MarTech: Greg Kihlstrom: Spotlight on the expert

Greg is a contributor to MarTech and has contributed several multi-part articles and other features to the publication. MarTech recently wrote a profile of Greg and his career journey. Here is an excerpt:

Q: How did you get into marketing?

A: I started off more in the creative realm, more on the design end. I actually got a degree in photography back when photographers would be in darkrooms all day. And then I got interested in the World Wide Web and quickly transitioned to that. I started teaching myself HTML and all about the web and building websites for anybody I could.

And then I got a job at a startup, back in the original Internet boom — late 1990s, early 2000s. I think that’s what really introduced me to marketing. And not only marketing but also technology. I was working with marketing and with the engineering team, building a product. It really taught me about this intersection of, back then, UX and marketing and technology. And I think I’ve taken that with me the rest of my career. I don’t like one thing, I like all of it.

That first company wound up going out of business. It went the way of Pets.com and many others at the time. I ended up starting my own marketing agency, primarily focused on digital marketing. We did a lot of website builds in the enterprise space and things like that, but we also saw the rise of social media as a marketing tool, programmatic advertising and personalization. Those were some really exciting years from, say, 2003 to 2017 when I sold the agency.

You can read the rest of the feature here on MarTech.