“The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” That quote is from David Ben-Gurion.

And it reminds me of marketing. We’re in the digital age, or maybe we’ve crossed over into the AI age. Either way, we don’t have the long deadlines we had when I started my career writing print ads.

And that’s just the difficult. What about the impossible? Well, that is part of our stock and trade as marketers, right? We push, try new things, experiment, innovate – that which was impossible yesterday is our new campaign or new tool we built for the customer.

So let me drop another quote in here, this one from my next guest – “Embrace ‘riding the worm.’” That’s her way of saying, don’t be afraid to try something that seems virtually impossible. It takes resourcefulness and the ability to tame something seemingly uncontrollable.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Erika White, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Affirm (https://www.affirm.com/).

Affirm is a public company that trades on NASDAQ. It reported $1.588 billion in revenue in 2023. White oversees a team of 35 professionals driving all aspects of marketing and communications for the company including growth marketing, martech/ops, partner marketing, brand marketing, research, and public relations. She was a core member of the team leading the $12 billion IPO in early 2021.

Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing

Here are some lessons from White that emerged in our discussion:

• Embrace ‘riding the worm’
• Don’t forget to laugh and help others do the same
• Within teams, make ownership a feature not a bug
• Energy and positivity are contagious
• Always take the call
• Direct feedback is a gift

Discussed in this episode

Customer-First Marketing Guide: 4 steps (with case studies) to build a customer-first marketing strategy (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/customer-first-marketing)

Just type /SNA into MeclabsAI (https://meclabsai.com/) and get conversion rate optimization ideas for your specific scenarios.  It’s totally FREE to use, for now (Meclabs is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa).

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Daniel Burstein Podcaster

Daniel Burstein is the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MarketingSherpa and the host of the ‘How I Made It In Marketing’ podcast, where he talks to marketing leaders about the lessons learned through their careers.

He also reports on successful marketing campaigns and industry data in MarketingSherpa articles, and helps facilitate the AI Guild from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute.

Daniel has 23 years of experience in copywriting, content writing, interviewing, speaking, business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.