Agency on Record: Recent Episodes
Jason Ocker & Mike Colombo
Mike Colombo and Jason Ocker from the digital agency Maark discuss creativity and technology in a commercial world. Except it gets a lot messier than that. A weekly podcast from the agency's headquarters in Boston.
Jay Wightman, head of digital experience at Manulife Investment Management, joins us to talk the data and product challenges of the company's digital transformation and how Maestro was a critical part of the solution. Mike and Jason want you to go to http://maestro.maark.com/.
In the holy trinity of story, vision, and style, style is often the one sacrificed. That can be true whether it's art, marketing, or digital experiences. Mike and Jason just want style to be in style.
There are many reasons to release a minimum viable product (MVP) in the software world--to hit a deadline, to test the concept on the market, to lower cost--and they're all probably wrong strategies. Mike and Jason just want you to knock off the M and V and focus on the P.
It sounds weird to say, but we've outlived Google Search's usefulness. It's full of ads, we never make it past page three of its results, it's hard to trust its objectivity, and the privacy concerns aren't going away. That means any other search engine is just as good, if not better. Mike and Jason just want to retrain the muscle memory that sends them to Google every time.
We pushed the bounds of science and bureaucracy to create a COVID vaccine in record time. But the simple online form for getting it is broken in every way despite big agencies and major companies building it. Even worse, this software fail is the state of the industry. Mike and Jason just don't want people to die from bad software.
It was fun to root for the Redditors, but the GameStop debacle shows yet again how software platforms are best at turning individuals into faceless, hysterical mobs. Mike and Jason are just sore they didn't get in when they were trading shares for old Nintendo cartridges.
Social media forces us to be emotionally attached to everything due to the social pressure to make statements or the unending need to post content. But the rabid pursuit to be "in the conversation" is exhausting and fomentative. We need more emotional impartiality. Mike and Jason are working on the self-help book: Not Caring Yourself into a Better Life.
We welcome to the podcast Cassidy Shield, VP of Marketing at Narrative Science, a company dedicated to telling engaging stories through data. We go way back with Cassidy, maybe too far back, and we get to pick his brain about who in the company should own the product vision and what the heck that even means (TL;DL: It should be Marketing).
Do we want to look back at 2020? Of course we do. It was a strange year for everyone, a tragic year for some, and--from a digital industry perspective--an enlightening year. Mike and Jason just want to record this podcast in person again.
The digital world has increased both consumption and production of both art and content to crazy levels. But has that voracious cycle caused us to lose something important? Mike and Jason just want to rehash old college dorm arguments...in the digital world.
When the pandemic started, Zoom was one of its heroes. Now its brand seems to have shifted from one of positive collaboration to one of necessary evil. Mike and Jason just want their friends and colleagues to be larger than a computer screen.
Goodby and Silverstein are known for iconic ad campaigns like Got Milk?, and their MasterClass is great, both for what they say and what they don't say about the modern state of marketing and advertising. And what they don't say, well, Mike and Jason do in this discussion of both the MasterClass and GS&P. Mike and Jason just want people to not forget about the time ET was impressed by Comcast.
There's an attempt to institutionalize good in business today, both via pressure from new generations of employees and the ideas of tech leaders like Marc Benioff and his stakeholder capitalism. But can you put a sincere engine for charity in a vehicle of escalating commerce? And is there even a shared sense of the greater good today? Mike and Jason just want more humanity in humanity.
We're inundated by software in our personal and professional lives, and every single platform is a learning curve. Meanwhile, that software is in constant flux, adding features and capabilities that clutter its menus and overlap other platforms and impact the experience. Software makers may need to think about their products in the software continuum of the user's life. Mike and Jason just want to email you a Word document.
Agency awards are...icky. The money machine is blatant--scores of awards, half a dozen deadlines each, 4,000 categories, non-competitive judging, checkout upsales. The money and business flow, not to the winners, but to the award orgs, and these orgs don't know what a modern, relevant agency does. Mike and Jason won an award for this podcast and are ashamed to tell you about it.
