If it works for Playboy, It works for me.

When I signed on with the Boston venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners, I happily accepted the title of “Marketing Analyst.” It seemed like a natural progression after earning a degree in marketing, enjoying a stint as a marketing intern, and then pursuing a marketing focus with an international twist in grad school.

Call it inexperience, or possibly just plain naive, though at the point of acceptance, I was blind to the ever widening scope of a marketer’s responsibilities. Technically speaking a marketing analyst could be responsible for: marketing strategy/mix (product, price, promotion, place), inbound marketing/lead generation, content creation and distribution, marketing research, segmentation, account management, website maintenance, event planning…and the list goes on and on…

After spending over a year performing generalist marketing activities, I have recently begun to focus my time around the area of content marketing – both creation and distribution. In this crazy world of marketing – I have found my niche.

The funny thing about this is that the area of content marketing has been explored for years, though it has not been singled out as its own area of focus until now. You can imagine my surprise when I saw the following title flash across my Google alerts this morning:
 

“Playboy Promotes Jimmy Jellinek to Chief Content Officer”
Jellinek will “oversee content development for print, online, mobile, TV, film and radio” and will be reporting directly to Hugh Hefner! It’s great to see that such an important marketing focal area is finally being recognized within larger corporations. It’s going to be a huge job and it will be interesting to see if newly appointed Jellinek is up to the challenge.

Maybe I’ll end up replacing him…or maybe (and more realistically) I’ll just stick to learning the ropes at OpenView and advising the management teams within our portfolio for all of their content marketing strategy needs.