Meet the Author

We’re about to embark on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling that made marriage equality possible for all. We celebrated in 2015 and we’ll celebrate again this year, because this is something we celebrate every day.

We’re excited to announce we just officially launched Version 4.0 of Nebo’s content management system — NeboCMS. We believe it’s the industry’s first Enterprise-Level, Ruby on Rails CMS.

To be clear, NeboCMS isn’t actually new. We first developed V1 over a decade ago. We’ve used it for tons of our clients, but we’ve never really publicly talked about it.

Unless you work at Nebo or are a client that uses it, you’ve probably never heard of it.

Well, that changes now.

Regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on, I think we’d all agree that we’re living in tumultuous times.

It’s not a surprise that anything seemingly kumbaya is met with opposition and backlash. But here at Nebo, being kumbaya is pretty important to us. We believe that diversity and inclusion are what make our country, and our company, great.

This is an amazing time to be in marketing and advertising. We can understand and target consumers in ways we’ve never dreamed of. It’s powerful. It’s precise. It’s personalized. It’s like being a kid in the candy store, and the store is full of target audiences just waiting to be served with ads.

We have the ability to combine demographic, psychographic and behavioral targeting into our social campaigns. We have incredibly precise geo/local targeting capabilities that can be layered on top of intent, demographics and device. We have programmatic media buying that is powered by AI and lookalike consumers, combined with actual behavioral data to maximize our awareness budgets.

We have a second chance to make an impact with retargeting. We have ad platforms that target based on what’s in your inbox. We have personalized and behaviorally targeted emails using algorithms that continuously learn. We have personalized website experiences. We can use consumer offline behaviors to inform online strategies. We can reach people through the apps they use. We have multi-channel analytics and measurement.

Basically, we have everything we’ve ever wanted. We have the consumer in our sights and can be a part of their lives in ways they never imagined.

But we need to be careful what we wish for. Because sometimes — many times — what we want isn’t what we need.

I’m a terrible listener. I’m not just bad at listening — I’m really, really bad at listening.

Now you may be asking yourself, as the reader, why should you care? Maybe you shouldn’t. But, if you’re in a leadership role, or will be one day, you can potentially learn from my mistakes. If you’re not in a leadership role, then you can better understand why others don’t listen well. And if you can peek into their mental universe, maybe you can help them change.

In order for me to get to the root of my own listening issues, I need to focus on two questions: why am I a bad listener and can I change?