By the time Nashville-based digital marketer Jennie Smythe launched her company Girlilla Marketing in 2008, she had already gained significant experience working in marketing and promotion for companies including Hollywood Records, Yahoo Music, and Elektra. She also forged her path in digital marketing as the music industry was undergoing the profound transition to a primarily digital medium.
“A portion of it was just being in the right place at the right time,” she recalls to Billboard. “I found myself in a unique position to be able to be the bridge between the two. And it just so happened that nobody was speaking the digital language. I became the person — this was [when] Napster [was happening], when the industry was suing kids in college and doing everything in their power to squash the new business — I was one of the people who was like, ‘Wait a second, if we’re hearing that this is what they want and they’re seeking it out…’ It was very ‘flip the script,’ because up until then, it was the industry telling the people what they were going to get, the industry making those decisions. That’s completely changed.”
Today, the all-woman team at Girlilla Marketing leads social media initiatives and content creation for its clients, helping to develop online audiences, virtual events, digital monetization, analytics tracking and more. During her career, Smythe has worked with artists including Willie Nelson, Darius Rucker, Vince Gill, Blondie, and Dead & Company. She chairs the CMA board and serves on the boards of the CMA Foundation and Music Health Alliance.
Now, Smythe is sharing the lessons she’s learned along the way in her book, Becoming Girlilla: My Journey to Unleashing Good — In Real Life, Online, and in Others, which releases via Resolve Editions/Simon & Shuster today (April 15). Her book also delves into Smythe’s personal journey including her 2018 breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Smythe was named a 2025 Advocacy Ambassador with the Susan G. Komen Center for Public Policy.
Jennie Smythe
Courtesy Photo
“[The book] really was a way for me to express my gratitude to the music business and the digital marketing community. It was a way to share my survivorship so that I could help other people. And my intention was to be able to be a support document for entrepreneurs and especially young women,” she says.
Billboard spoke with Smythe about writing her book, launching Girlilla Marketing, the importance of mental health advocacy and leading the next generation of women music industry execs.
Why was it important to you to share your life and career experiences in this book?
I thought I was going to write a business book about business lessons, anecdotal humor in the workplace, generational bridges, that kind of thing. But I got sick and our music community also lost several people to cancer, like [music industry executives] Jay [Frank], Lisa Lee, and Phran Galante. I had 12 rounds of chemo, six surgeries. [Part of me] was like, “Can I just go back to work?” But I realized, “No, you can’t. This is part of your story now.”
Every single one of those three people — Jay, Phran and Lisa — called me every day when I shared my story [about her battle with breast cancer]. They all were in harder circumstances than I was. So I was like, “I want to do this for them.” And the Nashville community, it is like a family. That’s one of the most special things, and no matter how big Nashville gets, we don’t lose that.
A conversation with your father led you to launch Girlilla Marketing. What do you recall about that?
I was 30, I had had a pretty successful career, and then my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I was in the hospital room with him and he said, “What would you do if your life was half over?” When he asked me that question, in that moment, it drilled down to two different things: I want to start a digital agency and I want to travel more. I realized, “There’s never going to be a perfect time, a perfect amount of money — if I don’t do it now, I will not do it.”
Girlilla Marketing is an all-woman company. What inspired you to launch a female-first company?
I feel like through my whole career of working for other people, I only had the opportunity to work for one woman, and she was amazing. But I wished I would’ve had more opportunity to do that. So, I created what I wanted, the place I wanted to work, because it didn’t exist.
One of the key early moments in the book was when, during your career at Yahoo Music, you received a performance review from your former boss, Jay Frank. You received some feedback you didn’t expect.
That’s what made him my trusted mentor because he was like, “You’re so smart and you’re doing all the right things, but you’ve got to be human, or people won’t want to work for you.” I thought if you are the champion and you are the best, then you will be rewarded for that behavior. Not at all. Everything that has come to me in a good way has come because of a team mentality. It was a lesson in leadership.
What are some things were you able to implement because of that conversation?
How do you come into the office in the morning, no matter how stressed you are — do you say “good morning” to everyone, or do you just ignore everyone? When you are in a meeting and somebody is not prepared, instead of drilling somebody down to where they feel like they can’t get out of that hole, what do you do? Isn’t the job of a manager to lift them up?
What are some of the biggest myths that persist around digital marketing in music?
One of the myths is that [artists] have to create all the time. That’s not true. You do have to figure out what your cadence is, but if you are creative and you’re constant, you’ll be okay. Some people are too precious with it, they feel like they can’t, and we have to get them out of that.
With things like TikTok and A.I., so many things are swiftly changing in the industry. What do you think are some of the biggest issues?
Mental health. Giving people the space to create without the pressure of the analytics, which are glaringly upfront in every conversation that we have. Once a week, somebody comes in here ready to quit because they’ve been told that if they don’t hit a certain threshold, that they don’t have a career. I’ve been around artists my whole life and that’s not conducive to a creative career. My thing is telling artists constantly that they are the CEOs of their lives, and their digital ecosystem is part of it, but it’s a wide net.
Also, the mental health thing starts from the top. I am so lucky to be in this community with people like Tatum [Allsep] from Music Health Alliance, and grateful for people like at the CMA who put together the mental health fund. People talk about artists, but it’s also the people in the business that need support, like our touring families.
For those who are just starting out in digital marketing, what essential tools do they need to know?
I think just being an avid user, and you need to know how to shoot and edit content. It’s all video. This is the biggest merge of the decade. We used to have the creative people and the analytical people. To inform the creative, sometimes you need to understand what the market is requesting — very much the same conversation we had with Napster, when it was like, “So this is the most illegally downloaded file in Green Bay, Wisconsin — maybe we should go play there.”
It’s also having somebody that can purposely come up with a creative strategy that also speaks to the analytical success to something, that’s the job for the next 10 years. That’s exciting because I think when I was in college, my [current] job didn’t exist. But along the way, everything I picked up mattered.
