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…

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…

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…

We’ve talked a lot about narrative in the past, but never about who owns the story in a marketing organization. In this episode we explore the true role of both your story and your storyteller, and what you can do to build a content marketing machine.…

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…

We welcome Mike Dowd to the conversation to talk video games, their massive market share, and how it has the potential to be as life-altering as the internet is…for both people and industries.. Mike and Jason just want Gears of War games to come out more…

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…

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…

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…

The recent de-platforming of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones by just about every social media from YouTube to Facebook to Pinterest (???) puts us all at an awkward crossroads. Is social media merely the private domain of private companies or has it evolved…

Your quasi-intrepid hosts have lived through MTV, cassettes, Walkmans, CDs, Napster, iPods, Zunes (Google them), streaming, and the resurrection of vinyl. How are we supposed to listen to music these days and has that relationship changed as the…

In this episode Mike takes a turn in the captain’s chair, forgets to introduce himself, and all but reaches for the parachute. Fortunately, Rich Wagner joined the show to share some insights on how Agile works (and sometimes doesn’t work) in a services…

Freytag built a pyramid so that you can tell better stories. In this episode we break down Maark’s storytelling methodology and what it means to put your customers on a hero’s journey. Mike and Jason just want to watch a dragon battle in the boardroom.

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.

The demand for more sophisticated digital experience is coming at IT like a comet. Dodging it means embracing a new managerial role over enterprise technology, while standing in its path requires a leveling up of IT skills in order to take an…

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…

We welcome Maark Creative Director Alex Carr to talk about why digital product designers should have the strongest opinion on the team, the prevalence of dumb UX paradigms, and where strategy and design really meet. Mike and Jason just want designers to…

The agency world has been in upheaval for a while, so much so that companies are looking for any way around the Big Guys that they can find, no matter how off the wall the replacement. In this episode we look at a Forbes article and an Accenture report…

Maark went from a posh office on Boston’s State Street to a completely virtual office spread across the world and everywhere in between (including a few months in a rock climbing gym). In this episode, we discuss our firsthand experiences trying to…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…