The Gist
- Balanced approach. Effective marketing requires a balance between short-term tactics and long-term brand building strategies.
- Learning from mistakes. Past marketing failures can lead to better strategies and prevent future missteps.
- Media utilization. Building in-house media capabilities can significantly enhance brand trust and market presence.
Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Recorded Future, shares his unconventional approach to long-term marketing success.
In this episode of CMSWire’s The CMO Circle, Wentworth digs into the importance of balancing short-term marketing tactics with long-term strategies to build a sustainable brand. And gives viewers an inside look at the steps he’s taken at Recorded Future — such as building an in-house news organization — in a move to establish trust and credibility within the cybersecurity space. Wentworth reflects on past mistakes and offers valuable lessons for CMOs aiming to make impactful, lasting changes in their marketing efforts.
Table of Contents
Episode Transcript
Michelle Hawley: Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me on today’s episode of the CMO Circle. I’m your host, Michelle Hawley, Senior Editor at CMSWire, and today’s guest is Tom Wentworth, Chief Marketing Officer at Recorded Future. He’s here to talk to us more about his unconventional thoughts on marketing.
Hi Tom, thank you so much for joining me today.
Tom Wentworth: Hey Michelle, happy to be here.
Michelle: So, I’ve heard that you have some outside-of-the-box ideas when it comes to marketing, so I’m excited to dig into your thoughts a bit today. One thing that you’ve mentioned to me is that people tend to underinvest in building a brand. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that and what you’re doing differently over at Recorded Future?
Tom: You’ve heard correctly.
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that CMOs face is wanting to show value. We join a new company and want to prove our worth, which for most of us means influencing revenue. At the end of the day, I only keep my job here, and we only keep our jobs if we can help the company grow faster. So there’s immense pressure on CMOs to focus on short-term results.
Which is important because we do want to contribute right away and obviously have a positive impact on revenue. But it’s so easy to over-rotate on putting all your brain power and all your budget behind short-term tactics because short-term tactics can certainly help accelerate revenue growth. My take today will hopefully show that over-rotating on short-term tactics is, in fact, the absolute fastest way to get fired.
It’s the fastest way to not generate the kinds of results that you want to generate for your company, but it’s the pressure that we all face.
Michelle: So tell me a bit then, I know you have some things that you’re doing differently, what are you doing over at Recorded Future that’s not necessarily a short-term tactic?
Tom: Yeah, it’s important that we balance these things. I think about two-thirds of my time should be spent thinking about how I’m going to help this company hit our quarter, hit our number this quarter and maybe next quarter, in 2024. But about a third of my time is spent thinking about what are things I can do in marketing that are going to have an unfair advantage over multiple years. It takes a lot of discipline to do that.
I’ve only learned this because I’ve made this mistake in my past. I’ve worked at a company where I spent all my time and all my money on short-term numbers. And that worked well until it didn’t. I can tell that story if you’d like, but I vowed never to repeat that mistake. So what we’ve done at Recorded Future, and it’s going to be different for everybody, I can’t tell you on this podcast exactly what tactics will work best for you, we started with a hypothesis that we wanted to build a relationship with an audience in a different way.
For Recorded Future, we’re a cybersecurity company, a threat intelligence company. One very simple comp to think about is what Bloomberg does for financial traders providing intelligence so you can be a better commodities trader or a better stock trader or a better bond trader. We do that for security professionals. We provide them with threat intelligence so they can better defend their organizations. So we said, if our product is kind of like Bloomberg, why don’t we kind of build our go-to-market like Bloomberg.
Bloomberg is most well-known for their news organization, Bloomberg News. And we thought, well, why don’t we sort of build our own news organization as a way to build trust with our audience? And if we did this, and if we’re able to successfully do this, we can start really building a relationship that would be almost impossible for anyone else to replicate. And it was hard, I can tell you the story of exactly how we got there, but we decided to build brand through news.
And I would argue it’s been very effective for us.
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Michelle: So going back a bit, if you’re willing to talk about it, you’ve mentioned working for a previous company, learning from your mistakes. Are you able to tell us a bit about what happened?
Tom: For sure. So I worked with a company called Acquia, in the CMO role, about 10 years ago. And love Acquia to death, great experience. I made the tragic mistake of just only committing to hitting the number in the short terms. Every quarter, me and our head of sales would sit down and we would, you know, wonder why we weren’t hitting our numbers or why we weren’t growing faster.
