The 10 Influential Marketing Leaders to watch in 2019

How do you diversify your
organization’s offerings to appeal to
the target audience?
As primarily an online/mobile brand,
our marketing is built to blend offline
and online experiences for the
audience to discover or participate in.
Since our company is about getting
people to travel and experience
cultures around the world, diversifying
across both spaces leads to inspiration
and ultimately action.
What were the past experiences,
achievements or lessons that have
shaped your journey?
Work as a brand planner at ad agencies
gave me sharp consumer focus and the
ability to find a key insight to drive the
work. Work as Director of Marketing
at Snapple gave me the experience of
managing a business. Work at CNN
immersed me in cross-platform
marketing and content marketing.
Facebook gave me the passion to work
for startups, an expertise in scaling
businesses, and understanding of how
to build/manage high-performing
teams. In particular Facebook gave me
the experience to manage high growth
and to build marketing strategies that
can scale and work internationally.
Culture Trip is giving me the
opportunity to build a new brand in the
minds of consumers as we are a travel
and media company with relatively
low brand recognition but huge
potential in English speaking markets
and globally.
How do you strategize your game
plans to tackle competition in the
market?
The principle that matters most is to
create a “difference that makes a
difference.” If your strategy does not
accomplish this, it will not be
meaningful or useful to consumers.
What were the primal challenges
and roadblocks you faced during the
initial phase of your career as a
marketing leader?
The challenge was to figure out how to
solve problems without being within a
traditional training program. For
example, being in brand management
at P&G is an amazing training ground,
it creates incredible skills and
experience. I was trying to figure it out
as I went and at times could feel like I
was “punching in the dark.” Although,
that challenge has helped me
enormously later on my career as it
gave me a very strong muscle for
solving ambiguous problems. Often
marketing can be the forcing function
for the other teams and also the most
visible connector that gives a company
internal coherence and momentum.
That has been almost invaluable in the
startup world.
What inspires you to become an
influential marketing leader?
I love marketing. I’m a complete nerd
about it. So, the inspiration at this point
comes from building teams that build
brands and help great talent reach their
potential.
Where do you see yourself in the
near future and what are your future
goals?
I see myself bringing Culture Trip to a
global audience and disrupting the
travel-media-tech space that we sit in
the middle of. My goal is to create a
new category of business from the
work we do here.
What is the future of technology and
marketing?
My answer is that right now the most
interesting thing is augmented reality.
People talk about virtual reality but for
Culture Trip we really want people to
do things in the real world, to book and
to travel, and augmented reality is how
eventually you can seamlessly
integrate online and offline at the same
time. If you can imagine someone
walking down the street, and looking
over at a building and augmented
reality is able to tell them the history of
the building. All that is related back to
the content and the data that they are
interacting with. That is going to
become a major enhancement and a
major opportunity for marketers -
presenting a more seamless and much
more interesting way to communicate
with consumers and users.
About the Leader
Mike Fox is the CMO at Culture Trip,
a travel, media and technology
company with offices in New York,
London, and Tel Aviv. He has also
worked as Senior Level Marketing
Executive with over 20 years’
experience in both consumer and
business-to-business markets. In
Mike’s early career he started working
at advertising agencies, before moving
client-side to Sony Electronics and
Snapple Beverages. Next he joined
CNN’s Strategic Integration Group,
where he created multi-media content
platforms for some of the world’s
largest brands. Next he worked in
CNN’s Strategic Integration Group
before, in 2009, he joined Facebook’s
monetization team and helped build the
teams that grew Facebook’s annual
advertising business to $12 Billion in
five years. Since leaving Facebook in
2014, Mike has worked as CMO and
CRO on early stage startups before
joining Culture Trip.
| April 2019
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