The Customer Experience shouldn't be silo'd into sales, marketing, product, and customer service. It should all be unified within a continuum of digital experiences. It's time for marketing to stop taking orders and start serving the long term vision of the customer's experience at every touchpoint. Mike and Jason just want to press "0" for the operator.
We started a cross-education program at Maark, with subscriptions to Treehouse for employees to expand their skillsets and to MasterClass to stoke their personal curiosity. Continuing education is a no-brainer, but how well do these platforms work for it? Mike and Jason want all their teachers to fit in little boxes on screens.
Sure, we all love movie theaters. They're nostalgic. And a chance to leave our screens at home for a screen somewhere else. But now that they're closed, do we need them anymore? Or is VOD to our 4K TVs a more profitable model for movie studios and a good enough experience for most movie-lovers? Mike and Jason are just glad Bill and Ted 3 isn't getting pushed to 2021.
Technicolor is bankrupt, and a big part of its business was visual effects. Their client list is impressive, as is their work, and yet, the margins for VFX are thinner than old pants. Is it the software conundrum? That clients don’t understand the true cost of innovation? Mike and Jason think whichever digital artists created Godzilla: King of the Monsters should be millionaires.
Blockbuster Video went from 9,000 stores across the country to 1 store in a decade. Movies and video games couldn't be more relevant, so how did Blockbuster fall so hard and so fast? The answer isn't Netflix. It's a failure at digital transformation. Mike and Jason miss Friday nights under the blue and yellow lights.
We talk to a founding father of Maark, Johnny Boursiquot, to learn about Maark in its early days and why he believes it's important for developers to own product experience instead of just delivering it.
The worst sports team is still probably marketing better than you are. Whether it's escalating narratives, brand management, or content marketing, sports is the best school to learn from. Mike and Jason just wanted to give the XFL that second chance.
Alexandra Watkins is obsessed with brand naming. From her naming agency Eat My Words to her book, "Hello, My Name is Awesome," she believes in the commercial power of a great name and the horror of a bad. We talk about her process, how to make such a subjective task more objective, and why a good brand name is so important to success. Mike and Jason just want to rename everything now.
U.S. National Pride Falls to Record Lows
The American Story, Splintered, and Those Vying to Tell It
We hear a lot about empathy in design, empathy on the socials, and it seems to be considered a universal good. But is empathy that great? Does it actually lead to subpar work or, worse, bias and prejudice instead of protecting against that? Mike and Jason just want us all to be Deanna Trois.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/r-i-p-quartz-brief-the-innovative-mobile-news-app-maybe-chatting-with-the-news-isnt-something-most-people-really-want-to-do/
With everyone in quarantine, entertainers and media personalities who usually rely on highly produced video content to create their experiences have been forced into creating low-fi experiences that any schlub could create...and it's made culture a lot more interesting for the time being. Mike and Jason just want to see a "Cheers in Zoom" reunion.
Our new state of emergency illustrates exactly why Twitter taken seriously is bad for society. It's full of misinformation and low-word-count opinions passed around at the speed of RTs, it taints and replaces legitimate journalism, and it tempts scientists and politicians to further their individual brands instead of the truth. Any information propelled by a like mechanism should be immediately suspect. Mike and Jason just want to Twitter to focus on what it's best at: drunk tweets.
We check in from our respective fortresses of solitude for some possibly too-candid thoughts about living and working through this pandemic, where health concerns are scary, the economy is scary, but the unknowns are probably the most mentally trying. Mike and Jason just want to visit their barbers.
The core craft of marketing is storytelling. And the way you figure out a story, and the way to practice that craft, is through writing. Is that arguable? We argue it in this episode. Mike and Jason just want to make storytelling cool again.
Conferences are being cancelled, nonessential travel is being curtailed, stocks are diving, industries are being hit--the coronavirus is really doing a number on the business world. In this episode, we discuss its impact and how Maark is dealing with it. Mike and Jason just wanted to go to Adobe Summit.
Brand New breaks down the rebrand.
Fast Company likes that the new Godaddy logo gets out of the way.
The Iowa Caucus voting app debacle is the latest in a string of high-profile software failures that illustrate that there is still a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of how software is built, how hard it is to build, what its risks are, and how to mitigate them. Mike and Jason just like how much fun it is to say "caucus" during a podcast.
