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OhHello - Paul Kontonis
61 Plays1 year ago
Episode 56 of the OhHello.io 🌞☕️ vod/pod - where this "Hello" and I cooked-up more food analogies than all other 55 episodes combined 👀
2 favorite nuggets from this fun convo:
🍯 "I love moments of change. Opportunities to evolve a business idea, to grow a business, to launch a business- those are the moments that I'm attracted to like a fly to honey."
🍯 The mentality of destination planning as a business: "where do we need to end up and how do we get there? Do it. Learn it. Understand it. ...before you can move on."
Paul Kontonis serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Revry, the global #lgbtqia + streaming media company. Before joining Revry, he held the position of Chief Marketing Officer at WHOSAY, an influencer marketing firm within ViacomCBS. Paul is a seasoned strategic marketing executive and brand builder with 25 years of experience, adept at guiding businesses through the ever-evolving marketing landscape to achieve revenue and company M&A objectives. Known for his energetic and creative leadership, he assembles confident and agile world-class marketing teams that consistently exceed expectations. Paul's commitment to the marketing industry is evident through his involvement in various organizations. He is a member of the ANA GLOBAL CMO GROWTH COUNCIL, has held the position of President at the Global Online Video Association, and served as Chairman of the International Academy of Web Television. Paul's educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Psychology from New York University.
We're stoked to have another #cmo join the OhHello.io tribe! Thank you, Paul; we're excited to have you on the platform next month!
In a few short weeks, between Thanksgiving and the Winter Holidays, we'll be hard-launching/releasing v2.0 with more mentors, more capabilities, and better experiences for all!
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Go sign-up at ohhello.io!
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Transcript
Reconnection and Introduction
00:00:10
Speaker
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.
00:00:36
Speaker
Hello, everyone. My name is Paul Cantones. I'm the chief marketing officer of Revry, which is an LGBTQ first streaming TV company. Love it. Love it. Paul, you have a fantastic experience of being a marketing leader in many different realms.
Passion for Innovation
00:00:54
Speaker
We'd love to hear a little bit more about just
00:00:58
Speaker
your experiences, what defines you, what has made you who you are today as a father, as a professional who has been a chief marketing officer at multiple places, who has ran huge teams, small teams, big companies, startups. What defines you? 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.
00:01:27
Speaker
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. The already built sitting there rinse and repeat type businesses. I don't get it, but the chance to drive something new into a market. Ooh, that's exciting.
00:01:55
Speaker
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 make change for sure.
CMO Role Challenges
00:02:10
Speaker
How would you characterize just the overall skill set that you're going to be able to share with the Oh, hello community from a, you know, I don't think always think of it as a straight up skill set. It's more a mentality.
00:02:24
Speaker
of destination planning. It's starting with where do we need to end up? Okay, how do we get there? 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
00:02:51
Speaker
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? Okay, well, how many customers is that? Or how many products do we have to sell? New or trial customers, right? Repeat or trial. Okay, what does that bring us back to?
Journey and Goals
00:03:16
Speaker
Locations, work backwards, work backwards.
00:03:19
Speaker
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 coming into DigiDay as CMO or launching my own web video studio or CMO of Husay and then became CMO of ICOM and 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.
00:03:43
Speaker
I love that. I love that it's the journey and that's what you and I were talking about in our prep call and our catch up was just 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 a peer of yours, but in a different industry.
00:04:13
Speaker
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, you know,
00:04:40
Speaker
call it Cape and an apron to be the chef and to have it ultimately get to that end result of that great fig pie, whatever it might be. I like that. Very few other people have gone down that route. What excites you about mentorship?
Mentorship and Skills
00:04:59
Speaker
When you think about just being a mentor to so many people within marketing, within entertainment, within content, what gets you excited about it?
00:05:08
Speaker
So anytime I get to work or be introduced to a new company with regards to marketing, it always is a new set of ingredients. If you want us 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 media, right, TV, being a TV company,
00:05:33
Speaker
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 any time I'm exposed to hearing about a new business, getting to understand a new business, I'm like, ah, okay, that's that, that's that, that's that, that's an important detail, that's an important detail. And then building that picture,
00:06:00
Speaker
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 up with their ingredients and going, oh, this is what we have to work with. What are we going to make? That's that's fun. I love the Iron Chef analogy. When looking back, becoming an Iron Chef,
00:06:26
Speaker
what would you tell your younger self? What would you tell those watching that are midway through their career, whether they're 25, 35, 45, 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.
Advice for Young Professionals
00:06:46
Speaker
Or to those just, hey, here are things I didn't think about that could be helpful nowadays. So when I was younger, I,
00:06:55
Speaker
20, I guess, 526. I got to an agency called Besantelian Lee and helped turn them into BTL design was their rebrand and I pushed hard for me to be the CMO. I was 26. I had no right
00:07:12
Speaker
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 always just wanted to be the leader.
00:07:38
Speaker
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 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, our weaknesses,
00:08:08
Speaker
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 would say along the way, do not rush to get away from doing the groundwork. Do it, learn it, understand it before you move on.
00:08:37
Speaker
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 Uh pull them out of the garden go to the grocery shop go to the butcher learn where all you know where you're sourcing all the 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 I really appreciate that
00:09:05
Speaker
Who are some of the top mentors that have had a profound impact on you?
Influential Mentors
00:09:11
Speaker
Who's made an impact? Yeah, so probably my first most impactful mentor was one of the founders of that agency, Besantully and Lee, David Lee, 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.
00:09:34
Speaker
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 gonna say no, I didn't want to. But in hindsight, I look at it and go, ah, that was the first one. And then
00:10:04
Speaker
More recently was, I coach soccer as well as run a soccer club. And the prior club I got to be at, Blah Wyskotchi, had a director, a technical director there by the name of Paul McGlynn. His son now plays Philadelphia Union, Jack McGlynn. He's fantastic. And Paul was such an incredible mentor
00:10:30
Speaker
on how to coach, how to how to break down the game into practices and how to make those practices relate to the players who then relate to the game. And I've used soccer as a
00:10:48
Speaker
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 when I learned on the soccer field to how I approach business. So two different styles. One who I got along great with, David, and one who gave me shit all the time, Paul, and was always on my case and never liked anything I did, but it pushed me to learn.
00:11:18
Speaker
You know, those two, those two have been my hallmark mentors. Thank you for sharing that. We'd 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?
Support for LGBTQ Representation
00:11:42
Speaker
Well, at Revri, 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 an authentic and inspiring way in a lot of cases. And so what I find, I inject purpose into our marketing
00:12:10
Speaker
as defined as inspiring exploration 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 we can get involved in an organization and support them. And most recently I've been working with a soccer organization out of New York called New York Ramblers.
00:12:36
Speaker
which is the, it's a nonprofit. It's the oldest gay men's soccer league that exists. It's out of New York and that's who we've been supporting. We sponsored jerseys 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?
Embracing Change in Marketing
00:13:02
Speaker
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.
00:13:16
Speaker
At the same time, understand most of it can be Emperor's new clothes or something not much different than you already have. It's just 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.
00:13:44
Speaker
Thank you to our listeners. Thank you for viewing. Take care, my friend. Thank you, Paul. See ya. How was that good?