like, why would I trust this vendor just because their logo is on a jersey or their logo is on a car? That just tells me they’ve got a lot of money to spend. So we said, instead of going to do that, the way that we’re going to build awareness for Recorded Future and build a relationship with our audience is through news and then through a podcast, which I’ll talk about a little bit too. So that’s our brand awareness investment. We feel very confident that people who fall in love with our news are also going to like our product. I don’t have to prove it, in the sense that I don’t have to have this super complicated attribution scheme. We just ask our clients and our prospects, ‘Hey, do you like Recorded Future News?’ And they love it. That’s just about enough for us.”