Marc Lefton
Gainesville, Florida
Overview
Here's what nobody tells you about marketing. The industry split itself into two religions. On one side, the brand people. They make beautiful things that win awards and can't tell you if it moved a single unit. On the other, the performance people. They can recite your cost-per-click to the penny and their ads look like they were designed during a layover. Both sides think the other is the problem. They're both wrong. The best marketing is creative work that performs and performance work that's creative. It's the same thing. It was always the same thing. The industry just forgot. I never f
About
Here's what nobody tells you about marketing. The industry split itself into two religions. On one side, the brand people. They make beautiful things that win awards and can't tell you if it moved a single unit. On the other, the performance people. They can recite your cost-per-click to the penny and their ads look like they were designed during a layover. Both sides think the other is the problem. They're both wrong. The best marketing is creative work that performs and performance work that's creative. It's the same thing. It was always the same thing. The industry just forgot. I never forgot. I'm a Fractional CMO and Creative Director. One person. I build the strategy, write the ads, buy the media, read the analytics, and do it again faster. The person who made the ad is the person who knows if the ad worked. No handoffs. No game of telephone where your brand voice dies somewhere between Slack channels. I also do stand-up comedy, which has nothing to do with marketing except it absolutely does. Improv trained me to listen before I pitch. Stand-up trained me to get to the point. Both trained me to read a room and know when something isn't landing. The best marketers and the best comedians share the same skill: they know what the audience is actually thinking, not what you wish they were thinking. I started as the youngest art director at BBDO. I've run agencies, built startups, taught at the School of Visual Arts, led SCORE North Florida, wrote a book on programmatic media, and built one of the first social networks before anyone called it social media. I'm in the top 0.1% of AI power users and I use that to move at a speed that makes agencies uncomfortable. My side projects include an AI-produced sketch comedy series, an app for tracking your enemies, a one-letter Wordle, and a history book you'll have to decide is serious or funny yourself. When hiring a marketer, ask what their side projects are. If it's all client work, maybe they're after a check more than it being the air they breathe. Monthly retainer. No contracts. No markup on your media spend. If you've fired your agency, outgrown your freelancers, or the CEO is still doing the marketing at midnight in a Canva tab they're not proud of, let's talk.