From paying for 96% of their views to 148% organic YouTube growth, ahead of a successful IPO. A two-year embed that built the system the agencies had been getting paid to outsource.
Markforged was about to go public. They 3D-printed their own stock-exchange bell out of stainless steel for the occasion. And they needed to level up their brand voice to match the moment.
As a Boston-based industrial 3D printing company with offices around the globe, Markforged needed to modernize their content while cutting costly reliance on outside agencies. The marketing team had created a hodgepodge of application spotlights and webinars, with little traction and zero consistency. The CEO wanted to “Go Big!” with content that could organically catch fire, again and again.
Their goal: build a premium, scalable in-house creative operation from scratch, develop a voice, and control their own content destiny.
Markforged was spending heavily on outside agencies to produce campaigns, content, and positioning. The agencies were producing competent work, but each engagement started from zero. There was no master narrative. No reusable Story Bank. No internal team trained to recognize, capture, and deploy the company’s own stories. Every quarter the meter ran. Every campaign required reinvention.
The average outside agency engagement runs on hourly billing, fresh discovery for every project, and zero accumulating equity for the client. For Markforged, that math added up to roughly half a million dollars in agency fees annually, with no permanent narrative infrastructure to show for it. Multiply across the two-year embed and the savings alone funded the operation Matt built in its place.
Matt joined as creative director and built the full creative operation from scratch. The work spanned strategy, infrastructure, hiring, and craft.
It started with a strategic roadmap of scalable programming designed to inspire prospects with applications, innovation, and business transformation. Co-created audience personas. Targeted content for every platform, from the homepage to YouTube to tradeshows to social.
From there, the operation: a dedicated soundstage built from scratch, hardware and equipment investment, hiring and training the team. Editors, producers, graphic designers, social media manager, coordinator, art director. The team’s processes integrated directly into marketing to support blog articles, white paper content, sales collateral, and quarterly earnings reports.
When onscreen talent was needed, Matt created guidelines and training for in-house engineers to become effective storytellers and communicators.
The machine hummed. Product launches. Customer documentaries. Tradeshow displays. Sales collateral. Internal culture builders. Mechanisms for UGC intake. All under one cohesive narrative vision. And Matt did it from Los Angeles, three thousand miles from Markforged’s Boston headquarters.
To bring content creation in-house and elevate production quality, Matt spearheaded the development of a fully-equipped studio built for speed, flexibility, and scale. The space had to accommodate large product shoots and enough power to run not just lights and production equipment, but several industrial printers in real-time.
The team Matt hired included award-winning cinematographers and production designers. The result was a turnkey content hub: lighting grid, soundstage, edit bays, shared-storage system, remote-ready infrastructure. It gave Markforged creative independence, operational efficiency, and the infrastructure to scale storytelling across every channel.
“I was blown away by Matt’s ability to make complicated things easy, but never banal. His vision and direction was key for us to increase our brand awareness in Europe, too. He possesses a winning combination of creative marketing skills and business sense.”
One of the proudest outcomes happened inside the building. The in-house studio also turned its lens on Markforged itself, spotlighting the people, rituals, and curiosity that made the company special. The videos did more than engage. These authentic videos sparked real recruiting momentum, with applicants citing them as the reason they wanted to work at Markforged.
A livestreamed bracket-style showdown where teams of Markforged employees competed to 3D print the strongest part. Spandex, hype videos, bedazzled parts. Over 100,000 impressions. Part engineering olympics, part internal hype machine.
What started as a casual Friday meeting became a key pillar of internal storytelling. Engineers showcased their favorite 3D-printed parts, from Settlers of Catan pieces to mission-critical components, in a friendly company-wide competition.
A short-form video series spotlighting employees’ personal and professional journeys. Humanized the brand, fostered cross-team connection, and became a powerful recruiting tool.
“While Marketing is often thought of as an external-facing function, great marketers have the ability to give employees purpose and make them viscerally feel the excitement of launching new ideas in the world. Matt did this in spades.”
“Matt is a terrific partner and a wonderful professional and leader who listens to the needs of the customer and then brings it to life in the most creative ways I’ve ever seen at work. I cherish my partnership with him.”
Paying agencies to invent the story your company already owns? Let’s build the engine in-house instead.
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Don’t worry, I loathe marketing emails. The rare times you hear from me, it’ll be a story worth stealing or a framework you can use that afternoon. Suffice to say, worth it.