Back in 2010, Mark got his first job at a digital marketing agency, as a junior analyst at Distilled.

One fateful day, a senior consultant had one foot out of the door, his out-of-office on, ready to go on holiday, when he turned and said “I need you to make an infographic for this client”.

Mark replied naively, “Okay, two questions… What’s that? And how do you do it?”

To which the consultant replied “Research seven interesting facts about the topic and send it to the designer.”

Needless to say, this was not a recipe for success.

In fact it was so unsuccessful that the owner of the client organisation came in to tell Mark exactly what he thought of that – in no uncertain terms! This guy was ANGRY!

Mark came out of that meeting determined to never find himself in that position again.

He realised that everyone in the specific corner of online marketing he found himself in was following the same people, listening to the same thought leaders – online and at conferences.

Around this time, circa 2010, these thought leaders were all telling us to make great content. And pointing to examples of great content.

But the problem was most of them hadn’t actually made the content they were pointing to. So they couldn’t tell us HOW to do it.

It took Mark a while to notice this. But once he did, he realised he needed to break out of this echo chamber. To hear from some different voices.

If these people didn’t have the answer, he wondered, who did?

And so he turned to the world of data visualisation and advertising.

He turned to advertising because even though everyone was saying ‘advertising is dead, content is king’, Mark was all too aware that content marketers didn’t have the same creative heritage that advertising did.

These people had been coming up with creative ideas since the Mad Men era. Mark figured they could teach him a thing or two.

And he turned to the data visualisation community because finding stories in data and presenting them in a compelling visual format was (and still is) a very popular way to create newsworthy, shareable content that generates lots of attention online.

So Mark went to work, consuming all the information he could find, and picking the brains of anyone who would listen.

Eventually, having absorbed as much as he could from these two worlds, Mark brought it back into his own work. And he started to have some success.

The Evolution of Dance Music was the first really successful piece of content Mark created. And is still, to this day, one of the most popular pieces of content he’s ever made. It received over 5 million visits, 100,000 social shares and was featured in WIRED, The New Yorker, etc, etc.

Mark quickly became the go-to guy within the agency when anyone was creating a new piece of content. The consultants, the data analysts, the designers, the devs – they would all seek out Mark’s input on the content they were creating.

One day, Mark took all the email requests he was receiving for help with creative campaigns and forwarded them to the agency’s founders and made his pitch. Mark thought they should start a creative team and he should be the one to lead it.

The bosses took a little persuasion, but eventually they decided to give it a go.

Initially, there were four people in the creative team, and over the following 5 years, Mark grew the team to 14, and it became one of the most respected content teams in the search marketing & digital PR industry.

By the time Mark left the agency, the content they’d created had received 14 million visits, 1.4 million social shares and had been featured in over 14,000 pieces of online coverage.

After Mark left the agency, a number of brands and agencies got in touch with him to see if he could come and help them develop the content team within their organisation.

Mark then spent the next 5 years consulting and training teams to create better content.

But eventually, he had to admit that he really missed the creative side of things. And even though he really enjoyed delivering training, he decided he wanted to get back to making content.

Around this time, the opportunity to work with James Finlayson cropped up. James is one fo the creatives in the industry Mark admired the most.

When Mark started a podcast, Content Deconstructed, in which he interviewed other content creators, there was a reason he invited James to be the very first guest on the series.

He didn’t know at that time he and James would go on to work together, but he’s very excited that they have.

When Mark and James met in a coffee shop to discuss the possibility of working together, they were bouncing ideas around all over the place.

They left excited about the content they would create together. Content that’s creative. That stands out online. That’s right for your brand. That people care about.

Content that people connect with.

If investing in content that really stands out online and gets you in front of the right audience is an important part of your marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you.