Part two in our quest for quality software experiences finds us discussing whether or not the old "build vs. run" model applies in a world bent on constant innovation. We learn from Boeing's experience that cheap software has consequences. Mike and Jason just want jets that never leave the ground.
Good design has mostly been commoditized. And that's because great design is super-hard to execute on. And that falls on the front-end engineers, who are, in the end, responsible for the ultimate quality of an experience and whether it will be used or trashed. Mike and Jason just humans to be better at software.
Over the past year or so, we've seen the industry shift from modernizing their web stacks to pulling value out of those stack, and first on the list seems to be personalization. Yup. It's time for that topic. Mike and Jason just want to stop being chased around the Internet by the same ads because we looked at that lamp one time on Amazon.
What does it take to be a marketing leader? Executing on the CEO's priorities? Embracing your own vision for the company's story? Should there be friction between the CMO and the CEO? Is marketing about standing out internally as much as it is standing out on the market? Mike and Jason just want to play Game of Thrones with the C-suite.
You can't market technology without the word "innovation." And, yet, few organizations actually want it, fewer organizations still care to invest in it, and, quite possibly, it means nothing. So why is the word so important? Mike and Jason just want to stop being forced to use the word in messaging projects.
Failure is a slippery word in the industry. Few admit it. Expectations are lowered until it's irrelevant. Project outcomes are spun. Goal posts are moved. So what is failure? Even more important, what is success, both objectively for a project and subjectively for the person who takes pride in their work and wants the best product to go out there. Mike and Jason apparently know too much about failure.
Decision fatigue has always been an issue in business, but now it's an exponentially worse threat thanks to instant communication channels like Slack. Every one of those red dots is someone asking you a question...that you need answer instantly or break the flow of business. Mike and Jason just want to flip coins.
Forrester recently showed that brands are achieving no differentiation in the market due to the homogeneity of everyone's digital experiences, and suggested that to combat the trend, 20% of technology budgets should be sent to creative. This sounds good in theory, especially for creatives and brands, but it might actually mean that everybody's screwed. Mike and Jason just want, well, the same thing Forester wants, but know the reality of execution and delivery.
It's a classic debate in the marketing world: When do you build the team to tackle all the various elements of marketing and when do you outsource? Today, that debate is much more complicated thanks to how technology is rebuilding marketing's role in the business. Mike and Jason just want you to remember that Maark is available for outsourcing.
The marketing around (and inside of) Stranger Things Season 3 was wild and brazen and so far unabated and could be a portent for the future of marketing. But we mostly discussed what we liked/didn't like about Season 3. Mike and Jason still can't get the theme from The Neverending Story out of their heads.
AdAge article on the disappearing CMO.
AdExchanger article on the disappearing CMO.
CNBC article on the disappearing CMO.
The Havard Business Review article on solving brainstorming with brainwriting that kicked off this whole conversation.
What do you need to start designing a digital experience? The content? How much of it? An outline? Full text? Can it be placeholder? Or should design dictate content? The amount of it? The flow? Can't design make general containers to fill with content later? Actually, it's not a chicken or the egg question. It's also not as simple as "both." It's a strategy question. That's right. The dreaded "S" word. Mike and Jason just want designers and content owners to get along.
With digital, the focus has always been on creating elegant experiences, and the socials often reward the most polished presentations of our lives. But a new generation is growing up that sees that level of sophistication as corporate and inauthentic and is drawn to low-fidelity aesthetics that will impact design, marketing, and how we interact digitally. Mike and Jason just want to know how to connect with their kids.
We frequently reference this episode with Chris Link:
https://aor.maark.com/episode/writers-should-be-strategic-to-the-business-a-conversation-with-christopher
This week we had an Apple event launching the company into the services biz and Adobe Summit, the company known for its super-expensive enterprise software. One still doesn’t quite totally make sense as a biz model, the other makes so much sense it’s terrifying. Mike and Jason just want to know what happens at the end of all this land-grabbing.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6768749/Is-internet-completely-control-monster.html
https://www.google.com/doodles#archive
Your intrepid podcast hosts, along with Maark Creative Director Alex Carr, return from the Land of Switzers after attending Digital Design Days. They discuss their impressions and conclusions on the conference, the presenters, and the work they saw. Mike and Jason just want to fondue themselves forever.