So I spent all my time and all my budget doing things that would help us hit the number this quarter. I didn’t think for a moment about, well, how do I build a better brand for Acquia? How do I think about getting Acquia in front of the kind of people who think about Adobe? Our biggest competitor was Adobe. Everybody knows Adobe. No one, relatively speaking, knew about Acquia. And I never spent a minute thinking about how to solve that problem.
Had I spent time thinking about how to do something there, I think Acquia would have gone public and would have been maybe, you know, even bigger than they are now. And it was the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career by far.
Michelle: So you get to Recorded Future, you decide we’re going to build a media company from the ground up. What did that process look like? Did you just go all in on the investment? Was it something you kind of built little by little?
Tom: Yeah, so we built it little by little and it was because one of the hardest things you have to get is a CEO who gets marketing and a CEO who’s willing to make longer-term bets. And I have one of those here at Recorded Future in Christopher Ahlberg. He also is a huge fan of Bloomberg like I am. So it was a reasonably easy sell. And it wasn’t that we set out to build a media company. It was we set out to build a relationship and build trust with our audience. And we thought that news was the best way to do that.
So the whole genesis of this was there’s just so much happening in cyber and there are so many interesting stories that just weren’t being told. So we said, why don’t we just go out and hire our own reporters and go do this? And this wasn’t ever meant to be a marketing investment. This organization we call Recorded Future News does report into me technically, but I don’t think of them as marketers, we don’t involve them in team meetings, like they don’t think of themselves as marketers at all. They have their own separate entity actually, at Recorded Future.
But we went out and hired an editor-in-chief. And this gentleman, Adam Janofsky, is a saint because he came over with a 100% leap of faith, and we said, Adam, we’re going to build a news organization, trust us, it’s going to be great.
And he came over and started doing editor-in-chief things, some reporting himself, bringing on some freelancers. And we had some success and we hired some more reporters to the point now where we have, I think, eight reporters, seven full-time in three different locations across the world out there putting out 10 to 15 stories a day on topics that we think are relevant to our audience.
So we started with one person. But now we’re maybe the biggest cyber news reporting team on the planet. And these people who work at Recorded Future, they all came from places like Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal or Politico. These are seasoned cyber and security reporters.
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Doubling Down in the Podcast Space
Michelle: But then at some point, you guys decided to step into the podcast space. You have a pretty successful podcast going on.
Tom: Yeah, we’d always had a podcast. I did not start this podcast, but the person who did was a visionary and we’ve done, by the time I started at Recorded Future four and a half years ago, we had already done like a podcast for three years, I think. Every single week, 52 times a year, you know how hard that is. Even when no one was listening, the podcast had an audience, but it wasn’t a massive audience, but it gave us enough confidence to say, well, what if we really double down?
Now we have this news organization called Recorded Future News. Why don’t we double down on the idea of also having a podcast? So instead of doing what everyone else does, like what you and I are doing now, two people interviewing each other, which is fine. That’s really hard to pull off because it’s so crowded. We decided to build sort of a narrative documentary style podcast. And to do that is hard because you have to have a showrunner, you have to write a script, you have to set up interviews, you have to do a different level of production on it. So in order for us to do this, we went on and hired a real legit podcaster. We went on and hired Dina Temple-Raston, who was a very well-known podcaster on NPR. She has a voice like an angel. Not only is she a brilliant storyteller, but she just sounds like a podcaster. It’s incredible how good she is.
And we gave Dina a production team. She brought over some of her team from NPR and we now have built, so we call this podcast Click Here. And it isn’t just this interview every week. It’s these real cool stories. Like Dina, her team flew into Ukraine right after the war and sat down on the ground level to figure out what’s happening and did some incredible reporting. And now this podcast has become, we’re in the tech news category. And it’s essentially every week like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Recorded Future.
We’re in the top 10 of this tech news category and getting over a million downloads a year at this point and growing. It’s been an incredible success.
Michelle: Yeah, I think the stories are what draw people in. They want to hear what’s going on around the world. Even when you’re talking about B2B, they want to hear about other companies and what they’re doing and the mistakes that they’ve made. So I think that’s definitely a great approach.
Tom: Yeah, and because we can get exclusive interviews, we can call up hackers. And we’re doing this as if we’re a media company, right? So yes, we work at a company called Recorded Future and Recorded Future is a SaaS cybersecurity company. But when we reach out, we feel like a news organization. So if Dina reaches out to you, she’s a trusted reporter.
You know, she’s going to be confidential. Like she has interviewed actual legit wanted-by-the-FBI criminals who will talk to her because they trust her as a reporter. Super cool.
Michelle: Yeah, I mean, in that space, I think trust is so important, especially when you’re talking about the written stories on your site.
