Marketing goes NextGen

The last 10 years in telecom have been tumultuous, to say the least. The boom-bust-buildup cycle has seen a lot of companies come and go and a once-stable job market become much less so. Along the way, a number of top executives have found themselves outside the corporate structure either by choice or as the result of mergers or other market forces.

A new marketing organization has decided to capitalize on that freelance talent by creating a company that does consulting in a slightly different way. NextGen Marketing Group was created by former chief marketing officers and others with experience at companies such as Sprint, McLeod Communications, Cablevision, IBM, GTE, AT&T and MCI.

“We pulled in ex-CMOs who have come out of the industry and have headed marketing organizations,” said Greg Crosby, former Sprint and McLeod executive and founder of NextGen Marketing Group. “We have all dealt with consultants before and we know the traditional model, where you hire a consultant and they come in and ultimately make a recommendation. Many times these will be thorough and analytical but not as practical or as doable in the real world as we would like.”

NextGen Marketing’s approach is to allow one of its partners to be the lead executive for a client and then to build a customized team of people and services on demand to meet the specific needs of that client, drawing in part from a set of affiliates that as of this week includes Jamcracker, the application software and software-as-a-service company.

“We are able to do whatever the client needs, from a strategic partnership to help build their products to developing all the ads, creative branding, strategic marketing plans, and basically function as an outsourced marketing arm for a customer, either doing something very specific or at the macro level,” Crosby said.

The group operates virtually, without a central headquarters, tying together resources that include partners such as Peter Lynch, Claudia Bacco, Thomas Mateer and Scott Hoyt. Affiliates include AuroMira, a national recruiting and workforce development firm; Burrell Associates Executive Search; Condado Group for customer relationship management; October Strategies for PR, and Under the Radar for advertising and brand management.

“With Jamcracker, we have a dual relationship – they are a client and they are an affiliate,” Crosby said. “They have been a client for quite some time. We have helped them think through how they can take advantage of the service delivery network they built for SaaS and package it and deliver it in a better way. That has evolved into a different phase of our partnership. As our group has grown, we felt that there is also an opportunity to run ahead of this in terms of bringing those services into those service providers ourselves. When we are consulting with carriers, cablecos and telcos on how they go to market, how they develop competitive advantages, one of the options is, instead of trying to build these organically one at a time, if you use the Jamcracker platform, you can speed time to market and increase revenues.”

Although just this week becoming more visible through its Web site, nextgenmktg.com, and press announcements about the Jamcracker relationship, NextGen Marketing group already has customers including AirCell, which is developing WiFi technology for the airline industry, and Sojern, another company focused on the travel segment with Web services and more.

And while telecommunications is a specialty, NextGen Marketing is also looking to serve the healthcare industry and more, Crosby said.

“The final component we bring is our business contacts,” Crosby said. “We can pick up a phone, call a CEO, broker a conversation and make things happen. We have relationships, and we have contacts.”