Well hello there,
I’m a marketer, writer, husband, father, and lifelong learner from Haddonfield, New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about me beyond my LinkedIn profile, you came to the right place.
What follows is a brief narrative of how I got to be where I am today, a mix of the personal and professional experiences that shaped me.
Growing Up
I was born and raised in Waterford Township, a sparse community on the edge of the New Jersey Pinelands. Most people know it by the name Atco, its sole claim to fame being the now-closed Atco Raceway.
Like many suburban Millennials, when I wasn’t watching MTV and playing Nintendo, I was out in the woods, making forts, riding bikes, kayaking and camping. My dad taught math at Cherokee High School in Marlton, and my mom worked for the state Division of Taxation. During the summers we took long road trips around the country every summer, to the point that I had visited dozens of states by the time I was a teenager. (Today I’ve been to 49 states. Need to knock off Hawaii sometime soon.)
After going to Waterford public schools through sixth grade, I went to a tiny Catholic middle and high school in adjacent Hammonton named St. Joseph Regional. While there I played four varsity sports - track, cross country, soccer and basketball - and was fortunate to have an inspiring English teacher in Chris Matarazzo. It was during his classes that I discovered a passion and talent for reading and writing, and my career path started to unfold.
College
I entered the University of Delaware as an English major in the Honors Program. UD offered journalism as a concentration rather than a major, which I added my sophomore year, which is when I also started writing for the independent student newspaper, The Review.
My junior year, I joined the staff of The Review as its Entertainment Editor, and was accepted into a new interdisciplinary minor called Interactive Media, with a curated list of class requirements in web design, computer science, photography, and communications. I learned a bit of HTML and CSS, put together some crude Flash animations, and built my first website using what was then called Adobe GoLive.
Those combined experiences led me to successfully propose a new position at The Review: Web Site Editor. (AP Style at the time was to make website two words. So 2006.) In that role I spearheaded a complete redesign and relaunch of the website, in addition to beginning the practice of publishing breaking news and online exclusives.
I also got my first taste of leadership at UD, serving as President of my fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Given the stigmas about social fraternities, you won’t find this on my resume today, but the truth is that this was an invaluable initiation to management. If you think keeping a professional team organized is a challenge, try wrangling more than 50 college bros!
I had a number of successes in that role, but, maybe more importantly, also got a quick and ruthless education in all the ways to not be a leader. I can thankfully say I left the organization stronger than when I joined it, and it’s still going strong today.
In 2007, I graduated with an Honors Bachelor’s Degree. Even then it was clear that the journalism industry was in steep decline, and many of my fellow English grads (smartly) went straight into communications jobs. Nevertheless, I truly believe in the important role the news media plays in our society, so I sought out a journalism career.
Journalism
I landed my first gig shortly after graduation at Elauwit Media, a fast-growing, hyperlocal news company based in Haddonfield that produces free, weekly, direct-mailed newspapers to higher-income communities in Camden and Burlington counties. Today they’re known as The Sun Newspapers.
About eight months later I joined The Press of Atlantic City, which at the time was one of the few remaining independent regional newspapers around. I was a remote worker before it was cool, writing about the communities of southern Ocean Count from my apartment in Toms River. I eventually moved down to the Atlantic County and Cape May County bureaus, where I met my beautiful and talented wife, Elisa.
After about 5 years, I had published a total of more than 1,800 articles. I loved some aspects of journalism, primarily the limitless ability to indulge my curiosity. Whenever I was wondering about something, I had an excuse to just pick up the phone and start asking questions about it. I reported a ton of breaking news, but my favorite stories were those enterprise features that were basically hiding in plain sight.
For instance, what’s with all those sand mines you could see on Google Maps? Why do people like spending countless hours on the cold, windy shoreline of Long Beach Island for its annual fall fishing tournament? Isn’t it funny that you can still recognize a former Wawa building even when it’s been repurposed as a new business?
However, after a few years in the profession, there was no doubt there was not a bright future in news reporting. Shortly before our paper was sold to Berkshire Hathaway, I looked to make the leap toward a more stable career in communications. I applied to nearly every marketing agency I could find in Philadelphia until I finally found a firm named Braithwaite Communications. The founder, Hugh Braithwaite, was also a former English major, and he thankfully took a chance on an ignorant journalist.