Tom: Yeah, and one of the hardest things we have to do is, you know, we are, again, we sell software to clients, right? Like every other SaaS company, we have this balance of, reporters want journalistic integrity. They don’t want to be told what they can and can’t report on. So each of our reporters cover a beat and inside of that beat, they are empowered to write about whatever they want to write about. And sometimes they write about topics that don’t always necessarily align perfectly with Recorded Future.
But that’s, we knew that going into this and we’ve given them the ability to go write about what they want. Just like at Bloomberg, if you look at the editorial policy at Bloomberg, the only topic Bloomberg reporters can’t cover is Bloomberg itself. They can’t, you know, say bad stuff about Mike Bloomberg or Bloomberg the company, but everything else is on limits. It’s essentially that model for us at Recorded Future, which at this point, the reporters, I think, and that’s the leap of faith I talked about earlier, they were skeptical we’d be able to actually pull that off. But we have now 100% shown this journalistic separation of church and state mentality.
Michelle: Do you think, you mentioned being one of the top cybersecurity news sites, do you think having that integrity and being committed to stories that might not align with your brand, do you think that’s what attributes to the success of it?
Tom: I think it’s what contributes to the success of building an audience. I think, you know, we don’t do any sort of advertising on this site. Like we could easily, I could start running Recorded Future ads on this site. We really don’t do that at all. I’ll talk about how we think about it from a business perspective in a second. But our number one objective is to build trust with the audience by telling the stories they care about authentically. Everything else is sort of irrelevant to us.
So I think the success has only been because people trust us and people were skeptical in the beginning. Hey, a tech company is going to report on news. They’re just going to make it be a thinly veiled ad for their products. We’ve now proven definitively that’s not what we do.
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Michelle: Yeah, I think that’s probably what a lot of people are wondering. If you have this site that runs independently of the business almost, where does the link come in? Where does the money come in?
Tom: Yeah, so the money doesn’t come in. So we don’t look to make money on this site. We could. We have a big enough audience at this point where I’m very confident we could turn this into a pretty significant business on its own. We will not do that. We don’t care. What we do care about is the audience for sure. And there are some benefits to Recorded Future, which I’ll tell you two of them in one second, but we don’t try to make money here. We don’t try to use this as a lead gen platform for Recorded Future.
The crossover that exists for Recorded Future, the tech company who sells a SaaS product, is we have a newsletter called Cyber Daily that is essentially a daily or weekly recap of the news. So every day if you get Cyber Daily, you’ll get yesterday’s news from the Record. That product, the Cyber Daily product is a product that will get you into Recorded Future’s lead database for lack of a better word.
So if you sign up for Cyber Daily, all you gotta do is put in your email address, but you know you might get other offers and promotions from Recorded Future by doing that. So that’s one way that we sort of, you know, crossover between Recorded Future News and Recorded Future. We also use our account-based marketing platform to identify accounts who visit the Record.
We think that’s an interesting signal. If an account all of a sudden starts reading a bunch of articles on the Record, that’s a data point that our sales team might find interesting. And even though they might not know the name of the person specifically who’s doing that research or reading those stories, it’s a data point that lets us know that maybe that account, something’s happening, that account we should look into. Those are really the two ways that we think about passing information over between Recorded Future News and Recorded Future.
But the main way that we gauge success is honestly, when we talk to people, they’ll say, hey, I love Recorded Future News. Your podcast is great. And that gives us a lot of confidence to know that it’s working.
Michelle: You mentioned a couple of benefits too that come along with having the new site. What are those?
Tom: I mean, the biggest one is think about we’ve had in the past two weeks, we’ve had two stories that have blown up on Google organic search results. So one story in a week had just about a million search result impressions and 75,000 clicks to the article. And then another one a week later, last week, had 500,000 search views and 50,000 clicks.
So you think about as a B2B marketer, how hard, how much you’d pay for that traffic and how much you’d pay for 150,000 clicks in two weeks. And the answer is you’d pay a lot and it would never actually happen. But as a news organization, this happens reasonably frequently for us. So back to the idea of, if you think about the end of the day, I want people to know about Recorded Future.
Right, there’s lots of tactics I can do. I could go buy a billboard at the airport, right? Everybody in cybersecurity loves airport billboards. You know what they really love? They love Formula F1 cars. There are so many cyber companies who sponsor an F1 car. I got nothing against that. That’s a $2 million plus investment you’ve got to make to get your logo on an F1 car. They do that in order to get their logo in front of people.
