Jason Weinberger, co-founder of Mother Bear, started his career on a Super Bowl set for Gatorade back in 2008. He was the youngest person there by a good margin, working alongside a young McDonald’s client named Morgan Flatley who’d become a friend and eventually the global CMO at McDonald’s.
That early work taught Weinberger something about big brands—they’re great for portfolio building, but the impact feels different when you’re maintaining share rather than shaping a story.
Fast forward through stints at Sprint B to B and other holding company gigs, and Weinberger realized the problems he wanted to solve weren’t at the Fortune 500 level. They were with scaling brands that needed clarity, credibility and conversion. So five and a half years ago, he and partner Matthew Kaminsky started a digital creative firm that eventually merged with a Seattle-based PR and strategy shop led by Nancy Poznoff and Katie Curnutte to become Mother Bear.
From Gatorade Super Bowls to solving real problems
Weinberger and his original co-founder, Kaminsky, came from creative backgrounds in the holding company world. They’d cut their teeth on the fun stuff—Gatorade, Miller Lite, Harley Davidson—but also learned how to make B to B not boring when they worked on Sprint.
Meanwhile, Poznoff and Curnutte were building a PR and strategy firm in Seattle, bringing client-side experience from Zillow, Amazon and Starbucks.
The two teams kept partnering on projects for scaling brands, realized they liked the same kinds of challenges, started what Weinberger calls “business dating,” and about a year and a half ago got legally hitched and rebranded as Mother Bear.
The name came from their positioning work. They realized they guide, protect and nurture brands through their growth journey, and someone said that sounds like a mother bear. It stuck. The name wasn’t taken. Always helpful.
What Mother Bear does differently: the five problems they solve
Mother Bear built itself around what scaling brands actually need, which led to five common problems they see repeatedly.
First, team problems—growing companies don’t have the right people in place, so Mother Bear becomes an extension, whether that’s creative work or fractional CMO help. Second, brand problems where a great product isn’t communicating its value clearly. Third, performance problems with high customer acquisition costs make growth too expensive. Fourth, stalled growth where companies need to move into adjacent categories. Fifth, awareness gaps where compelling stories aren’t getting seen.
The agency’s setup reflects how they solve all that: strategic marketing, PR and comms, digital and creative under one roof. It’s unusual for a 20-person full-time team plus half a dozen perma-lance contractors, but it lets them be agnostic about solutions rather than trying to force every client problem into a banner ad or TV spot.
Why being indie beats the holding company math
Weinberger’s blunt about why independence matters. At the big agencies, client fees often go to fancy offices and holding companies in New York, Paris, and other locations. At Mother Bear, all the fees go to senior talent.
That means when you meet the new business team, that’s who actually works on your stuff. No bait and switch. No specialized pitch team that disappears after you sign.
The creative side is mostly holding company dropouts who wanted out of that system. The strategy and PR side brings client-side leaders who know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of agency work.
It’s a unique blend—former journalists, people with MBAs who are also creatives, folks who worked on fortune 50 brands and people who worked at startups. They’re technically fully remote but maintain offices in Chicago and Seattle for people who want them. Nobody has to go in, but the option’s there.
Why brands choose Mother Bear: clarity, credibility, conversion
The pitch is straightforward. Mother Bear solves business problems creatively rather than trying to sell you on whatever medium they happen to specialize in. If the answer is PR or performance marketing or a new website or all of the above, they’ve got the experience to execute it.
The leadership team’s background—that mix of client side and agency side—means they’ve seen most problems before and they’ve been in the client’s shoes. They’re not just focusing on making something pretty. They’re solving for the actual business challenge.
Recently they took over a yerba mate brand that was struggling despite having a great product. A couple weeks after Mother Bear fixed their funnel and updated their creative, the client messaged to say they had to pause because they’d run out of product. Good problem to have.
That’s the kind of impact you get working with smaller companies that really need the help, not maintaining share for a giant where your work barely moves the needle.
Why talent picks Mother Bear over the big shops
The retention story tells you something. They haven’t had a full-time person quit yet, though Weinberger’s quick to add he doesn’t believe in jinxing things.
Part of that is the work—you get to solve different kinds of problems across B to B and B to C, working on scaling brands where you can actually see your impact.
Part of it is the setup. Summer Fridays. The office is closed Christmas week and the July 4 week. They staff projects so people aren’t burning midnight oil like they do at a lot of agencies. There’s profit share and a feedback structure focused on learning and development.
And since they’re fully remote with optional offices, people can work how they want. Whether you’re a creative who wants to move beyond maintaining share for big brands, or you’re coming from a client-side role and want to apply that perspective at an agency, or you’re a former journalist who wants to work in comms, there’s room to grow and learn from different types of leaders.
A band of misfits who don’t fit in a box
When asked if Mother Bear considers itself weirdos, misfits or underdogs, Weinberger went with misfits.
They’ve got client-side people who are surprisingly creative and recently helped a lot with pitch work. They’ve got creatives with MBAs, which isn’t exactly common. People who worked on fortune 50 brands both agency and client side, and people who worked on startups in both worlds.
It’s just a kind of misfit group of talent that doesn’t really fit in a box, which seems to be working fine for them.
Morgan Flatley, if you’re listening
If Weinberger could reach out to any CMO or marketer, it’d be Morgan Flatley, currently head of marketing at McDonald’s worldwide. She was that young client on the Gatorade Super Bowl set back in 2008.
When Weinberger was thinking about leaving advertising or going to business school—not a lot of creatives really did that—he reached out to Flatley and she took the time to meet and have conversations despite already being a pretty big deal at PepsiCo.
Everyone he’s come across over the years who’s worked with her, whether at PepsiCo or McDonald’s, always has great things to say. It’s just cool to see where she’s gotten from where they both were back then.
Learn more
Mother Bear
Jason Weinberger LinkedIn
Nancy Poznoff LinkedIn
Katie Curnutte LinkedIn
Matthew Kaminsky LinkedIn
Mother Bear LinkedIn
Contact: ja***@********ar.agency
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