Community Highlights: Meet Angelo Ponzi of Craft

Today we’d like to introduce you to Angelo Ponzi.

Hi Angelo, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I moved to California from New York after college with a promise of a job in marketing. Unfortunately, while that job in the film/TV business did not pan out, I found myself in an advertising agency in Orange County. Two moves later, I was working in a global agency with sixteen offices around the world as an account executive, emphasizing marketing planning.

After several years, one of my clients hired me as the advertising manager, and my first job on the client side of the business began. This back and forth between agency and client happened several times, giving me a unique perspective that I believed helped differentiate me in the market. I took advantage of this unique positioning, along with my research and planning skills, and headed out on my own as a strategic planner focusing on serving advertising agencies, many of which I competed against over the years.

After several years, I asked myself, “why am I doing all of this for other firms, “maybe it’s time I started my own,” which I did. over the next 13 years, I grew my firm, known as Cratft into a full-service agency. A the same time, I launched a separate company in the action sports industry known as Board-Trac, which focused on providing research, consulting, and syndicated data for the surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, paddleboard, and wakeboard industries.

After 13 years of building my firm, I was approached by one of the largest independent agencies headquartered in Santa Monica to sell my business and be merged with my creative partners into a new agency called Open Minds. Over the next 8 years, Open Minds focused on consumer brands, building a reputation in the beer, wine, and spirits categories.

As a result of the 2008 recession, Open Minds was absorbed by its parent company, and I decided not to move and, once again, began consulting. After a short, two-year gig as the Director of Sales and Marketing for a unique research company called PhaseOne Communications in LA, I focused on building my consulting business again.

Known as Craft, my team of marketers provides consulting, interim, fractional, and leadership services focusing on the strategic and analytical side of marketing, taking a holistic approach to drive business growth.

We are considered brand architects, using qualitative and quantitative research to gather the necessary insights from your customers, prospects, competition, and the market to develop fact-based approaches to building effective and efficient growth plans that we call marketing blueprints.

And, much like a General Contractor, we partner with internal teams or carefully selected, vetted individuals and organizations to execute the strategies and plans we develop.

We then provide the oversight and management to ensure you stay on brand, plan, budget, and time.

Our clients work with us when they need to launch, scale or pivot.

By truly understanding how a company is positioned and perceived in the marketplace, we can help craft messaging to be more relevant to its customers based on their needs, wants, motivations, and behaviors to optimize their marketing investment.

We do this by digging into the marketplace, their customers, and the competition to uncover those opportunities that are either missed or those that we have to craft a strategy against to help you be the product or service of choice.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road to business growth is never a straight line. There are always obstacles that get in your way, both internal and external, to an organization.

But regardless of whether I was working for someone or myself, the biggest challenge has always been the design and implementation of finding and securing new business while maintaining the business you have.

And finding the right people who have the skills, drive, and mindset that fit from a cultural standpoint.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
At Craft, we use data to help define a brand and help them pivot or establish growth strategies. Many marketing firms focus on tactics, but we never start there. It’s always about the process, gathering information from the market, competition, and customers to help define growth strategies.

How can an efficient and effective plan and tactics be created without truly understanding what drives and differentiates a business and makes them relevant to its customers?

That’s why organizations hire us. We take a deep dive into the internal and external data to deconstruct and then reconstruct the information into a viable approach to their marketing.

Our services are offered as individual projects, or in most cases; we take on the role of a Fractional CMO.

As a Chief Marketing Officer, along with my marketing support team, we provide consulting, interim, and fractional marketing leadership services to small to medium size companies in the $5 – $75 million range with a focus on the strategic and analytical side of marketing to drive business growth.

We dedicate our time working with company management as an unbiased voice in developing detailed competitive profiles, audience personas, defining market opportunities and strategies, brand realignment, to strategic, integrated sales, marketing, and communications plans that help you compete in an ever-changing market.

In our process of defining growth strategies, we identify the right markets, ideal customers, messaging, and competitive points of differentiation using research to gather the necessary insights to build effective and efficient plans.

For tactical work, we partner with internal teams or carefully selected, vetted individuals and organizations to execute the strategies and plans and provide oversight and management to ensure we stay on brand.

We start by focusing our attention on three areas: Insight, Brand, and Plan. We believe these are the three pillars to build an effective, efficient marketing program.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
That I have been playing music since I was in 4th grade. I started playing trumpet and moved to drums in my first band in high school. Years later, after moving to California, I started another band that lasted for almost 10 years, where I moved from drummer to rhythm guitar, which was a lifelong dream to play guitar.

I have played in several bands over the years, even playing bass in one.

One of my highlights was an opportunity to be the house band for a charity event backing up 80’s rockers Eddie Money, Mike Reno from Lover Boy, and several others. Truly a highlight of my music career.

Today, a few friends have gotten together, and I’ve come full circle, back on the drums once again.

Contact Info:

• Email:  [email protected]
• Website: https://www.craftmarketingandbranding.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craftmarketingarchitects
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angeloponzi/
• Other: https://businessgrowthcafe.podbean.com/