Braithwaite Communications
That first year or so in the agency was a crash course in everything public relations, crisis communications, social media, advertising, SEO and more. I consumed every book, blog, newsletter, podcast and free online training course I could find. Thankfully, Hugh was an inspiring leader who was always reading and learning, and made sure the shelves of our office on Walnut Street were filled with both new and classic business books.
BC’s services and client base were wildly diverse, which helped me get a sweeping view of marketing strategies and tactics in a short amount of time. My client accounts and responsibilities included:
Media relations for Wynn Resorts, which at the time was competing for a license to build a new casino in Philadelphia. We led the competition in positive press, and Wynn’s proposed resort on the riverfront in Fishtown would have been amazing. They unfortunately withdrew their application when New York approved seven new casinos that would’ve created too much competition.
Writing for Wawa, including editing an early draft of The Wawa Way, written by the outgoing CEO Howard Stoeckel.
Content marketing, advertising planning, branding and social media management for an insurance education non-profit based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, called The Institutes. One of the highlights from our work together was launching a content marketing and advertising initiative to attract more young people to the insurance and risk management profession. In addition to earning coverage in news sources like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, we also published creative, original content that put a fun and interesting spin on the industry, reaching millions of Millennials and earning incredible engagement rates through organic and paid social media (as high as 15% engagement on boosted Facebook posts, compared to industry benchmarks at the time that were less than 1%).
Content marketing for Aesculap, a medical device subsidiary of healthcare conglomerate B. Braun. Aesculap’s target audience was the health system professionals who buy, manage and sterilize medical devices, and we interviewed their subject matter experts to produce a blog with unique insights into that specialized niche.
In my hunt to learn everything I could about marketing, I eventually stumbled upon This Old Marketing, the podcast from Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, founders of the Content Marketing Institute. While so many other blogs and podcasts I found seemed completely shallow - offering recommendations with little to no evidence or critical thinking - Pulizzi and Rose were uncommonly honest and practical. I became a religious listener, and was extremely proud when I shared an article from my personal blog with them and earned a shoutout on the show. I later submitted an article that was published on the CMI website and confronted a challenge we often faced with our own clients to explain the logic of content marketing.
(Around this same time, I was brimming with so many ideas from both reflecting on my previous journalism experience and thinking about the possibilities of content marketing that I launched my own personal blog called Reassociated Press, which explored the intersection of these two fields. I re-published a few of my articles here from that blog, including this one that went very briefly viral on Media Critic Twitter.)
Hearing about the growth of content marketing every week, combined with my writing background, led me to eventually approach Hugh with a proposal: change my role from Account Executive to Lead Content Strategist, where I would focus primarily on clients that needed content production, as well as dedicated a portion of my time every week to content marketing for the agency itself. Thankfully, he agreed.
In that new capacity, I took on the challenge of redesigning the agency’s website myself (it was then on an ancient CMS that was not mobile responsive or easily updated), along with launching and writing a weekly newsletter and blog that shared interesting marketing insights with existing clients as well as served to nurture new clients leads. That newsletter, called Long Story Short, continues to this day, and I republished a few of my favorite articles from that time on this site as well.
As a result, we went from having zero email list to nearly 1,000 subscribers in less than a year on a shoestring budget, more than tripling the number of new leads in our funnel. It allowed decision-makers to sign up and see how we think before deciding to invest with us, and it allowed us to grow our business with current clients by helping to demystify marketing and reinforce our recommendations. At the time, no other agencies in the Greater Philadelphia market practiced what they preached when it came to content marketing like BC was, and they remain a leader in the space even now.
While I greatly enjoyed my client work, I honestly enjoyed this in-house work more because I could go so much deeper having full control of our efforts. I could see all the analytics live, knew if we closed a lead or added to a retainer, and I could freely experiment and make continuous improvements.
That sparked my interest in exploring content-focused internal roles at nearby enterprises. One day, a recruiter reached out with one such opportunity at an auto parts manufacturer outside Philly. I’m not a car guy, and it was a farther commute, but at time there were very few opportunities in the region with the word “content” in the title. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to pursue this new path.
After learning a bit more about the role and the organization, I decided to join Dorman Products as its first Director of Content.
Dorman Products
In many ways, Dorman was an ideal situation where I could take everything I had learned so far in my career and put it into practice. I wound up learning so much more, and accomplishing more than I could’ve imagined.
At the start of 2018, the company had grown to more than $1 billion in revenue through three of the Four Ps of marketing. It was constantly first to market with aftermarket replacement auto parts that were previously only available from dealership service centers (Product), at significant lower costs than dealerships charged (Price), sold through nearly every auto parts store and wholesale distributor in the U.S. and Canada (Placement). For decades, this was successful with relatively little in the way of the fourth P: Promotion.
