Jon Kallus
A private counsel for CMOs

I get it.The chief exec wants weekly growth. But you're still sorting through all the institutional baggage, teams, and quirky ways of working you inherited. Not to mention the dozen roster agencies itching for a chance to refresh your brand/site, rethink the media mix, or launch a comprehensive research project. When did CMO become such an awful gig?It's not. You just need a little outside help.I'm a private counsel to CMOs at medium to large enterprises. They think of me as part therapist, part fixer, part creative director, and part strategist. Or, simply, their right hand person for hire, whether they're turning a brand around for PE, or leading a world famous household name.I am not a growth hacker. I don't use generic frameworks. I can't coach. I'm an experienced and empathetic partner for marketing leaders who need a secret weapon.I do things like make sure your agencies and your creative teams are doing their best work, and solving the right problems. I can vet a production budget. Negotiate a creator agreement. Review an agency SOW. Or evaluate RFPs. I can work with and nurture your actual no. 2, freeing you to manage up.And, if needed, I can help you find the real point of your business (what you really, truly, actually do for your customers), package that up, and then help you build a plan to share and protect it. I can even get all that down to a single slide for you to present to the CEO and board, so they understand the scope of our plan, why it's good, and keep your people and budgets safe.That last thing is a signature project of mine. I call it the Signal Sprint. It lasts 6 to 8 weeks. I look at your research and your internal decks. I talk to your experts. Then I find the most important thing and turn it into a story your board will believe in. This gives you the plan you need to get the money and support you want. Sometimes CMOs want continue working together after those budgets are approved. That's great by me.Big brands trust me because I spent 12 years at the world’s most celebrated ad agencies (like Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco, and Wieden+Kennedy and BBH in London), where I developed campaigns for some of the world’s best known names, including Diageo, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Google and Nike.In 2018, I founded my own startup agency. Running a team of anywhere from 1 to 9 people, my little company worked with giants in consumer tech, B2B technology + managed services, DTC e comm, and fintech (brands like Square, WeWork, Bumble, and Allbirds). Through partners, I worked for the World Economic Forum. And we've been a retained, roster agency for a Fortune 500 cloud infrastructure leader and a publicly traded global managed services provider whose names I can't say here.I understand the C-suite at huge public companies. I'm a fiduciary who knows Figma. And a consigliere who can write copy.In my spare time, I built and sold a popular travel, tech, and business newsletter, which I still curate, and am also an active COO for a content creator with 350K followers on Instagram, plus 35K on Substack. Doing that keeps me fluent with the creator economy, and its largest platforms.If you'd like to work together, I am booked until June 2026. You can find me on LinkedIn or subscribe to my newsletter. And if you would like to talk about a project in 2H26, please send me a message here.Thank you for reading.