Fractional CMO and marketing intelligence for qualified B2C companies.

The business problem

Connect the work to business results

Strong specialists still need a shared plan and a consistent view of outcomes.

TV buys audience. Search responds to intent. Direct mail creates response over time. The CRM records outcomes, and sales converts or fails to convert. When those links don't connect, the business learns the wrong lessons about where to spend its next dollar.

The practical role

My job is to set the strategy and the budget logic before anyone buys media, digital or traditional. I establish what the data can tell us, what it can't tell us yet, and what has to be repaired before it can. Then I keep good vendors pointed at the business result and deal with weak work or missing handoffs when they show up.

Every review connects channel activity, the company's own customer data, lead quality, CRM outcomes, sales, retention and profit, and ends in a specific decision and a way to check whether it helped. It's process improvement, every cycle.

Where attribution goes wrong

Most CRMs run on last-touch attribution because it's the only kind they can do. Whatever the customer touched last gets all the credit, which flatters the channels that close and starves the ones that did the heavy lifting up front. The usual correction, handing every touch a percentage, is false precision. The customer couldn't tell you how they were influenced, and neither can the data.

So I don't try. I treat the funnel as one system and measure the number that matters, total cost of marketing against total sales. Inside that, the matchback tells you what mail did, the audit tells you what the buy delivered, and the CRM tells you what closed. Which channel deserves the credit is a question I've stopped asking.

Two habits follow from that. Leads that close at a low rate aren't always poor leads. Often they're good leads that are contested, because the same person called five of your competitors from the same aggregator. And the old instinct to give every channel its own phone number so each can be tracked usually costs more response than it explains. One number people can remember beats six they can't.

Capabilities

What I do

Six entry points into the same marketing system.

Clients bring me what they already have. A CRM export, a mail file, access to the Google Ads account, call logs, station invoices, the P&L. I take what exists, make it joinable, and find out what it has been trying to say.

Attribution and measurement

Leads and sales are matched back to the mail file that was dropped or the campaign that ran, with in-home dates checked so the mail was in the house before the sale. Last-touch reporting in a CRM typically credits a mail program with a fraction of what it produced. The matchback shows the rest, by segment, in dollars. The same work connects calls, forms, landing pages, CRM outcomes and sales quality into one view across direct mail, digital, CTV, TV, radio and the sales process.

Digital performance

Is the platform buying profitable customer behavior, or just leads? The review looks below campaign reports into account structure, bidding signals, landing-page quality, event tracking, offline conversion flow and CRM revenue.

Traditional media

Broadcast, cable, print and out-of-home, line by line against what was promised and what aired. More than a billion dollars of media has been spent under my direction, traditional and digital in roughly equal measure, so I know what a :30 in early fringe should cost and what a healthy bonus ratio looks like. More often than not, the audit finds the problem was in the buy before the first spot aired.

Data and direct mail

A model built from your own buyers, applied to the customer and prospect records you own or license. You get ranks, selection flags and segment definitions you can reuse across channels, plus counts for planning. In most files the top ten to fifteen percent of households produce half the revenue. The job is finding them before the mail drops, the schedule airs or the digital campaign launches.

Practical AI

AI takes the rote work off the table so the people can spend their time on strategy, improvement and profit. It drafts, summarizes and cross-checks. The numbers come from code, and client data that needs a language model stays on local models, not in a public cloud service. How I think about AI, and how I use it.

Fractional CMO

Senior marketing leadership for B2C companies where the CEO has outgrown disconnected vendors and needs one person to connect the strategy, the analytics, the specialist execution and the measurement. Data analytics, strategy and planning I do myself. The channels are carried out by specialists working from one plan, and results feed back into the next decision.

The best plan is only as good as the people who carry it out. If your current vendors are good, I'd rather work with them than replace them, and most of the time that's what happens. When one isn't up to the work, I'll tell you plainly, tell you why, and show you the numbers behind it. I keep a bench of direct mail, radio, television, digital and creative partners I've worked with for years, so a change, when it's needed, doesn't cost you a search.

The work depends on more than buying media. Lead handling, CRM definitions, customer matching, creative and offer testing, retention and operational capacity all affect the result. The owner should be able to see the priority, who is responsible for the next action, what data will come back, and how the outcome changes the next round of work.

Client fit and economics

Where the relationship makes sense

The business needs enough opportunity, data and decision authority for senior marketing leadership to pay for itself.

The work only pays off when four things are true.

