About
Us
We’re more than a diversity of disciplines or departments. With MKR, you get a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We’ve got concert promoters, filmmakers, activists, musicians, and social influencers. Their pursuits both inside and outside the business make them stronger, more effective, and way more fun to sit next to at a bar.
Our mission is to achieve winning business outcomes for our clients with intelligence, innovation and fearless creativity.
Values
Excellence
We hold ourselves to a higher standard in our unrelenting devotion to the craft.
Curiosity
An insatiable appetite to grow our expertise—about our industry, our clients, their customers, and the world around us.
Leadership
The ability to guide our clients with imagination, humility, and insight positions us as more than just a service provider.
Customer First Approach
The way customers experience a brand defines the brand. Every moment matters. From the advertising they see, to the online reviews they read, to the point of sale that nudges them toward the register, and more. Every single touchpoint. Every single time. That’s why we place great emphasis on crafting emotionally meaningful creative platforms that enable us to engineer relevant and timely interactions at every stage of the customer journey.
Leadership Team
Chris Mortenson
CEO
Chris Mortenson
CEO
Chris spent nearly 30 years as a corporate executive and marketing professional at leading brands like Oscar Mayer, ConAgra, American Greetings, and Coleman Natural Foods before returning to Milwaukee to join MKR in 2007. He has been running companies since 1995 and blends his hands-on management and marketing experience with a deep understanding of consumer shopping behaviors to help clients grow their business and achieve an ROI on their marketing investments.
Chris offers MKR’s clients valuable insight, deep knowledge, and broad experience across a range of marketing disciplines, and provides thoughtful leadership to the agency team.
Peter Kim
President/Chief Creative Officer
Peter Kim
President/Chief Creative Officer
Peter provides enthusiastic leadership while driving innovative creative strategies for MKR. With his ability to create authentic, emotional connections between brands and their prospects at every stage of the customer journey, Peter excels at helping clients harness the power of creativity to change hearts and minds.
An award-winning executive with nearly 25 years of experience, he’s earned many of the industry’s top accolades, including The One Show, Graphis, Archive, Webbys, and the ADDYs. His campaigns have also been featured in Advertising Age, Creativity, Adweek, and the New York Times. Peter has lent his creative leadership to an impressive list of clients, including Anheuser-Busch, Starbucks, Harley-Davidson, Chrysler, Kraft, and Case IH.
Bob Bourgeois
EVP/Chief Strategy Officer
Bob Bourgeois
EVP/Chief Strategy Officer
Bob is known as a perceptive business and account leader with a bias for action, as well as a fondness for big, big charts that make a useful display of the right data at the right time. He has training in classical UK-style account planning, a.k.a. creative research, as well as experience directing and supporting large-scale marketing enterprises.
Bob has served in marketing and management roles on both the client and agency side of the business. His track record includes experience with innovative marketers such as Kimberly-Clark, McDonald’s, Meijer, Penzeys Spices, Snap-on Tools, and Walmart.
Breah Mortenson
Chief Legal Counsel
Breah Mortenson
Chief Legal Counsel
Breah brings a diverse set of skills to her role at MKR, including investment banking, law, and corporate strategy. Her educational background includes a business degree from the University of Wisconsin, a law degree from Harvard, and a year studying diplomacy at Oxford University. While she balances her time at the office between account service, strategic development, and contract law, her favorite part of the business is helping clients exceed their business goals. When not in the office, Breah can be found competing on her performance horses or running the occasional marathon.
Kelley Briggs
Chief Operating Officer
Kelley Briggs
Chief Operating Officer
If anyone can bring out the best in people, it's Kelley. As COO she specializes in maximizing our team's potential, and as a friend to everyone in the office, she's the go-to for meaningful conversations. Kelley makes sure MKR's operations are the most efficient they can be, and that our teams have everything they need to get their work done easily. Like Hermione with her Time-Turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Kelley makes her hard work look magically easy.
Sarah Pittner
VP Account Management & Planning
Sarah Pittner
VP Account Management & Planning
Sarah has been delivering client successes and brand strategies to consumer and B2B industries for over fifteen years, including building manufacturing, gas engine oil/lubricants, agriculture, health care, retail, education, and not-for-profit. Her dualist approach to strategic development involves analyzing a client’s objectives and devising a plan to target and drive brand loyalty based on research and industry knowledge. We know it works because we’ve seen her apply those skills to many of our client’s brands with outstanding results
Meghan Barich
VP Account Management
Meghan Barich
VP Account Management
Meet Meghan (pronounced Mee-gan), because she would sure as heck love to meet you. Our account director is a self-professed lover of people. Seeing a client light up at the awesome work our team creates makes Meghan feel like a proud mama, and one that we all feel lucky to have. With her plethora of experience across various industries, Meghan brings a lot of great ideas to the table. She’s a whiz at managing large, complex campaigns, and is able to translate content plans into execution to tackle business objectives.
