Designers Assumed I Was a Numbers Guy. Analysts Assumed I Was a Creative.

For half my career, designers assumed I was a numbers guy. Analysts assumed I was a creative. Neither group meant it as a compliment.

I started on the creative side, paying my way through college doing freelance graphic design, ads for local businesses, whatever kept rent covered. Then Dell wired up the other half of my brain: Six Sigma green belt, DMAIC, living inside web analytics while we grew consumer ecommerce to $3.5B. By the time I was CMO at Bazaarvoice, I was shipping a mockumentary music video and an ROI model in the same week, and honestly enjoying both.

In a 2014 interview, Gerardo Dada asked me my marketing superpower. My answer then is still my answer now: being middle-brained. Understanding the analytical and the creative, and bridging between them in strategy and execution.

Here's why I think it matters more than either talent alone. Most marketing organizations are two tribes. The brand tribe and the spreadsheet tribe, each fluent in a language the other tribe finds vaguely ridiculous. And the best ideas usually don't die from being bad. They die of monolingualism: a beautiful campaign that can't survive one CFO "because," or an airtight model that nobody feels anything about.

People buy on emotion and justify with fact. That sentence has two halves. So should your team.

I don't think you can make someone middle-brained overnight. But you can force translation: have your designer present the funnel numbers, have your analyst pitch the story. Watch who lights up doing the opposite job. That's your bridge.

I've come to believe the scarcest hire in marketing isn't the best creative or the best analyst. It's the translator between them.

Who's the translator on your team? And if no name comes to mind... now you know where the ideas are dying.