How I Made it in Marketing

Updated: 04 Nov 2025 • 155 episodes
www.marketingsherpa.com/podcast

Marketers are the artisans of commerce. Our palette is ideas. We ply our craft to facilitate choice. To empower every person creating value in the world – sharing their inventions, their service, their good works. And ultimately, to keep a society built on choice functioning.But also…This is one of the most fun, wildly creative, never-grow-up, 99% boring meetings followed by 1% of sheer creative brilliance, funny-yet-frustrating-yet-fruitful career choices you can make.Let’s explore the dichotomy.In this podcast, Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa dives deep into marketers’ and entrepreneurs’ careers to inspire your next great campaign, give you strategies for winning approval on your ideas, and help you navigate the trickiest decisions in your career. The curious, comprehensive style of these interviews allows marketing and business leaders to do what they do best – express themselves to communicate a key lesson.Listen in as we probe marketing leaders about how they crafted campaigns, built their careers, and what they learned along the way. We’ll get deep, we’ll wring insights form our guests to help you, and we’ll have fun doing it.This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher online course (https://meclabs.com/course/).

Show episodes

Blandvertising [https://marketingexperiments.com/copywriting/writing-meaningful-copy]. It’s a word I coined 13 years ago to describe a wishy-washy marketing claim. The type of words that fill a copy block. They look right. And it’s probably sprinkled with words like “scalable,’ ‘ecosystem,’ ‘user-centric,’ ‘best-in-cla

39 min
00:00
39:29
No file found

Some of the best conversations I have with my kids are during filler time. Not the quality time you hear hyped up – just a side conversation over breakfast, or driving to an errand, or putting together Ikea furniture. Marketing and public relations can be the same. Instead of focusing all this attention on forcing a cu

39 min
00:00
39:53
No file found

I am not a numbers guy. And I’ve been in my fair share of meetings with decks filled with endless charts and data and my eyes glazed over. I’m sure you have as well. So were we the problem? Were we just not captivated enough by the correlation coefficient? I think not. And I think the reason why can be best summed up b

57 min
00:00
57:11
No file found

The total addressable market. TAM. We sometimes think the bigger the better, right? Hey, it means I can go to potential investors with a more impressive number. But too large a total addressable market can hinder success. As this episode’s guest says, “serving everyone serves no one.” To hear the story behind that less

55 min
00:00
55:53
No file found

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight. Excuse my remixing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but doesn’t it feel that way when staring at a dashboard sometimes. We have so much data – and frankly, our competitors probably have a lot of the same data – but can we turn those numbers into real insights to better serve

73 min
00:00
01:13:52
No file found

I love Delta Air Lines. It’s my favorite airline. Please understand that. Now, that said, when I was a kid, their tagline was ‘We love to fly and it shows.’ I would see the tagline on TV ads. I would see it on giant posters in the airport. And then I would get on the plane. And even as a kid I could tell…the people wor

48 min
00:00
48:50
No file found