Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi (1973) is coauthor of Get Content Get Customers: Turning Prospects into Customers with Content Marketing (co-authored by Newt Barrett). The book was one of the first to look at the impact of content marketing on corporate brands. Joe also co-authored Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers for Your Brand, which is an operations handbook for the discipline of content marketing. Joe is a content marketing strategist, speaker and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which runs the largest physical content marketing event in North America, Content Marketing World. Founder of three marketing services entities, Joe has worked with hundreds of brands including dozens of Fortune 1000 brands (Microsoft, Petco, CME Group, SAP, DuPont, and HP). Joe was also named top content marketing strategist by both LavaCon and Contently.

Biography
Pulizzi was born in 1973 in Sandusky, Ohio. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Bowling Green State University (Magna Cum Laude, 1995) with a major in Interpersonal Communication. Pulizzi received his Master of Arts in Communication degree from Pennsylvania State University (1997), where his Master’s thesis looked at the communication behaviors of professional athletes after committing untoward acts.

Career
In his early career, Joe worked on radio remotes for a Clyde, Ohio radio station, spent time as a funeral assistant and then supervised an internal communications department for Medical Mutual of Ohio, one of the largest insurance companies in Ohio. He began his content marketing career in 2000 as account manager for Penton Custom Media, a division of Penton Media (the largest independent business media company in North America). In 2001, Joe took over as division director, helping to develop content programs for some of the largest business-to-business brands in the world. It was during that year at Penton Custom Media that Joe started to work the term “content marketing” into sales engagements.

For his time at Penton, Joe received the 2008 Custom Media Innovator of the Year award from American Business Media, 2006 Top Mover/Shaker from The Cleveland Professional 20/30 Club, and more recently the 2011 Folio: 40.

In 2007, Joe left Penton Media to form Z Squared Media, LLC (ZSM) serving the content marketing industry. The initial ZSM brand Junta42 served as a content marketplace for brands and agencies. From 2008 to 2010, Junta42 matched up over 1,000 projects with such brands as Orbitz, Blackberry and Honda. In 2009, Pulizzi launched SocialTract, which provided blogging services to over 100 companies in the HVAC industry. In August 2012, SocialTract was sold to NCI Communications out of Atlanta, GA.

Junta42 has since evolved into what is now the Content Marketing Institute, an education and advisory firm for content marketing, Content Marketing World, an annual content marketing event, and Chief Content Officer, a quarterly print magazine delivered to 20,000 marketing executives. CMI also consults with Fortune 100 brands.

In 2012, Z Squared Media, LLC was recognized as #365 of 500 on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies.

Pulizzi now speaks around North America and Europe at association and private events on content marketing and the transformation of brands into publishing operations.

He lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife and two kids.