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How many times in the last couple of years have there been out-of-reach marketing results that get bigger and grander by the quarter? How many more MQLs can you obtain 10x than last quarter? Are MQLs even working anymore? Do more. With less budget. With fewer people.
It’s hard out there to be a pimp marketer; it’s even harder for marketing leadership. So, some heavy hitters in the B2B marketing space came up with an idea. The B2B CMO Project. “Community and Insights for the Modern B2B CMO”.
This new project is a community brainstorm with some smart people: Jon Miller, Co-founder of Marketo and leader of a stealth AI start-up, and Sydney Sloan, 4X CMO & Executive-in-Residence at Scale Ventures. Full disclosure: Jon Miller was my boss during my time at Demandbase.
A bit about the B2B CMO Project, from Jon Miller himself: “The B2B CMO Manifesto.”
“The B2B CMO Project exists because marketing leadership is in crisis. CMOs are losing the seat at the table we only recently earned. While we’ve been obsessing over MQLs and attribution models, we should have been shaping markets and building brand equity.
The B2B CMO Project exists to give marketing leaders the tools and support to navigate this transition.
We’re building the community, research, and frameworks CMOs need to reclaim their strategic role and drive sustainable growth.”
You can read the manifesto here
So, how does one develop this idea? I had the opportunity to build this project. The scope: We need a website and to brand our podcasts. We need a way to showcase our community. And it needs to look great… like, really great… because we are targeting CMO leadership. And it has to make a visual impact.
So, I was honored to build this idea for them. I built a couple of fun brand projects for the group.
There are 3 parts to this project: The Project, The Podcast & The “List.”
We needed a design foundation and wanted a consistent, modular logo system from the beginning.
As marketers, we’re all about KPIs and Growth stats. So, the XY graph as the design foundation is the cornerstone of the identity. It’s a nice visual way to anchor the logo system. It just frames nicely.
We needed consistency, but we need some subtle differentiation
The main focus of the design is the community. These marketing leaders and their peers working together needed to be emphasized. We chose an illustrative theme for the headshots and the overall identity. The paper effect literally “tears a page” from the old marketing playbook, symbolizing the ripping out of ineffective practices. (Ok, that might be a stretch, but it’s a fun starting point.)
With that vibe in mind, we updated everyone’s headshots and gave them an AI makeover. I’ve always loved the illustrated profiles of the New York Times & Wired staff. And with Midjourney, we could create this way faster than drawing from scratch. As an illustrator, I couldn’t draw these quickly enough to launch this project on time. So, using the actual headshot photos and style references yielded some lovely results. And ties the identity together.
And by the way. THERE’S 100 OF THEM! (That’s a whole ‘nother story on the process)
Bringing everything together to create a bold, unique website is always challenging, but we achieved it. It has a strong pop and visual impact thanks to the bold color choices and illustrative elements. We’re quite happy with the results. We’ve recently upgraded our web development services; this site is built on Webflow, which is a partner of the B2B CMO Project.
The paper textures, along with the subtle charts, graphs, and illustrations, combine to form a lovely identity. It’s super bold, has clean elements, and we’ve highlighted the illustrated headshots in a unique way. We’re pretty proud of it. Also, it doesn’t hurt the caliber of people on this 100 list, which strengthens the project’s validity.
Designing for content is both fun and challenging, especially when it comes to podcasts. The art of creating a podcast thumbnail is definitely a skill in its own right. What makes you click on a thumbnail? The data shows that including people in the creatives performs well, so our illustrated headshots should work brilliantly, and I think they’ll stand out. Designing for Spotify AND YouTube involves some interesting constraints and many moving parts. Thumbnails for episodes, branding for the channel, and then adding some social content needs—all building into a comprehensive design system that ties into the entire identity.
This was a pretty high-profile project, and it was also a startup in a way. We built a great brand identity and website, and excited to help launch it. So, check out the site www.b2bcmoproject.com or LinkedIn, YouTube & Spotify!
If you like what you see here and need help with your next creative marketing project. Please reach out or hit me up on Calendly to set up a call.
Creative can be a circus. Let us help.
Cheers
Greg
Idea Circus 💡 🎪
Not “Influencer” social,.. but social enough.
In the last year, this team processed 856,648,859 words across 100,000+ articles in 50 Languages. That’s a lot. I had the opportunity to build an internal brand for the Cisco International Experience (IX) team, which handles all localization projects for the company.
I had the opportunity to brand a startup, named Context River. Data is a river. Data works better in context. That’s the brand concept behind this new startup. Project by Idea Circus
Blog Project Showcase : Datacor A post by: Datacor Rebrand Project A new project to showcase. Datacor, a manufacturing software company, reached out to me