But, things were changing. As the company grew into new product categories it started to face stiffer aftermarket competition. The growth of ecommerce also made it easier for more manufacturers and resellers to enter the market, putting more demand on the business to differentiate its products.
With that context, I set to work assessing the situation and developing a strategy.
Product Content Strategy
As I started to learn more about the business and state of its operations, I realized that content marketing was unfortunately going to be a luxury tactic. There was so much else that simply wasn’t working.
In particular, there was no comprehensive strategy, process, or ownership for developing product content. We were launching hundreds of new products every month with little in the way to make sure each new part had the right photos, descriptions, instructions, and other rich media to properly market our products.
At the same time, new leadership was exploring the potential of selling more products on Amazon, which the company had delayed for years due to potential channel conflicts. To even hope to succeed there, we needed great product content - multiple high-quality images, accurate and thorough descriptions, keywords and slang terms, and additional rich media like videos, graphics, and A+ Content. We also needed to develop better processes and standards so we could create all this content at scale.
This very clearly took priority over practically everything else my team was charged with, because any improvements to our product content would translate directly to more sales, fewer returns, and greater customer satisfaction.
I immediately started asking questions and collaborating cross-functionally with nearly every department - Product, Sales, IT, Business Insights, Supply Chain, etc. - to co-develop and execute better processes that would integrate with existing workflows and timelines. This was arguably the toughest piece of the puzzle, because we now knew was good looked like, but changing the way we went to market would become a years-long effort that needed everyone’s buy-in throughout the 3,000-person business. Fortunately, we had a visionary CIO in Donna Long at the time, and she led the charge in rallying leadership behind the cause.
I created and implemented the company’s first product content strategy in those first couple months, which would set the tone for the rest of my tenure there. It created priorities for my team, identified what types of products needed what types of content, and set us on a path to steadily improving everything about our product commercialization efforts.
By the time I left in early 2024, the Amazon business had grown from $20 million to more than $120 million, making it by far our fastest growing channel and our fifth largest customer overall. The tens of thousands of products that we enhanced through improved content played a significant role in enabling that growth. That same content was also syndicated through our all our traditional channels, yielding even millions in incremental sales and thousands more satisfied customers.
To get a sense for the types of product content our team deployed, check out this product on Amazon, which when I left was our best-selling replacement kit.
Building an In-House Agency
Of course, I also needed a team of people to make this new strategy happen, but I was hired with only one direct report. For about a year, I was writing all our product descriptions, social posts, video scripts, etc. myself, while also building a roadmap for what an ideal creative organization would look like.
Fortunately, Dorman was a member of the Association of National Advertisers, which was a wealth of practical information from other member enterprises about how they approached various marketing topics. When digging into organizational structure, I learned more about the increasingly popular concept of the in-house agency. Whereas so many corporations once solely relied upon external agencies for a variety of marketing services, more and more were now realizing they could find a number of benefits by simply hiring these professionals.
This approach made a lot of sense at Dorman. Here were all the benefits we saw for our particular business, from a PowerPoint I would later present to the ANA In-House Agency Committee:
With this strategy in place, I grew the team significantly over the next few years, formalizing the transition in 2022 by announcing a new structure, process, mandate, and name for our team, BuzzWagon. Here’s the timeline of how the team grew and changed during my time there.
2018
Relocated video contributors from the Channel Marketing team to my team.
Converted two part-time video roles (video shooter and editor) to full-time.
2019:
Relocated photographer from Master Data Office to my team.
Hired our first Marketing Content Manager to help manage more day-to-day writing and fact-finding duties.
As several key customers started requested more 360-degree photography of our products, we purchased a 360 photo rig and hired a 360 Photographer.
2020:
Promoted our marketing coordinator to Project Manager to take on more responsibilities and larger projects.
2021:
Hired freelance copywriter to join team in full-time position.
Hired additional graphic designer internally from separate Packaging team.
Relocated technical writer from Product department to my team.
2022:
Officially announced formalization of content and creative team as new in-house agency, BuzzWagon.
2023:
Hired additional Technical Editor.
Hired additional Video Editor.
After acquiring another company, Dayton Parts, we relocated another photographer and a web developer to my team.
