SXSW: A Fireside Chat With GreenSmith Public Affairs and Medici

GreenSmith Public Affairs’ Mike Smith Speaks With Medici VP Of Marketing Nerissa Sardi.

This interview originally appeared on Nibletz.

Last week during SXSW the CMO Clubhouse took over the lobby bar of The W hotel. At that members only event, the marketing officers for some of the world’s biggest companies, were rubbing elbows, exchanging war stories and listening to panels on branding, marketing, and reaching those ever important millennial buyers. The CMO Clubhouse is typically reserved for the top echelon of Fortune 100 marketing executives. But sometimes other standout marketers attend, and even participate in panel discussions.

Nerissa Sardi is the Vice President of Marketing for Medici, a telehealth startup based in Austin Texas. Sardi has worked in high level marketing positions at companies both big and small. She’s held positions with UBM, Thomson Reuters, Oracle and even EBay. She’s also spent a good part of the last decade in startups. Back in 2010 she was the Director of Marketing for CrowdScience, a startup acquired by YuMe in 2013. Four years ago she moved to Austin to join Medici.

For this year’s CMO Clubhouse gathering during SXSW, Sardi spoke about how to do marketing and branding as a startup on a shoe-string budget.  There’s a trend in the marketing profession where more and more people who have worked at large companies with massive budgets, have been wooed away to fire up the marketing for smaller startups. That can present a huge challenge for someone who had an open checkbook to work with in the past.

Sardi explains that marketing on a shoe string budget is something that really inspires her to make the most out of every opportunity and create other opportunities at minimal or no cost.

One of the things that’s important to Medici and Sardi is to have a partnership with a good PR firm. In this case, her firm is GreenSmith Public Affairs, a DC based agency that has helped over 60 startups in a PR capacity over the last decade. In fact, Sardi first worked with GreenSmith while she was at CrowdScience. The firm was instrumental in helping them garnet the publicity they needed, pre-acquisition.

Michael Smith, one of the founders and partners at GreenSmith PR had a minute to sit down with Sardi during a break at the CMO Clubhouse at SXSW. Check out the video above and for more information on GreenSmith PR click here, and Medici, Click Here.

Check out the full interview here.