The Business of Marketing features senior leaders from global brands, agencies, and technology platforms in conversations that go beyond the surface.
Each episode explores how decisions are made at the highest levels, how priorities are balanced across brand, demand, and growth, and how marketing leadership evolves as organisations scale. The focus is never trends or tactics. It is always judgement, experience, and real-world perspective.
We record in studio and on location at industry events around the world. Every conversation is long-form, unscripted, and built around a single question: what does it take to lead marketing inside a complex business?
Every conversation generates intelligence. What we build from it is what makes Business Of worth returning to.
Across 118+ episodes we have built one of the most substantial bodies of qualitative intelligence in marketing leadership. Candid, senior, unfiltered views on the decisions that define how organisations are built and grown.
That intelligence does not stop at the episode. We take what we hear and turn it into insights and executive briefings written for board-level conversations. The questions that keep CMOs and CEOs up at night are rarely unique. We find the patterns, surface the thinking, and give leaders something they can use.
Business Of exists to serve one audience: the senior leaders responsible for outcomes. Everything we build is designed for the room where decisions are made.
John Horsley & Justin Cooke
John Horsley has spent over thirty years at the centre of B2B marketing, technology, and community. He founded the Digital Marketing group on LinkedIn, now the fourth largest group on the platform with over 2.3 million members. Named by Fast Company as one of the fifty most influential people on the web. Featured in the BIMA 100 and The Drum's Top 200 People in UK Digital. For nearly nine years he served as publisher of CMO.com for Adobe across EMEA, a relationship that began because Adobe recognised the community John had built and the way he nurtured it. They wanted that instinct applied to their world. The result was a publication that sat between Campaign and the Harvard Business Review, built on trust and genuine value to the marketing community at the highest level. That principle has never changed.
Justin Cooke has eleven personal exits. That all started with Fortune Cookie, the digital agency he founded in 1997, which he grew to 200 people across three continents and $25 million in revenue before selling a majority stake to WPP in 2012. Since then he has been a Venture Partner at Northzone, backing category-defining businesses including Spotify, Klarna, and Trustpilot. Former Chair of The Drum, Vice Chair of UNICEF UK, Chair of BIMA, member of the British Museum Digital Advisory Board, and Digital Advisor to HM Government. Featured in the Wired Top 100 and inductee of the Digital Hall of Fame.
Between them they have spent decades convening, building, and connecting the people who shape this industry. John has organised hundreds of events in London, San Francisco, and Amsterdam, bringing senior leaders together on and offline for over thirty years. Justin chairing, investing, and advising across some of the most consequential organisations in digital, travel, and technology.
The problem they kept coming back to was simple: a lack of meaningful, practical, pragmatic senior perspectives. The kind of thinking that only comes from people who are responsible for outcomes. At Cannes Lions in 2023, in conversation with Lance Pillersdorf, CEO of Advertising Week, the idea for the show crystallised: take the discussions that had always happened in private and open them to the world. Not just the people lucky enough to be there, but anyone who should be part of the conversation. Every episode a micro-MBA from the people running some of the world's most ambitious organisations.
John describes what he does simply. He is a tourist, touring brilliant minds, ideas, and opinions. He loves bringing brilliant people together because he believes only brilliant things can come from it. That curiosity, without agenda, is what makes the conversations what they are. The privilege of access, turned into something the wider community can learn from. At the heart of everything Business Of does is a simple belief: provide value to the community first, always. Not extracting from it. Earning its trust by giving before asking.
They have built a network of senior leaders across brands, agencies, and technology businesses who contribute to the platform as hosts, guests, and advisors. It is built on a community of people who believe the best thinking in this industry deserves to be shared.
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We work with a select number of partners each year on interviews, live recordings, event programming, and executive briefings. If your organisation has a perspective worth hearing at the senior level, we want to know about it.
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