This was a terrific squad of people. Josh Seasholtz, our Creative Manager, was one of the most talented designers I’ve ever worked with. We somehow found two unicorns in Bryan Joslin and Liam Iriving, both car guys who could write their asses off and intuitively understood marketing. We had excellent designers, writers, photographers, video specialists, and a highly reliable project manager in Christina Payne. Add in a few freelancers and creative agencies and we were truly a powerhouse team.
According to our project management software, Wrike, we accomplished more than 10,000 tasks in 2023, each ranging from writing a product description to editing a video. The quality of our content won awards from the Content Marketing Institute, Association of National Advertisers, Auto Care Association, and even directly from our retailers and distributors. We were definitely stressed at times just by how much was being thrown at us on a regular basis, but some of that was also our own pushing the envelope, which ultimately allowed us to start controlling our own destiny.
Overhauling the Dorman Brand
The mandate we established for BuzzWagon was threefold: create great experiences with Dorman’s products, deliver creative solutions to Dorman’s contributors, and build and strengthen Dorman’s brands.
That third charge was another monumental, multi-year effort. When I started at Dorman, there was no formal brand style guide. Our various product brands were not defined and were poorly understood internally, let alone externally. Our packaging didn’t visually match the way we showed up online and in marketing materials. Not only did we need to establish better standards, but we also had to untangle and update everything that was already distributed out in the market.
Step one was refreshing and documenting standards for our parent brand, and we brought in an external branding agency to provide some additional perspective. Once we put these new standards in place, we applied it to every asset template, as well as retroactively aligned older materials to the new look and feel, including sell sheets, webpages, PowerPoint presentations, videos, print and digital ads, social media posts, product graphics, and more.
The next phase was telling our brand story, and the primary asset we developed for that effort was a comprehensive microsite called the Dorman Virtual Tour. I have a separate case study for that award-winning project here.
The third phase was launching a more modern and consumer-facing tagline - Driving New Solutions - as part of the company’s first national digital advertising campaign. My team developed all the creative assets for the campaign, including a brand manifesto that took the form of posters around our facilities and a signature anthem video, all of which was executed by our in-house team.
The final phase of this refresh was establishing a new product brand architecture, defining and positioning each brand, and aligning our physical product packaging with the new strategy and standards. We left this stage for last because it was by far the most complicated, requiring us to work closely with the separate Packaging team that reported to our Retail business unit, and raising sensitive implications with our customers who already had millions of dollars in inventory stocked in their warehouses.
This part of the project was still underway when I left in early 2024, but we had made tremendous progress in establishing a clearer brand hierarchy, implementing better practices for packaging development, and breaking down barriers to cross-functional collaboration. None of that work would’ve happened had our team not taken on our mandate and proactively spearheaded these efforts.
Dorman Content Marketing
After we had gotten through much of the blocking and tackling of strategy, process, and brand building, I finally felt it was time to start leveling up our capabilities and turn to what I thought was going to be my original focus: content marketing.
In surveying the space, we found there were actually very media sources that spoke directly to mechanics about the profession of repairing vehicles. There were lots of car enthusiast publications, and other outlets that were geared toward repair shop owners, but there were arguably none that consistently focused on service technicians, the men and women actually turning wrenches at your local garage. We saw this as an opportunity to establish a unique focus on this niche - what the Content Marketing Institute would call a content tilt.
The result was ShopPress.com, which in its second year exceeded our traffic and conversion goals by 500 percent. You can learn more in the video below, and I’ll eventually create a whole separate case study on this project.
Leaving Dorman
In early 2024, the future looked bright at Dorman. We were entering the second year of a three-year strategy I had created and presented to leadership that would fix some of our most glaring gaps in content development process and brand-building. On January 17, I presented our strategy for the year to the now 50-plus-person department, and there was a lot of excitement in the room. Morale was the highest I had seen in it in my half a dozen years there, with a lot of people saying how refreshing it was to have a clear and compelling vision for what we wanted to accomplish.
Two days later, shortly after my team’s morning stand-up meeting, I received a call from my boss. I thought it was going to be regarding the messaging for an email blast that Sales leadership had requested earlier that week. Instead, I was told that the budget issues we had been dealing with were now impacting roles, and mine was being eliminated.
This was beyond surprising - it was surreal. It was performance review time and I was about to ask to promote two people on my team! I would learn later that day that dozens of other contributors had been let go, from Vice Presidents and Senior Directors to Project Managers and IT Administrators.
Honestly, I was relieved that no one else on my team was affected. It would’ve killed me to build an industry-leading team only to have it torn apart. If my lay off meant everyone on my team was able to stay, that was a win in my eyes.
