Episode Details

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Michele Martin, Senior Director of Global Brand and Integrated Marketing at Ticketmaster.

Summary: Most career advice still hands you a ladder and tells you to climb. Michele makes the case for a lattice instead, the crisscross path of sideways and diagonal moves that built her range across banking, retail, a startup, and now Ticketmaster. Along the way she breaks down why the call center job she almost refused changed everything, how mentorship and sponsorship are 2 different engines, and why communication beats coding as the skill that survives the AI era. She even walks through what a genuinely good AI session looks like on her marketing team. If you've ever felt boxed in by the straight climb up, this one rewires how you think about your next move.

About Michele Martin

Michele Martin is the Senior Director of Global Brand and Integrated Marketing at Ticketmaster, where she leads brand strategy and ties together the channels that reach fans across sports, music, and the arts. Her career is a working example of the lattice she advocates: 11 years at TD Bank moving through corporate sponsorships, communications, a contact center, and sales strategy, then brand and customer roles at L.L.Bean and a stretch at a growth-stage startup.

A first-generation college graduate, she builds communities everywhere she lands, from the Kind/Red marketing collective to Live Nation Women. She's also an avid traveler, an amateur golfer, and a self-described nonfiction reader who gets her fiction through Netflix and TikTok.

What A Lattice Career Means And Why It Beats The Ladder

Most career advice still runs on a single image: the ladder. You start as a specialist, become a manager, then a senior manager, then a director, then a VP, climbing one predictable rung at a time. It's clean, it's legible on a resume, and it quietly convinces a lot of good marketers that any move which isn't straight up is a step backward. Michele has spent 2 decades proving the opposite, and she has a better picture in mind.

Walk into any hardware store and find the fencing section. The lattice is that crisscross panel of wood, the one you'd nail under a porch for a little privacy. That shape is the whole philosophy. A lattice career moves diagonally, sideways, sometimes down for a stretch, and then back up from a completely different position than where you started.

The freedom in that reframe is the part people miss. When you stop treating vertical promotion as the only valid direction, you give yourself permission to chase the work you're actually curious about. You might take a role that pays the same and reports to the same level because it teaches you something your current lane never will. A year later that detour is the reason you can do a job nobody on the straight-up track is qualified for. The lattice isn't a slower ladder. It's a wider map of where a career can go.

The marketers who'll be hardest to replace over the next decade are the ones who collected range on purpose, because range is the thing no single promotion can hand you.

Key takeaway: Stop scoring every potential move by whether the title goes up. Draw your own version of the lattice instead: list the 3 skills or domains you most want to understand, then look for roles that hand you those, even laterally. The diagonal move you resist now is usually the one that makes you uncopyable in 5 years.

How To Decide If A Sideways Career Move Is Worth It

Every marketer has a moment where someone dangles a role that feels wrong. Wrong department, wrong direction, wrong vibe for the brand you're trying to build for yourself. The instinct is to protect the climb and say no. Michele almost did exactly that, and the role she nearly turned down ended up shaping everything that came after.

She spent 11 years at TD Bank, a place that treated career growth as a contact