Marketing consultant, Fractional CMO, brand strategy, energetic speaker, foodie, soccer player, and proud Dad

I’m passionate about marketing and building brands, and that energy is evident from the first moment of interaction. My approach combines curiosity with strategic thinking and creative solutions to help businesses stand out and grow through effective marketing.

With over 20 years of experience, I’ve led transformative projects across diverse industries, including technology, medtech, consumer goods, and professional services—serving both B2C and B2B clients. In 2012, I founded Common Giant, where I helped companies harness branding as a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked client-side managing retail stores up to $52MM in revenue, served as VP of Brand Strategy on the agency side, launched an agency with global clients, and acted as a fractional CMO for multiple businesses. My experience spans branding, marketing strategy, and creative execution across a variety of business models.

"The guy you want in the room." - Former coworker.

I believe in these four core principles:

1 - Marketing is a business practice. 
It’s not just about promotion. Marketing is a series of levers to pull for higher profits.

2 - Know the customer as much as you know yourself.
Understand what, how, and where your customers buy to serve them best.

3 - Grow the orchard while you sell the fruit.
Focus on long-term brand growth while capitalizing on immediate sales.

4 - Boring is expensive.
Mediocre marketing is forgettable, less effective, and costs more in the long run.

Beyond my work with brands, I'm an enthusiastic keynote speaker, delivering engaging talks on branding, marketing, creative problem-solving in business, and effective marketing strategies to audiences of all sizes.

Phillip Oakley

Jelena Budjevac, PMP

Digital Marketing Channel Strategy Director

straight4word agency

straight4word offers nonprofits and small businesses meaning marketing, their own factional CMO, so they can focus on their mission and improve how they market and communicate to their audience. I’ve helped various organizations (video production, fitness, nonprofit, etc.) with website redesign and launch, social media strategy, content creation, etc.

Founder

Taoti Creative

Taoti is a full-service, award-winning creative agency with over 25 years of experience delivering meaningful outcomes for our clients. We work with world-class brands on marketing, digital strategy, brand, UX/design, web development to make a measurable and meaningful difference and get results.

Some of what I do:
• Lead marketing and communications from the creative to high-level strategic to the daily tactical for our agency and our clients
• Oversee our key advertising client account
• Partner closely with agency executive team, talented designers, savvy strategists, dedicated project managers across our diverse service areas to deliver brand, marketing and communications ideas and services to our clients
• Manage our passionate team of marketing and communications professionals

Director of Marketing and Communications

Arete 

Arete is a cybersecurity firm with a global footprint that focuses on cyber risk and incident response, tech-enabled managed services, and powerful data insights

Achievements include:

 ➤  Improved brand equity and CX through a brand overhaul: 
       - created new brand elements, templates, processes from the ground up
       - launched new website

 ➤  Built the marketing foundation from scratch to be professional grade both internally and externally
       - deploying centralized intake process for marketing requests and projects 
       - set standards, created examples and delivering training to the company's center of excellence.

 ➤  Reduced risk by defining and adhering to professional standards
       - introducing cookie compliance tools for the new website to meet GDPR, CAA, etc. requirements
       - drafted 2 company-wide policies for internal communications, social media

Director of Marketing

Dupont Underground

Dupont Underground is a progressive nonprofit startup focusing on architecture, design, and art. 

Led marketing, communications, and PR. Worked with a variety of stakeholders, advanced teamwork and drove consensus-building in a fast-paced environment. 

Achievements include:

 ➤  Built a ground-up, grassroots marketing campaign across multiple social media platforms to sell out all live events and shows as part of PRIDE. Voted and awarded "Best A+E Event" by The Washington Blade for 2021

 ➤  Achieved record sales and highest attendance ever (+28.5% compared to 2019) despite a 30% decrease in days open to the public given the pandemic for 2021

 ➤  Defined, developed and managed brand, introducing professional standards along with KPIs, data, and technology to improve brand equity 

 ➤  Increased brand awareness and sales by creating an integrated marketing strategy with a scalable, diversified mix of content, focusing on digital, direct email marketing, video and livestream storytelling; launched TikTok, Instagram Reels and Live

 ➤  Organically increased social media by 25% (audience), 134 (reach), 101% (engagement), and 181% (profile visits)

Chief Marketing Officer

Developed strategy and managed projects and operations in the US and globally, with a focus on:
- branding, marketing, communications, and PR
- business development
- knowledge management and IT processes and systems.

Accomplishments include:

 ➤  overhauled completely how the practice delivered content to our clients from writing to be more client focused and understandable; structuring and organizing our content to be easy to find and use; designing a user-friendly, streamlined subscription management system

 ➤  rolled out the new approach globally throughout the firm to increase and strengthen our brand and improve our client experience worldwide

 ➤  led marketing for multiple practices to create resources and processes to market their capabilities and deliver valuable insight and thought leadership to their clients, including developing marketing materials and social media campaigns, designing trade show booths, producing videos, and more

 ➤  drove development and implementation of the first streaming video show for PwC, Inside Tax Policy, to advise businesses on tax policy as developments evolved using technology in a new way

Director

- Directed operations globally for EY's Transportation Industry practice, including communications, marketing, PR, knowledge management

- Oversaw communications, marketing, PR, and knowledge management for International Tax Services, National Tax Department, coordinating with 30+ member affiliates worldwide

Associate Director

Improved and managed:
- communications
- marketing and public relations
- knowledge management
for International Tax Services at Ernst & Young LLP's National Tax Department

Assistant Director

- Managed communications, public relations and knowledge management (ranging from database, intranet and internet sites, mobile platforms, etc.) for International Tax Services at EY's National Tax Department

Supervisory Associate / Senior Associate

- Managed accounts and billing for the high net worth individual practice
- Researched and analyzed businesses, industries and provided competitive intelligence, including tax benchmarking of target companies in relation to their competitors
- Planned training and client events nationwide and locally

Associate

Combining art and science, creativity and data, emotion and reason to deliver modern marketing and communications for organizations across industries. I connect brand and technology to deliver a stellar client experience (CX) and business results. 

 ➤ 25 years marketing and communications expertise
 ➤ across diverse industries (financial, legal, arts, cyber, technology)
 ➤ trusted advisor to C-suite and management
 ➤ diverse business environments (global matrixed, nonprofit startups).

Key experience includes: management of small and large teams, brand development, brand management, campaigns, client experience, content creation (audio podcasts, video, marketing collateral, thought leadership, annual reports, articles, etc.), digital storytelling, digital marketing (SEO, social media, email, websites), customer journeys, communications (both employee and external, PR), data, research and focus groups, knowledge management, operations, and project management.

taplio

The Battle

Phillip Oakley

Jelena Budjevac, PMP

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