Fortunately, I had a bit of a cushion through a venture my wife and I had started years earlier.
Mountwell Marketing
In 2019, my wife Elisa faced her own career transition. She was pregnant with our second daughter, and her current employer was experiencing its own issues, so it wasn’t clear whether she’d have a position to return to after her maternity leave.
One of the immediate fallback ideas we had was creating our own business. In fact, we had already done so when she was pregnant with our first daughter three years earlier. At that time, we were consuming a ton of medical and parenting information, as all first-time parents do, and found it unnecessarily confusing. With us both coming from journalism backgrounds, we felt like there was a better solution. So, we launched our own parenting blog called Parentifact.org - a nod to the Politifact fact-checking website - with a business model based on revenue from Google Ads and Amazon Associate commissions.
We published more than 30 articles, built our own forums for parents to ask and answer questions, and created a custom search engine, but it was eventually clear this was more a labor of love than a revenue generator. It was meant to bring in passive income, but the path to profitability seemed to be anything but passive. I still haven’t had the heart to take the site down, in the hopes some new parents still find it and learn something, although I unpublished most of the articles for fear that they would become misleading as the scientific consensus on some topics evolved. I left a few of our favorite pieces and the custom search engine.
We at least learned one thing that didn’t work (at least as far as making money), and we had already gone through the process of creating an LLC. When it came to pivoting, I had experience with another type of business model that had a much more immediate path to generating a positive return on investment - a marketing agency.
In fact, I had an idea for a unique marketing agency for a few years at that point. Whenever we had small businesses reach out to Braithwaite, we had to tell them them our minimum monthly budget was out of their range, but we didn’t have any other agency to refer them to, because every other agency we knew was also after larger clients. This seemed to be the natural law of agencies: the best way to scale an agency was to secure larger budgets at higher rates, so it was only natural that most agencies targeted those organizations with the largest budgets, not those that were starting at zero.
That raised an intriguing possibility that the huge majority of businesses needed a strategic marketing agency, but couldn’t afford one because of the way agencies priced their services. What if we started one that actually met small businesses where they were at, charging a fraction of the price of other agencies, and guided them through the fundamentals?
In early 2020 we officially launched Mountwell Marketing, named after the park across the street from our home in Haddonfield. You can learn more about our story and services at Mountwell.Marketing. To date, we’ve represented and supported dozens of small businesses clarify their brand, build websites, set up social media accounts, execute direct mail and advertising campaigns, and more.
Fast-forward four years to early 2024, our youngest daughter was now in kindergarten, and Elisa found a great new opportunity to go back to work full-time. Two weeks later I got the bad news from Dorman. Our situations had flip-flopped in the blink of an eye. While I immediately started looking for another full-time, in-house content leadership role, I also instantly assumed a new title: President of Mountwell Marketing.
As of today, Mountwell has been a great way keep my skills fresh as well as remain on the forefront of digital marketing. I am constantly exploring and implementing new strategies and using new tools to help my clients succeed, getting my hands dirty in ways that many marketing leaders tend to become detached from as they take on higher level managerial roles. I’ve always enjoyed being a player-coach, and this pivot has been like being inserted into the starting lineup again.
The other big silver-lining: I’ve gotten to take over school drop-off and pick-up duties, which means I get to spend a lot more times with my family.
Personal Life
Who I am is obviously a lot more than my professional career. My wife and I have two beautiful, kind, and hilarious daughters, Eloise and Mae. We live a tight-knit, amazing community in Haddonfield, where we’ve been fortunate to meet many other great families.
As I mentioned up top, I grew up in the woods, but I also love new experiences, so in choosing a home I was conflicted between living in a rural area surrounded by nature or living close to an urban area filled with restaurants and entertainment. We somehow found both here - a home across the street from a park with a creek running through it where the kids and I can explore, that’s also walking distance from a vibrant downtown and the PATCO into Philadelphia. I’m still amazed this was possible every time I think about it.
For fun, I play basketball, golf, ski, and try to consume as many books, movies, shows, magazines and newsletters I can find time for. I’m a diehard Philadelphia sports fan, in particular the Sixers. Having grown up in the Pinelands and reported on it for years, I have a passion for native plant gardening, with quite a few planters of carnivorous plants in the backyard.
I also enjoy meeting new people and gaining new perspectives. If you’ve read this far and would ever like to chat, please feel free to reach at Lee.Procida@Gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.