QueerX’s Post

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Oh, hello, Paul. Hello Jeremy. So good to see you. Great reconnecting. Loved hearing just about your personal and professional accomplishments over the past few years since it had been a while. So happy to have you here. I have the pleasure of knowing who you are. Why don't you tell our oh hello audience who I'm speaking with right now and who they're listening to. Hello everyone. My name is Paul Kontonis. I'm the chief marketing officer of Reverie, which is an LGBTQ first streaming TV company. Love it. Love it. Paul, You have a fantastic experience of. Of of being a marketing leader in many different realms. Would love to hear a little bit more about just. Your experiences, you know what to what to find you, What has made you who you are today as a a father, as a professional, who it has been a chief marketing officer and at multiple places who has ran huge teams, small teams, big companies, startups. What's a fine to what makes you who you are today for me? One of the things that absolutely drives me is moments of change. I love moments of change. Opportunities to evolve a business idea, to launch a business idea, to grow a business. Those are the moments that I'm attracted to like a fly to honey, we. The already built sitting there rinse and repeat type businesses. I I don't get it. But the chance, the chance to drive something new into a market, oh, that's exciting. That is exciting. That is exciting. Not nearly as exciting as the fig tree in your backyard in Queens, but quite exciting. I hear you on that. It's nice to be able to invent and and make change for sure. How would you characterize just this overall skill set that you're going to be able to share with the O Hello community from a, you know, I don't know. I think always think of it as a straight up skill set. It's more a mentality of destination planning. It's starting with Where do we need to end U? OK, how do we get there? It's it's one of the reasons why I think the CMO role has been so challenged. In the last 15 years, I would say it has the shortest tenure in the C-Suite. Primarily because it lost touch with the destination. It lost touch with the destination being a monetary goal. Sales. And what I like to do in every situation I'm in is work backwards from where do we need to be in sales? OK, well, how many customers is that or how many products do we have to sell new Oregon trial customers, right, repeat or trial? OK. What does that bring us back to locations, work backwards, work backwards. Then you could start to build your marketing plan because you know where you're going to end up. And So what I look to do for every business I'm involved in whether helping coming into Digiday CMO or launching my own web video studio or CMO of who say and then became CMO, Viacom ad solutions. It was always about what's the destination, how are we going to get there and primarily how is marketing going to get us there? Love that. I love that. It's the journey. And that's what you and I were talking about in our in our, in our prep call and our catch up was just how, How? So many people overlook the journey of getting to the it's not necessarily the getting to that end result. It's what did you do to accomplish it. How did you change what were the effects. And we were talking about from not to get too personal but just someone that you know within your network who is is a is a peer of yours but in a different industry who had hit a point where they had spent 30 years professionally unhappy and when you are able to spend time and have. Creating that journey and asking those questions and having those goals, it makes it a lot more fun And so I would, I would think by you going to a lot of these different companies wearing the chief Marketing Officer Cape and coming in to. That call it Cape and an apron to be the chef and to have it. Ultimately, get to that end result of that you know, great fig pie, whatever it might be. I like that out and few, very few other people have have gone down that route. What excites you about mentorship when you think about just being a mentor to so many people within marketing, within entertainment, within content? What? What gets you excited about it? So anytime I get to work, Oregon be introduced to a new company. With regards to marketing, it always is a new set of ingredients. If you want to go back to that apron, it's a new set of inputs, right? Having been in education and publishing and tech and now in in media, right TV being a TV company. The underlying principles, what I call the transferable skills, are always the same. The process is the same. The machine that underlies the work is exactly the same, but the inputs and the ingredients change. And so anytime I'm exposed to hearing about a new business, understand, getting to understand a new business, I'm like, ah, OK, that's, that's that, that's that, that's an important detail. That's an important detail. And then building that picture in my mind is awesome. I love it because then I start seeing. New, cool, fun, exciting things. So there is that little bit of a rush with getting all the new ingredients like being at the Iron Chef and opening U with their ingredients and go ooh this is what we have to work with. What are we going to make that's that's fun. Love the Iron Chef analogy when looking back becoming an Iron Chef. What would you tell your younger self? What would you tell? Would you tell those watching that are midway through their career whether they're 253545 would however old they are? It doesn't matter, but just things that just advice or recommendations if you could look back and say. Damn it Paul you could have should have done this or to those