The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Matt Johnson is Founder and CEO of Pursuing Results, a podcast production agency that works with emerging thought leaders – business coaches and consultants. Using a detailed process, Pursuing Results helps clients launch their brands, executes and distributes its clients' weekly video podcasts, and promotes thought-leader business growth. His "specialized assembly line" produces consistently high...

Mary Grothe is the CEO of Sales BQ, a a relatively "young" organization that works with companies to rebuild, scale, and empower their underperforming sales departments. A typical client might have 5 to 7 salespeople reporting directly to the CEO. Last year, Sales BQ rebuilt the sales departments for 42 companies. Mary, an experienced sales dynamo, known for exponentially exceeding quotas, says BQ...

Nancy Harhut is Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of HBT Marketing. In this interview, she talks about the how her company utilizes behavioral science and marketing best practices to change how people make purchasing decisions.  Social scientists and behavioral economists have found that people often make decisions by defaulting to "hardwired" behaviors, rather than by thinking things through....

Marc Ensign is the Big Cheese at LoudMouse, a personal branding agency for speakers, authors, coaches, entrepreneurs and artists.  A musician by training, Marc dreamed of performing on Broadway. He created a strong personal "brand," wrote articles for music industry magazines, interviewed and forged relationships with a lot of performers. As a skilled bass player, Marc eventually "got the Broadway...

Dani Buckley is the General Manager of LeadG2, an 100% remote inbound marketing and sales enablement agency, which focuses on sales results for B2B and B2C companies that have complex, multi-channel sales processes.  LeadG2 started in 2011 as sales consulting firm that needed to generate leads for its business. Its first clients were media companies that owned television and radio stations . . . a...

Dale Bertrand is President and Founder of Fire&Spark, a marketing agency focused on ecommerce, and especially ecommerce SEO: product page optimization, ecommerce site link-building, and delivering technical SEO and site speed solutions on a variety of ecommerce platforms. Deep technical skillset. People today may avoid link-building because Google has a history of penalizing dubious link-building...

Oliver Lopez is founder and CEO of Struct Sales, a sales consultancy firm that works with large B2B sales and marketing teams selling complex products and services over long sale cycles. Typical clients of his company have tried and failed at inbound marketing. They may come to Struct Sales thinking they know what they need as a solution. Often, they're trying to solve the wrong problem. Inbound m...

Kim Orlesky is Founder and President of KO Advantage Group, one of the fastest-growing sales training organizations, and author of Sell More Faster. KO Advantage Group works with small companies selling high value, premium-priced B2B services and helps them expedite the sales process by focusing on building relationships, getting that first handshake with a potential client faster, connecting with...

Chris Strub's goal is simple: to grow his personal brand, to try to use that brand for social good by promoting nonprofits, and to make the world a better place. His I Am Here organization is an "umbrella" over the wide variety of entrepreneurial marketing activities he pursues around the U.S. . . . and the world. He feels the power of personal branding can be assessed through an individual's use...

Chris Spears founded Arke Systems in 2005 and, taking advantage of the opportunity to decide "who he was in the organization," designated himself Chief Marketing Technology Officer. The company offered back-end systems support – web platform, CRM system, and email capability development and integration – for the clients of digital agencies.  The problem? Arke had no control over design or strategy...

Chris Yoko is President and CEO of Yoko Co, a digital marketing firm that focuses on working with organizations that have a passion or purpose beyond mere profit.  Why would a marketing agency choose to work with that "slice" of the business landscape? In 2014, Chris's small team questioned why they loved working with some clients . . . and others . . . not so much. Their newly-formed Advisory Boa...

Ryan Pritt, President and Co-Founder of Pritt Entertainment Group (PEG), took a youngster's avid interest in sports and an adult's realistic assessment of his own athletic prowess to chart his sports-related career. For the past 11 years, he has run his sports creative agency, which specializes in video production, animation, graphic design, and live events. Today, PEG serves a roughly 50-50 mix o...