• You have data. It doesn't need to be clean or organized. It needs to exist.
• A decision maker is in the room. The owner, CEO or head of marketing who can say "do that by Monday." Findings routed through a coordinator who needs three approvals become shelf help.
• You know your own business well enough to tell me when a finding doesn't surprise you, and when it does.
• You'll hear an uncomfortable answer. If the report needs to confirm what you already believe, or a long-time vendor gets the final word over the numbers, I'm the wrong firm.

I can build dashboards till the cows come home. But dashboards are for people who already know what question to ask, or think they do. Most clients hire me because they don't yet, or because they have part of the picture and know there's exponential growth in understanding the rest of it. What they need is the answer and the one action that follows from it.

I spend your marketing budget the way I'd spend my own, and I get paid out of what that adds. I look at gross sales and gross profit before I got involved and after. You have the capital at risk and run the business every day, so you keep most of the money. If a plan adds a million dollars of net profit, I'm worth about a hundred thousand of it. That math usually works for a business doing $5 million to $50 million or more a year, and for a company weighing a $300,000 to $350,000 full-time CMO it's another way to get the same seniority. Scope and fees are set in the engagement agreement, and the proof of concept costs nothing.

When this is not the right model

I'm not a list broker and not a B2B prospect-list shop. Startups and microbusinesses are usually not a fit. If you believe you still want to talk, reach out, but my minimums are likely to be cost prohibitive unless you have very good funding. The relationship also requires access to the decision maker and a willingness to repair the measurement and operating problems the work uncovers.

Founder

About Ben Morris

Traditional media, digital marketing, data analytics, CRM, attribution and practical AI, connected at the level of the business owner.

I started in media at fifteen, working the overnight shift at an FM radio station that had been signing off at midnight. I talked the owners into letting me play records until dawn instead. Everything since has been some version of the same pitch, backed by better data.

1975 to 1983

Radio. Overnights, music director, jazz and R&B shifts, and a stretch promoting concerts, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Mayall, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Delbert McClinton, R.E.M. and more.

1982

Graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in film theory and co-founded an advertising agency with two partners out of radio and television. Radio commercials were the core product until we worked out that the money was in the media buy.

1980s and 1990s

Learned to buy television, cable, newspaper and outdoor. Grew from nightclubs and local retail to regional accounts, then national campaigns for Fortune 500 clients. Direct response work from 1-900 numbers to long-form TV.

2000s

Moved the agency into search and display while the partners wanted to stay in broadcast. Started building statistical models and segmentation for direct mail and media planning.

2009

Built a bid strategy platform for paid search by keyword, geography and bid price, applied to the millions of impressions even a modest campaign produces.

2015

Bought out the last partner and turned fully toward digital and analytics. Kristalytics became the home for the modeling and measurement work.

Today

Scoring and matchback for direct mail programs that mail more than 30 million pieces a year, media audits across broadcast and digital, and fractional CMO work for B2C companies in home improvement, nutritional supplements and financial services.

Every one of those transitions was supposed to end the business. Each one just moved where the money was, and the job was to notice early and move with it.

Categories over the years are a cross-section of consumer marketing. Quick-service restaurants, national franchise systems, automotive, home builders, financial services, travel, education, ecommerce, supplements, windows and doors, HVAC and remodeling.

The tools are Alteryx, Python, Polars and DuckDB for data work at the scale of hundreds of millions of rows, with semi-air-gapped and air-gapped local LLMs. Every major audit is checked by a second independent pass before it goes to a client.

I carry errors and omissions and professional liability coverage with a claim-free record, and I work under written data handling terms with every client. I have spent a good part of the last two years on state privacy laws, because the clients I work with are subject to them and so is the work I do for them.

Contact

On not advertising

The irony isn't lost on me. I've spent my career helping companies advertise, and I don't advertise myself. The reason is that selling to consumers and selling to businesses don't work the same way. For a consumer brand, marketing is how you find buyers, and it's worth every dollar spent well. For a practice like this one, marketing mostly attracts people hoping somebody has found a way to make money come out of the USB port on its own. It's never that easy. It's also not out of reach, and the work is more enjoyable than it sounds, watching dirty data get clean and start showing clear patterns and clear next moves that pay.

The specialists I'd want for myself, in medicine, law, accounting or architecture, aren't the ones with the best search rankings. They have enough work from the people they've already helped. That's the practice I've built, and it's why most of the people who email me were sent by someone I've already worked with.

Reaching me

If you believe I can help you, email me with the type of business you run, a rough sense of marketing spend and the problem you want solved. I'll reply and we'll set a time to talk.