just hey here are things I didn't think about that could be helpful nowadays. O when I was younger I-20 I guess 526, I got to an agency called Best in Tully and Lee and helped turn them into BTL design was there rebrand and I pushed hard for me to be the CMO. I was 26. I had no right whatsoever to be pushing for that role. Yet I pushed for it to get it because I was in a rush to stop doing what most people would call The Dirty work, the grunt work. I was in a rush to just lead. I wanted to be the guy in charge, the front of the boat. We're going there, we're going to go there. I wanted to be there mostly because I never liked everyone else's leadership, so I was just wanting to be the leader. But. The importance and every step of that journey for me of actually doing the work has enabled me to come into different positions and not be afraid of doing the work and the ability my ability to. Get my hands dirty, Yeah, at the ground level and fight that ground war alongside my marketers enables me then to have a better understanding of what are the challenges, the opportunities, the threats are weaknesses. Our strengths. It gives me a much better sense of that and a sense of how to help my teams do even better because like a conductor, I've learned every instrument in the orchestra. I'm not great at them all. I stink at most of them. But I know what it takes to get it done. And I I would say along the way, do not rush to get away from doing the the groundwork. Do it, learn it, understand it before you move on. Do it. Learn it, understand it. Before you move on, going back to the Iron Chef analogy that we're using, grow the go and plant the seeds. Grow the seeds, pull them out of the card and go to the grocery shop. Go to the butcher. Learn where all you know where you're sourcing all of the ingredients from. Learn how to knife preparation, water temperature, everything that comes with. Just don't be too good for any kind of role. I love that. I really appreciate that. Who are some of the top mentors that have had a profound impact on you? Whose main impact? Yeah, so probably my first most impactful. Mentor was one of the founders of that agency, Best Intellian Lee. David Lee has since passed on. And he was. He had two partners, Mal Besson and Joe Tully, and all three of them were just so different from each other. Yeah, David was able to sit in the middle and and get the most out of. Both of his partners and he was always kind of somebody who was counseling me to take a breather, relax, soak it in. Even though I did it, I fall. Yeah, I was just going to say, did you though? No, I didn't want to. But in hindsight, I look at it and go, ah. Umm, that was the first one. And then more recently was I I coach soccer as well as run a soccer club, and the prior club I got to be at Blowy. Scotchy had a director, a technical director there by the name of Paul McGlynn. His son now plays Philadelphia Union Jack McClain. He's fantastic and Paul was such an incredible mentor. On how to coach, how to how to breakdown the game into practices and how to make those practices relate to the players to then relate to the game. And I've used soccer as a. A guide for how I build my marketing teams. I've used it for how I approach campaigns, approach a bigger strategy. I actually use a lot from what I learned on the soccer field to how I approach business. So two different styles, right? One who I got along great with David and. And one who gave me **** all the time, Paul and was always on my case and and never liked anything I did. But it pushed me to learn and. You know those two, those two have been my hallmark mentors. Thank you for sharing that. Would love to hear about a cause that's near and dear to you. As you know, as a hello, as a mentor on the platform, you're going to be able to donate some of your proceeds to just about 50 different charities. What's a cause that's near and dear to you? Well, at Reverie, being an LGBTQ first network, we are really focused on the importance of representation in media and what does it mean to people to see themselves, to see people like them? Projected and portrayed in authentic and inspiring way in a lot of cases. And So what I find I'm I'm inject purpose into our marketing. As defined as inspiring expiration of these authentic voices from the LGBTQ community for the social economic benefit of the community and so. I'm doing it by being hands on and anytime you know, we can get involved in an organization and support them. And most recently I've been working with a. A soccer organization out of New York called New York Ramblers, which is the It's a nonprofit. It's the oldest. Gay men Soccer League. Cool. That exists. It's out of New York and and that's who we've been supporting. We sponsored jerseys and it's awesome and giving them as much support as we possibly can. I love that. That's great. That's great. Any other parting words of wisdom or advice that you want to give to the oh hello community? Innovation and change are your friends. Don't be afraid of them. Get into every platform. Get your hands into everything. See what it's all about. But. At the same time, understand most of it can be emperors, new clothes or something not much different than you already have. It's just the the, the, the flavor, the current flavor. The principles remain the same. The platform may change, the look and feel may change, but the underlying strategy does not. So do not, you know, jump into everything new. Go for it, have fun with it. But don't forget your core marketing principles. Amazing. Paul, thank you very much for coming on the oh, hello pod, Thank you to our listeners. Thank you for viewing. Take care of my friend. You thank you, Paul. See ya. That was that good.