Agency On Record

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.

Article referenced in the podcast: The Well-Rounded Digital Designer, by Alex Carr.

Show Notes! Here's the Forbes article. And here's the Accenture report.

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.