You know, we’re doing that in some ways through news. I think we’re reaching a whole heck of a lot more people in doing that. And we’re not just putting our logo out there. We’re building trust with the audience by telling them what matters, like massive benefits to us. So the oversimplification is this is our equivalent of the airport billboard or the Formula F1 car. But in reality, it’s a way for us both to build our brand and to essentially build trust with an audience, we think those two things are pretty awesome.
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Michelle: So for marketers that are out there and they’re saying to themselves, okay, I need to focus on these long-term strategies, get away from the short-term. Do you have any advice for how to maybe convince other executives to invest in something where it’s going to be long with the payoff or the payoff isn’t easily quantifiable?
Tom: I think the first thing is the hardest, what everyone in marketing wants to do is copy everyone else. No one should copy what I’m doing. It only works in some ways because we’re in cyber, because we’ve been able to build a big team of reporters. It’d be really hard to copy me. Like people who just start a podcast and become just another podcast, like every other podcast, don’t do that either. So I think in some ways, marketing is like this game of arbitrage where you’re always trying to find the white space to go where no one else is, but the natural tendency is just to follow the crowd.
Like my competitor is on TikTok, so I should be on TikTok. If you do that, you’re going to fail without a doubt. Don’t do that. So I think the first thing is to start to find things that you can do uniquely and own and commit to over a long period of time. Because if you go do that thing for three months, it’s going to fail. If we had looked at the Record, our news site after three months, we would have cut it. It would have had 10,000 views a month. Terrible, right? We just hadn’t built an audience yet. It took us a year to really start to see the results of building an audience.
So first thing is find white space and to give a very specific actionable thing to do. I think a platform for B2B with white space right now is YouTube. I spend all my personal time on YouTube these days, my 10-year-old daughter, she doesn’t know any actors or celebrities. She knows YouTube celebrities. FaZe Rug, you know who FaZe Rug is? FaZe Rug is this like, I think pretty wholesome. He used to be a gamer, but now he’s got this massive YouTube channel, like massive, like is as big a celebrity as any Hollywood celebrity. And the 10-year-olds, they know FaZe Rug. They don’t know what a Tom Cruise is, right?
I think YouTube for B2B has this massive white space. What’s great about YouTube is the algorithm prioritizes stuff you like. So if YouTube knows you like B2B and you’re a B2B publisher putting content out on YouTube, I think the algorithm could direct a ton of content to you. Now, why don’t people do that? Because it’s hard. Like you can’t just put a camera up. Here’s my phone. Hey, here’s my YouTube video. Hey, check it out. I’m Tom. I’m on YouTube.
Like it’s really hard to build a fan like these YouTubers who do it. Mr. Beast, FaZe Rug, MKBHD, these guys who create massive audiences. Like they are building media companies, too. If I didn’t have other things to do right now, I’d find a way to be all in on YouTube as a creator and dominate that channel as just an example of a of a white space opportunity. There’s no one on YouTube. TikTok even. I don’t have TikTok. My daughter’s not allowed on TikTok, but like that’s wide open for creators. So I think it’s time to see some B2B companies make a big bet there.
Future Plans at Recorded Future
Michelle: So we’re just about out of time, but I wanted to ask you, I have one more question before we go. So you have this successful news site running, a podcast, a long-running podcast. Do you have any other plans in the works that you can share with us?
Tom: We’re intrigued by video, we’ll do something with video, but we’ve set the bar so high that we don’t want to do the selfie video on an iPhone. We’ll do something with video. These creators, and maybe FaZe Rug’s a bad example, because that dude is making millions a day probably at this point, but there are so many unbelievable creators who B2B marketers could go out and say, wow, that person was able to build their like, skincare. There are a ton of skincare creators out there building massive audiences. Go hire one of those. Go say, hey, look, I know you do the skincare thing on your side hustle, but I’m gonna hire you to go do what you do for skincare for B2B. Go find some creators.
So we’re enamored with something like that. How do we get out there and maybe think about video in a different way? But do it in the Recorded Future style of having it be, you know, really, really well done.
Michelle: By bringing in the experts, don’t just wing it.
Tom: Don’t, and marketers, we love to wing it. It’s like, just because you have a mic and a camera doesn’t mean you’re a podcaster.
Michelle: Well, that’s all the time we have for today. Tom, thank you so much for joining me and giving us some insight into your marketing tactics.
Tom: Thank you so much.
Michelle: Thank you everyone for joining us for this enlightening episode of the CMO Circle. Don’t forget to check back next month for an all-new episode. And in the meantime, if you’re looking for some great new content, you can check out our other CMSWire TV shows, Beyond the Call and the Digital Experience.
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