In the second episode of a two-part interview with Anders Brownworth, we learn that his personal life is as intriguing as his professional life in cryptocurrency. Brownworth is actively training for the goal of being one of the first civilians in space. IN SPACE. Mike and Jason just want space travel to be as easy as it is in Gattaca.
A frank discussion on how Maark balances a large, complex workload, generous PTO, and company growth, all while being a small, nimble agency that gets things done. Mike and Jason just want those four-day work weeks that are all the rage.
The Covington Catholic High School story reveals how bad Twitter is for journalism. And when journalism is harmed, everybody suffers. Mike and Jason just want to stop doing episodes about Twitter's negative effects on society.
Cable TV still is the dominant way most people get their media, but statistics show a large trend of both people leaving cable for streaming services and entire generations not even knowing what cable is in the first place. What does this mean for media and the marketers vying for audience attention? Mike and Jason just wish TV was a punchline again so that they could leave their houses.
We look back at the past year at Maark and the past year of Agency on Record and what's on the horizon for both in 2019. Mike and Jason just want to eggnog their way through the next two weeks.
We talk to senior producer and longest-running Maark employee Mark Van Der Hyde about balancing work projects and personal projects. Mike and Jason just want to surround themselves with people who do interesting things.
We welcome Christopher Link, the head of content at John Hancock Investments, to discuss how he built a team of writers into a formidably strategic asset for the company, one that does everything from protecting the brand story to making digital transformation possible. Mike and Jason just want writers to be cool again.
Sometimes it happens. Agencies have to fire clients. It hurts financially. It makes us sad. It goes against everything that makes us a service company. But it can protect the agency—its goals, its employees, its quality of work, and its culture. Mike and Jason just want us all to reenact Hands Across America every other Saturday.
How do you manage a tech project? Mike invites senior producer, Simone Ovsey, to the AoR podcast to talk about managing projects at Maark, and how to be successful when you are tasked with all the complexities of digital delivery. We talk about the pitching and requirements process, design, HANDOFF, development, and QA. Mike just appreciates that Simone found a way to bring JSON into the show.
Jason wrote a blog post about this very topic, and posted it here: https://www.maark.com/articles/serious-about-story/
For a while there, it looked like corporate websites were becoming less relevant, but today they're the hub of all digital activities, complete with a complex, multi-system back-end, highly competitive customer experiences, and a need for a clear strategy and strong story. Mike and Jason just want to Squarespace you up an enterprise dot com right quick.
A lot of stats thrown around at the beginning of this 'cast, with some vagueness over which is bigger, sports or video games (see below). Either way, it's pretty apparent the gaming industry will win that competition, if it hasn't already.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-11-28-global-gaming-revenue-on-par-with-sports-following-2017-estimates
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4184342-video-games-taking-will-esports-become-larger-sports
https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/
Collaboration has become a feel-good word and a general goal in corporate culture, but the truth is, collaboration (as corporately defined) is the worst way to get anything good done. Plus, you're probably not really collaborating anyway. Mike and Jason just want to be left alone in their offices with meals left outside their doors.
If your management consultant can't build a world-class digital experience, you shouldn't be listening to them. No matter how much data they have. Jason and Mike just want to sell a six-month PowerPoint project for $300,000.
From burning socks on one side of the political spectrum to celebrating the morality of a multinational corporation on the other, the reception to Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign has been weird, with both sides seemingly missing the real implications of this marketing strategy. Either way, we might be at a real watershed moment for branding. Mike and Jason just want to know what their vintage Nike Solo Flights (with tag still on) are worth now...had they kept them.
In this episode we dig through our phones mining for meaning in a sea of meaningless apps. Has the mobile app revolution really changed the way we live, or just the way we chat? Mike and Jason just want to figure out if Google's really stealing Jason's travel pins.
We referenced a lot of articles in this ep:
Apple CEO Tim Cook on keeping humanity in playlists (???).