Aki Balogh, Co-Founder and CEO of MarketMuse, a company that works with companies and agencies to transform content marketing into performance marketing, speaks on a topic that is relevant to both agencies and companies – content – and talks about the benefits of long-game strategy vs. the short-term transactional "push." Every company needs to create content to build product and brand awareness,...

Emily Binder is Founder and Voice Marketing Lead of Beetle Moment Marketing, a voice-first marketing agency focused on helping companies develop branding strategies for when voice is the primary interface for interacting with technology . . . a strong trend now and for the future. Voice-activated devices (Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home [which recently gobbled up Nest], Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cor...

Ben Kunz is Executive Vice President of Media Associates, an independent media planning, buying and analytics agency working with clients with $2 to $30 million advertising budgets. Although the company "does media," its primary focus is on tactic and channel selection and on predicting, controlling, and maximizing advertising investment results. Ben explains the structure of advertising as having...

Magnus Unemyr, Marketing Automation Expert, helps companies install and set up website-based marketing automation systems. He recommends using site lead magnets (calls to action, buttons, banner ads), caging some content behind landing pages with registration forms, offering incentives to register information e.g., a PDF that can only be downloaded in exchange for contact information, and adding n...

Mike Popowski, CEO of Dagger, is The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast's first repeat guest. In this interview, live at the 2019 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX, Mike explores the direction his company, Dagger, a strategic content agency, has taken over the past year. Dagger's trademarked statement, "Content at the Speed of Culture," reflects the company's focus. Mike des...

Megan Cunningham is CEO of Magnet Media, a vertically-organized strategic studio that uses storytelling and data to drive business results. Megan feels the best way to engage customers or clients in meaningful, lasting ways is to tell stories that matter, that touch both head and heart. To accomplish this for Magnet clients, small, nimble SWAT teams (pods) pair an account strategist (head) and a c...

After an 8-year stint at Ogilvy, a New York City-based British advertising, marketing, and public relations agency, and 3 more at Leo Burnett in Australia, Rohit Bhargava left the agency world to write. He blogged the Non-Obvious Trend Report (January 2011) to share some unexpected insights about business for the coming year. That blogpost became a digital report that morphed into an e-book that,...

Neil Davidson is Managing Director of Hey Human (London), "the behavioural communications agency." Hey Human started five years ago – the world was changing, brands were changing, and people were changing (and all of them still are), but agencies? Same old, same old. Neil questioned, "What could be done to change the way agencies work . . . so they could effect change in the way brands behaved?" H...

Joseph Jaffe, Admiral and Co-Founder of the HMS Beagle, a small consulting boutique agency, opens this interview with the story of how the HMS Beagle, the British ship that 200 years ago, carried Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, a voyage that inspired Darwin's theories of evolution and the survival of species. He then explains how the amazing pace of change in today's business environment forces a...

Three years ago, Patrick Walldén sold of the majority of his 165 employee agency to a real estate billionaire looking to diversify his portfolio. Arena group was formed when Patrick created Engage, a new lead agency, and combined it with leftovers from his previous company: Kobama, a digital production agency; and Parapix, a film company. Engage works on building engagement within companies . . ....

Michael Skolnik, co-founder of Soze Agency, a social impact agency selling compassion, equity, and authenticity, believes that, if his company is going to build creative campaigns about these values, then the company itself has to operate internally according to these values. How is that implemented? Soze Agency is a worker-owned cooperative. Vacation time is unlimited. What? How does that work? S...

Ann Barlow, West Coast President/ Head of Employee Engagement at Peppercomm, a strategic communications and marketing firm whose purpose is promote, protect, and connect clients—and "to use its innovation and imagination to inspire people to come to know and trust the organizations it works with ." The 23-year-old Peppercomm has its roots in PR, and, although its focus today is on integrated commu...

Lee Caraher is Founder, President, and CEO of Double Forte, a "fiercely independent public relations and social media firm" with offices in New York and San Francisco. They select clients that are good companies doing great things in their categories (in particular – consumer lifestyle, digital life, and professional services); and set goals based on business outcomes (ROI)—not PR outcomes. At lea...