Gina August
VP Media Director
Gina August
VP Media Director
Gina is a skilled Media Communications Strategist with more than 12 years’ experience in strategic planning across multi-channel platforms, including broadcast, OOH, print, and digital. She specializes in consumer engagement, communication planning, and media management, and has worked in multiple categories including retail, apparel, financial, healthcare, motorcycle/automotive, entertainment, B2B, non-profit, and sports. Gina excels at innovative, well-researched, cost effective media plans that meet the client’s needs on all levels. She believes in integration between brand strategy, creative, account planning, digital, and PR, to ensure that all communication efforts are fully integrated.
Matt (Stu) Barnett
VP Creative Director
Matt (Stu) Barnett
VP Creative Director
Matt Barnett believes that the voice of your brand should be one worth listening to. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’d better be inspiring. If you’re loud and boastful, you’d better have swagger. If you’re boring, well, don’t be boring. He has created campaigns that have stood out to audiences and award shows for a variety of clients, including the Indiana Pacers, Kiwanis International, Arby’s, Purdue University, FORUM Credit Union, and Carrier Corporation.
Ellen Wager
Associate Creative Director
Ellen Wager
Associate Creative Director
With over 15 years of experience, Ellen has many talents ranging from conceptual advertising to illustrative design. She has worked on iconic brands, including Foot Locker Inc., Nike, Adidas, Healthy Choice, Dove Chocolate, Twix, and Kraft. Before settling in Milwaukee, Ellen lived in Georgia, New York, California and Germany. Originally from St. Louis, she was happy to return to her Midwestern roots. When Ellen isn’t busy using her creative genius building brands for MKR, she enjoys board games, jewelry making, and all things DIY. She likes to think of herself as the MacGyver of functional art.
Julie Rasmussen
Media Director
Julie Rasmussen
Media Director
Julie has more than 20 years of experience in a wide array of industries, including entertainment, healthcare, grocery, insurance, retail, and banking, among others. As Media Director, she has practical planning and buying knowledge in all forms of media including television, radio, outdoor, digital, and print. Julie’s strength lies in her ability to analyze a client’s objectives and, based on research and market knowledge, devise a plan to efficiently and effectively reach the target with the client’s message.
Topher Howden
Director of Strategy
Topher Howden
Director of Strategy
If digital strategy is your need, Topher is your guy. He’s delivered world-class strategy for some of the largest brands on the planet and leads digital projects spanning web, social, and brand strategy. Topher’s words to live by are simple: if you can’t measure it, then what’s the point? His analytical prowess helps prove the value of MKR’s efforts on a daily basis.
Sean Ireton
Director of Engagement & Reach
Sean Ireton
Director of Engagement & Reach
By the time you hear about a new social service, Sean’s already spoken to the rep and put us on the VIP waitlist. He wears many hats at MKR, though he prefers one with the Duke logo. Overseeing social media content and strategy, Sean helps our clients amplify their message and get the best return on ad spend possible. With this former parody rapper and all-time Simpsons trivia master on the job, you won’t have a cow, man.
Kristine Warski
Media Director
Kristine Warski
Media Director
Kristine is MKR’s consummate media expert. She has spent over 20 years planning and buying media across traditional and digital platforms for clients in too many industries to count. By mining data, she can optimize performance and conversion tracking to deliver strong ROI for her clients and better connect them with their target audiences. As if that weren’t enough, she’s a master of Polish cuisine. Try her golabkis — they're a game changer!
MKR Healthcare
Cutting through in healthcare takes creative approaches that can survive the gauntlet of approvals while still resonating authentically with audiences. It starts with bold, thoughtful strategies.
MKR Higher Education
We combine the science of enrollment management with the art of differentiation, enabling our clients to win every moment of the student pathway to enrollment and managing their relationships on through graduation and beyond.
MKR Ticketed Entertainment
Sold-out events are the product of knockout strategies. Whether it’s selling seasons, upgrades, or single-day events, we partner with clients to drive a sense of urgency and opportunity into casual and avid fans alike.
MKR Retail/CPG
From persuasive packaging to strategic retargeting and every touchpoint in between, we put our clients’ products into consumers’ hands, hearts, and minds.
MKR Utilities
Utilities are as diverse as any other industry, so why aren’t their brands treated that way? We work closely with clients to tell those unique stories that move initiatives and communities forward.
