A hypothesis and an experiment.

Fundamentally, CMOs and marketing leaders want to know what gaps exist in their marketing capabilities, the investments needed to close them, and in what order to take them on, given the dependencies between them.

The path to answering this question is well-worn. Hire a consultant, do a bunch of discovery, document the current state, define the target state, build a roadmap. It works.

But it carries real flaws.

Traditional consulting projects are expensive. They're slow, taking weeks or months when decisions can't wait. And the quality and usefulness of the results hinge on a single point of failure, the experience and expertise of the consultants assigned to the work.

The afterblink.co assessment platform is an experiment toward a better way.

It's built on a hypothesis that 20 years of practitioner judgment and instinct can be encoded into an AI-enabled, self-service assessment capable of producing recommendations more credible and actionable than a team of consultants, faster, more consistently, and more affordably than the traditional model.

The easy part is generating a report from scored inputs. The hard part, and the real bet, is capturing the situational judgment, the internal politics and the organizational realities that reshape what gets prioritized. That's what scorecards miss, and why most consulting reports feel detached from the situation on the ground.

That's where you come in.

afterblink.co is live, but it's early, and every experiment needs participants. So while it's in this test phase, the MCMA is free. You get the complete assessment and the full report at no cost.

In exchange, we'd love your feedback on what was useful, what was missing, and what would make it better.

Hello.

I'm Mark Mountan, creator of afterblink.co.

I've spent 15 years building and transforming marketing capabilities. Most of that work has been in financial services, with the largest banks and credit unions in the country.

My first foray into technology-enabled marketing capabilities started at Wells Fargo with a tag management platform. That work hooked me.

It grew from there to bigger things like full martech stack strategies, target operating models, process transformation, compliance and audit readiness, customer data activation, and scaled personalization programs.

I've done this work as an operator inside the organization. And I've advised CMOs and senior marketing leaders from outside, at two national consulting firms. Few people get to see the work from both chairs.

The most rewarding moment is always the same. When a new capability goes live. The people running it are energized to do something new. And the business sees the benefit.

The hardest part is knowing where to start.

CMOs are pulled in every direction at once, by regulatory mandates that can't slip, by business demands that change with the quarter, by expectations from the top. Everything is a priority. Nothing waits its turn.

Cutting through all of it to find the right first move is where everything begins.

That's the challenge afterblink.co is built to take on.