Fractional CMO and marketing intelligence.

The business problem

Connect the work to business results

The best specialists still need one plan, set by someone who knows their craft.

The people who are best at Google Ads, at buying radio and television, at building a direct mail campaign or running a call center are experts at their piece. What they can't do from inside their piece is see the whole plan. That's my job, and I can do it because I've done theirs. I've bought the television, built the mail programs and read the call center reports, so I know what each one can and can't deliver, and I don't ask a TV buy or a mail drop for something it was never going to produce.

TV buys eyeballs. Search responds to intent. Direct mail builds response over time. The CRM records what happened, and sales closes or doesn't. When those pieces aren't read together, the business learns the wrong lesson about where to spend the 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 things I've learned working that way. 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

Television, radio, mail, search, social and the phone are six ways a customer reaches you. They land in the same CRM and have to be read together.

The work starts with everything you already have. A CRM export, the customer file, the revenue file, the mail history, access to the Google Ads account, call logs, station invoices, the P&L. The more you bring, the better the first plan. Some of it I'll already know how to read. Some I won't. Some of it will be wrong, and the first job is sorting out which. If you've mailed for years and the CRM shows almost no mail response, I already know where to look. It's hiding in organic search, form fills and walk-ins.

That only works with confidentiality in both directions. You're handing me the most sensitive data the business has. I'm handing you methods I've spent thirty years on. Mutual NDAs cover both, and what we build stays between us. My clients don't present the details at the next mastermind, and neither do I. It's why the examples on this site are patterns rather than stories.

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 end up on a shelf.
• 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. 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 want the rest. What they need is the answer and the one action that follows from it.

Compensation is set after the proof of concept, not before. By then we both know what the file and the program can produce, and we set a fair, stable number together against what we both believe is achievable. 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, with a holdout where the program allows one. 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.

One client per category in a market

If I work with a window and door company in a city, I won't take its competitor across town. In broad categories where people buy from several brands, supplements for instance, I'll work with more than one, decided case by case and always against the same test. I don't compete with myself, and my ideas don't compete with each other in the same market.

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 first, then promotions director, music director and on-air shifts at rock, jazz, R&B and Top 40 stations, and a stretch promoting concerts.

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, 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.

The thirty years weren't spent only running the companies. I negotiated with the television and radio stations and the billboard companies myself, built the media plans, and did the data work by hand before there were tools for it. Over that time more than a billion dollars of media has gone through plans I built, traditional and digital in roughly equal measure, and the models now score and match back more than thirty million pieces of mail a year. I can still run a pivot table, administer a database and write the code. The tools today are Alteryx, Excel, DuckDB and Python, plus the household matching behind connected TV, where a proper match to the home beats an IP address that may belong to somebody else's. What I'm not is a digital traffic buyer. Google, Bing, Meta and the rest are bought by specialists who do that all day, working from my plan and measured by my numbers.

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 data work runs on local systems at the scale of hundreds of millions of rows, and the language models run there too, off the public cloud. 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. Most, not all. If you've read this far, have a problem I find interesting, and I think I can make a real difference, the door is open.

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.