Forbes says people are listening to music more than ever...32 hours a week!
Business intelligence says the music industry is setting records with $43B in revenue last year, with the artists who make it getting a paltry 12%...and only if they hustle.
Rich's blog post referenced in the show: https://www.maark.com/articles/agile-square-peg-in-circular-world/
Maark's 5 Act Framework: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b59uj4w0v8fkoli/maark-5act-framework.pdf?dl=0
Jason's blog post on business stories: https://www.maark.com/articles/thats-not-a-story/
We've had thousands of years of practice at making good content. Why did we chuck it all out the window for the Internet? Mike and Jason just want an RSS feed full of blog posts on their Google Reader page.
For more on "experience-first" IT, take a look at Mike's recent post on the topic over at the Maark blog: https://www.maark.com/articles/digital-cio-mastering-the-nuance-of-digital-delivery/
We come (mostly) clean about our past to discuss our education in the classics from the Great Books program of St. John's College of Annapolis and how we think that equips us to be better agency executives than if we'd gone conventional business education routes. Mike and Jason just want to discuss this 1,500-year-old book with you.
See our post on the Maark blog about how being a hybrid virtual office invigorated our productivity, cemented our culture, and helped us learn who we really were as a company.
We welcome Maark colleague Michael Dowd back to the podcast to discuss our experiences pitching work to potential clients, while turning the tables and scoring clients on how they judge pitches. Clue: It shouldn't be merely on skill sets and case studies. Mike and Jason just want people to clap and throw roses at the end of their pitches.
Our eleventh episode centers on Maark, the agency behind AOR; where it came from, and its role as an unlikely veteran in a field that may not exist. More like Quantum Leap than AOR, Mike and Jason just want this episode to put right the wrongs of practice podcasts past.
AOR welcomes Alex Carr, creative director at Maark and the one in charge of user experience (UX) engineering at the company, to discuss how UX engineering takes as much art as engineering, the myth of the full-stack developer, and why there's no such thing as a simple handoff between the design team and the development team. Mike and Jason just want a clean QA phase.
We still don't know if Google faked its Duplex demo, but the idea of it still made us break out our brand new recording equipment so that we could wonder out loud and on mic about the ethics of A.I. in life and marketing. Resident Maark futurist Michael Dowd returns. Mike and Jason just want robot butlers the size of the Iron Giant.
Comparisons between B2B and B2C marketing usually focus on the complexity of B2B solutions and sales. However, the real difference might be (unfortunately) that B2B knows less about its market than B2C. Mike and Jason just want that Star Wars Company to name a robot B2B2C.
Why naming B2B products is often a fool's errand, why the path to a great tagline is through five pages of narrative, and why you should consult a French dictionary before doing anything. Mike and Jason named this podcast in 15 minutes.
Too often, a company's brand is tragically bifurcated into digital experience and advertising. And Marketing always focuses on the least effective one. Your digital brand is the one your customers actually use, and if it's bad, no ad creative will ever repair that damage. Mike and Jason just want your customers to stop making fun of your product.
It was supposed to be a discussion about social media in a marketing context, except that it wended down dark tunnels of existential foreboding as they try to ascertain if social media is a breakthough or a breakdown. Mike and Jason just want their lives to measure up to the lives of friends and strangers.
Maark executive Michael Dowd joins the podcast to discuss the strange, disappointing, and exciting realities around the current state of virtual and augmented reality. Mike and Jason just want a holodeck.
Thanks to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, data privacy is in every other headline. Between that and the looming GDPR, are we at the edge of a new era of user-controlled data or just experiencing one more bump in the gradual numbing of our attitudes toward our data points? Mike and Jason are glad their college days occurred before Big Data.
Why is disciplined storytelling in a marketing organization such a unicorn, and how is storytelling evolving in a digital world? Mike and Jason just want ghost tales around a campfire.
Digital transformation is such a massive initiative that there's no way it can be entrusted to a boutique agency, right? On the other hand, if the agency is so big it's in need of digital transformation itself, how is it going to be agile enough to make another enterprise agile? Mike and Jason just want to avoid being chased around online by irrelevant ads.