Helped 500+ Clients & Students
Worked with 1,000+ Brands
Advised 100+ Businesses
Hi, I'm Andrea Palten,
your marketing consultant
The marketing industry has a problem, and it's not AI.
It's the people using every tool available, including AI, to flood your feed with fake screenshots, manufactured urgency, and "six figures in six weeks" promises they can't back up. It's the gurus who've never held an actual marketing job telling you to "just post more content." It's the bro marketing playbook that makes you feel gross just reading it, and somehow keeps getting louder.
I've watched brilliant coaches, consultants, and founders try to follow that playbook and lose themselves in the process. They water down their message to sound like everyone else. They chase tactics that don't fit their business. They burn out trying to keep up with advice designed for people with no integrity and nothing to lose.
That's not marketing. That's noise.
I'm Andrea Palten, a marketing consultant with 25 years of experience across startups, nonprofits, Fortune 500s, and everything in between. I've sat in the rooms where real strategy gets built, managed the big budgets, led the teams, and I've also run my own agency and built my own businesses from scratch. I know what actually works, and I know what's just someone trying to sell you a course.
CMO Growth Guide exists because the strategies that move the needle shouldn't be locked behind expensive agencies or enterprise marketing departments. You deserve the same caliber of thinking, translated into something you can actually execute without burning out or selling out.
To anyone who's been told to just run more ads, post all day long, or fake it till you make it:
There's a better way. Let's build it.
How I got here:
1998
I started college as a journalism major at CU Boulder, chasing stories and believing that was my path. Then Columbine happened, and I was there working for CNN. I held a microphone up to a grieving uncle and asked how it felt to lose their niece. I couldn't do it anymore. Journalism wasn't for me, but I didn't know what was...
1999
My first real job was in radio, which I hated, but it introduced me to the moment that changed everything. We shared a kitchen with the company next door, and I struck up a conversation with the CEO who needed a marketer. He took a chance on me, and I took a chance on something completely new. I started doing guerrilla marketing, think stickers on cars and scrappy street-level campaigns, and then their web developer quit. I taught myself HTML, took over the website, and accidentally became a digital marketer. Best accidental pivot!
2000
I landed my first grown-up corporate job at Transamerica, a billion-dollar financial company, running their digital marketing and rebuilding their mutual funds and life insurance websites. I was learning what it meant to market at scale, with real budgets and real stakes.
2011
I found my favorite job. American Humane Association, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting animals, hired me and gave me the best boss I've ever had. I got promoted to run my own Marketing, Brand, and ePhilanthropy department for the first time in my career, and I learned what it felt like to do work that actually meant something. Dogs are my entire heart, so yeah, this one hit different.
2015
I joined an Ogilvy agency, working on websites and software for giant brands like Boeing and AT&T. I was operating at the highest level of the industry, and it confirmed everything I'd been building toward for 15 years.
2016
I wanted to do my own thing, so I started my own marketing agency. I got some incredible clients, including Big Chill, a seriously fun appliance brand, and we got one of their stoves onto the set of the Deadpool movie. I fell in love with consulting, with being close to the work, close to the client, and seeing the direct impact of every decision.
2020
People kept asking me to teach, so I did. I taught marketing at General Assembly, CFU, and then got one of those "wait, seriously?" moments when I was asked to go to the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center to teach Olympians how to use social media to build their personal brands. If you had told 1998 journalism-student me that this was coming, I would not have believed you.
Then, my dad died
I took care of my mom, moved my husband Brian and our dog Bugsy to be close to her, and eventually decided it was easier to go back to corporate. Grief and taking care of others changes your priorities. I followed mine.
2022
I became Chief Marketing Officer at an Executive Coaching company and something clicked. I was surrounded by incredible coaches and I got to watch, up close, what transformation actually looks like when someone has the right guide. I fell in love with the coaching world and knew I wanted to be part of it in a bigger way.
2024
I joined Techstars as VP of Marketing, where I now serve 5,000+ startups across the globe. The scale is massive. The mission is real. And I bring everything I've learned across 25 years into this work every single day. My favorite part is consulting these amazing founders on their marketing!
NOW!!!
And then I built the thing I always wanted to build.
CMO Growth Guide exists because too many brilliant coaches, consultants, and founders are getting fed watered-down, hype-filled, bro marketing garbage that makes them feel gross and gets them nowhere. I've spent 25 years in the rooms where real strategy gets built, and I'm done watching smart people waste time on tactics that don't work.
Here's what I offer: an Impact membership community where you get enterprise-level marketing strategy without the enterprise price tag, 1:1 consulting for founders and service professionals who need a true strategic partner, and a LinkedIn program built to turn your profile into a client-generating machine.
No bro marketing. Just 25 years of proven strategy, translated into something you can actually use.
Your business deserves real marketing. Let's build it.
