Tweet This
Rodney Williams has had a knack for marketing his whole life. But his multiple business degrees and real-world experience are what propelled him to create industry-disrupting technology and grow his venture-backed business from Cincinnati, Ohio.
It started when he was just 6 years old. His mom owned a beauty shop in Baltimore, and he would hang around the store and lease out issues of his magazine collection to the kids who came in with their parents. He knew they’d be uninterested in the magazines his mom provided for her customers, and he found a way to earn a dollar every time a customer wanted to borrow one of his.
Williams has cultivated this keen insight into what consumers want and has carried it over to every aspect of his career. “[Marketing is] not creating a commercial or coming up with a cool campaign,” he says. “Marketing, to me, is really taking a product or brand...and utilizing pretty much every consumer-facing moment to effectively deliver your solution,” he said in our interview on corporate innovation.
Many years later, and after several successful business ventures throughout high school and college, Williams landed a job with Procter & Gamble (P&G) as brand manager for Pampers. He would eventually use the experience he gained there to found LISNR and invent an advanced technology for sending data through sound.
If that sounds crazy, keep reading...
The P&G Years
Williams already had four degrees, including an MBA in Finance from Howard University, before signing on with P&G. But working there was like being launched into a real-world example of one of the case studies he read about in school. He says it was like an addition to his education, like “MBA part three or four.”
It helped that P&G’s marketing strategy was in line with Williams’ approach. “When you look at the core of Procter & Gamble and why I went there,” he says. “They 'wrote the book' for Brand Management—which is Product Management—which is why every CEO that’s ever existed at P&G has been a brand marketer.”
During his time there, Williams did everything he could to push innovation in his area of the company. He made it his personal pursuit to build and create technologies. In fact, he wrote three digital patents while he was there, and he was the first marketer at P&G to ever do so. Everything he did there was in an effort to “break the business” and innovate toward better practices. And it prepared Williams for something even bigger.But Corporate America tends to be resistant to change, and P&G was no different. Eventually, the pushback Williams faced on his big ideas got him thinking that it might be time to leave "Cubicle Nation" behind.
Founding LISNR
While still at P&G, Williams started to realize a growing fixation on sound as a technology.
“I got a chance to just be at the forefront of what we were doing from a technology standpoint, and I started to get obsessed with not necessarily sound, but more so: ‘How can we effectively communicate to consumers better, and what is available for that to happen?’.”
The idea that sound could do more got stuck in his head, and he started researching technologies to send data through audio. He pulled a team together, built a minimum viable product and started pitching to local investors in Cincinnati, OH. When they got funded, he decided to go all-in with LISNR.
LISNR is a communication protocol that can transmit small packets of data between devices. In this sense, it’s similar to other protocols like NFC, Bluetooth, RFID and Wi-Fi. What makes it unique is that it sends data through ultrasonic sounds, meaning sounds that are above the limits of human hearing.
LISNR’s tech isn’t dependent on hardware (unlike NFC and Bluetooth) and is becoming seriously disruptive in the IoT (or "Internet of Things") space. The company has raised nearly $15M in capital and has won awards such as a Gold Lion for Most Innovative Mobile Technology at Cannes and a spot in CNBC’s Disruptor 50.
And it all goes back to Williams’ roots as a marketer and his time spent honing his skills at P&G.
He says, “I just understand the nuances of media and marketing and audience, and consumer behavior insights. That’s like the blood—the vein—of why technology exists, and I think more people should pay attention to that connection.”
He believes firmly in the power of marketing for shaping the future, which is what drives him every day to innovate and create new technology.
“Great marketers have the ability to influence everything, because they have to.”
