Rockstar CMO Advisors (RCA) provides consulting advisory services and fractional marketing leadership to B2B marketing leaders.

Describing ourselves as Rockstar might sound ballsy, you be the judge if we are, but we have been the producers, backing band, and session musicians that have enabled CMOs, CEOs, and marketing leaders to find their rock star marketing groove.

We are the artists formerly known as Appropingo, born from a need for people to pronounce and remember our name. Appropingo? Really?


What do we do?

We share what we’ve learned backstage and in front of a live audience during our many marketing tours. Some call this gig strategic consulting services, fractional marketing leadership, executive advisory, we just hope you’ll say that our experience made a difference.

Our jam is to create ART (Awareness Revenue and Trust) as we know that being the “coloring in department” is not the art of marketing, it’s providing the driving baseline for growth. To do that, we’ve helped some wonderful CEOs and CMOs with the following:

  • Strategy and planning
  • Capability review and gap analysis
  • Martech assessment & selection
  • Marketing operations advisory
  • Campaign strategy
  • Content Marketing
  • Content Strategy
  • Agency review

Recent gigs

Over our careers we’ve provided strategic advisory to major brands and organisations like American Express, Nasdaq, 3M and SAS. More recently, we’ve been delighted to work with:

  • Bloomcradle / BeAClimateHero
  • censhare
  • Connex One
  • DeltaClimeVT
  • Flagship Networks
  • Ickenham Group Travel
  • iManage
  • Kentico
  • Orange Logic
  • Percassity
  • Pimloc
  • Sitecore
  • Stacks LLC
  • Storyblok
  • The Executive Network
  • Xpanxion

Get in touch and we’ll share more details of our experience of working with these fine brands.


Principals

Introducing the Rockstar CMO Advisors, supported by a backing band of creative and strategic talent and partners assembled to meet the needs of a client project.

Ian Truscott

Founder, Chief Bottle Washer

Ian Truscott has led marketing as CMO and VP for enterprise B2B vendors, a former industry analyst, who has advised clients from startups to the big guys across the US and Europe.

If you can put the word content in front of it, Ian’s into it; Content Marketing, Content Strategy, and Content Technology.

Ian founded Rockstar CMO in 2018 and merged it with his B2B content marketing and advisory agency appropingo in 2020. Why? No-one could say “appropingo”

Ian manages to explain business-critical ideas clearly and with a sense of humor — which is a rarity in this area. His enthusiasm for the market he works in no way dulls his critical abilities. I recommend anyone looking for a voice of reason in the software technology world to seek Ian’s input.

Siobhan Fagan, Managing Editor at Simpler Media Group, Inc

Jeff Clark

Principal, Strategic Advisory

Jeff Clark is a creative marketing executive with over 30 years of experience running corporate and product marketing teams at profitable, enterprise software companies and small start-ups. 

Most recently, he was the principal analyst for Marketing Operations at Forrester SiriusDecisions, where he helped clients to improve planning and execution processes, including the adoption of integrated campaign strategies, martech optimization, and agile marketing to better align teams and improve outcomes. 

Jeff is a skilled and highly creative marketer who excels at many areas of marketing including corporate branding, communications, creative services, large scale events, building high-performance teams, and managing complex projects with many moving parts. His deep marketing experience is an asset to any team he leads, and his tireless work ethic and passion are inspiring

Paige O’Neill, CMO Sitecore

Jeff Ellsworth

Principal, Business Development Strategy Planner & Client Partner

Jeff Ellsworth is a business development and alliances leader with a track record of sales growth through his proven “Mind the Sales Gap” approach to ecosystem selling and B2B solution go-to-market. Using this approach Jeff has built demand generation programs that have yielded revenue for B2B vendors like SAP, Google, and SDL, through partnerships with organizations like Accenture, Deloitte, and Publicis Sapient. These programs help companies close more overlooked business and generate 10x pipeline and deals

Jeff now shares this experience and his expertise in retail, B2B, B2B2C, manufacturing, eCommerce, content, and digital transformation with our clients as a Rockstar CMO Advisor, business development strategy planner, and client partner.



Our thinking

5 F’in’ Fundamentals: Marketing Operations

Next up in our series of 5 F’in’ Fundamentals Jeff Clark has some advice for tuning up your marketing machine. …

Building Trust with Brand Values

Here on Rockstar CMO, we love to talk about the mission of marketing to create ART – Awareness, Revenue and Trust. In this guest article, Megan Isola shares how brand values build customer trust. …

5 Principles for Setting Marketing Goals

Created your OKRs? Jeff Clark takes us through the next step to get us started on creating a marketing metrics dashboard… …

159: The OK with OKRs, Under the Influence with Yash Chavan from SARAL and Process over a Cocktail Episode

This week Jeff Clark is back to chat about OKRs, we go backstage with marketing entrepreneur Yash Chavan and discuss influence marketing and Robert Rose is in the bar discussing process vs content people …



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