Aaron Cohen
MASTER STORYTELLER.
MARKETING & COMMS EXECUTIVE
Phone:
Email:
Address:
3845 SE Clinton Street
Portland, OR 97202
What a story.
Building a stealth augmented reality startup from Vancouver, WA into a high growth transformational business was a chance of a lifetime. Four years later, 41 out of 100 Fortune 100 companies now rely on RealWear as their device of choice (Gartner/IDC).
The rugged headset became the gold standard in industrial AR.
What I did: I worked directly with Honeywell, Mars, Microsoft, Goodyear and Zoom to drive our customer narrative into the market through strategic leverage. It worked. Climbing the corporate ranks, receiving three promotions in just three years, it was a dream come true. I was the single consistent marketing force from Series A funding to today's historic deployment with Ford Motor Company.
Three Things to Remember.
1. I'M A FEARLESS LEADER.
(I'm all in. I say "yes, and," then drive the ball forward fast with full buy-in and empowerment,.)
2. I'M WELL WORTH HIRING.
(I am fun to work with, fierce, and extremely adaptable)
3. I'M A MASTER STORYTELLER
(I'm already writing the story in my head during our alignment meeting.)
I graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the Columbia Leadership Institute to hone my skills as a leader and storyteller. I have more than two decades managing people, coaching performance and excellence.
I have invaluable experience with evidence-based marketing, developing corporate and product message houses, narratives, talking points, positioning docs, gold decks, as well as entire BOMs for product launches (web sites, case studies, landing pages, etc).
I've taken my creative skills and applied them to modern digital marketing. It is uncanny how my love of fiction throughout my childhood has translated so seamlessly into the world of business. Does the message resonate? It's all about the story.
MY PROFESSIONAL JOURNEY
2018-PRESENT
RealWear, Inc.
Senior Director, Global Marketing
Promoted 3X in 3 years. Developed full funnel marketing plans from launch to customer success and scaled deployment. Conceived of high impact digital marketing moments including live events, thought leadership moments, panels, books. TCO and product positioning white papers. Won Best AR wearable product at AWE, secured national press, and demonstrated that RealWear could punch far above its weight in the market, with high reviews by Gartner and IDC. Handled both earned, owned and paid media.
2017-2018
FOUNDER & CEO
Glitch Marketing and PR Agency
Created a successful boutique marketing strategy agency focused on Series A disruptive Silicon Valley startups. Worked 1:1 with founders including Phil Libin (Evernote/AI Incubator), Shane Chen (Inventor of Segway), and VentureBeat. Responsible for the launch of 9 AI startups at All Turtles, including Butter.ai (acquired by Box) and Replika.ai (with story secured in Financial Times)
2016-2017
Director of Marketing Communications
SureID (digital identity/security)
Led all aspects of marketing communications including thought leadership, PR, events and social media. Responsible for repositioning and repackaging the SureID B2B product from being strictly a government product for U.S. Navy and FBI . Drove panels and thought leadership at SXSW with a successful campaign whose survey results was featured in Fast Company.
2007-2015
Senior Manager, Corporate Communications
Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance
Led marketing and communications on behalf of 120 utilities in Pacific Northwest (including PGE, Pacific Power and PSE) and managed team of writers, designers and analysts. Ran the reporting, messaging, annual reports and quarterly reports, resulting in doubling of budget to $120M.
1999-2007
Sun Microsystems, Inc.(Fortune company acquired by Oracle)
Head of Industry PR
Promoted several times and served in a variety of customer narrative roles. Wrote a 150 page appendix on Java startup success stories for JavaOne and served as key resource for all customer stories over a five year period for sales and marketing. Promoted to head up all industry PR in 2003. Completed successful, memorable career at "The Dot in Dot Com" with a focus on eco-responsibility. I also led RealWEar's Take Back Wall Street PR initiative in 2006. Landed hundreds of articles in the media and managed multiple wordclass agencies at once including Bite PR, MWW and Ogilvy.
MY FORMAL EDUCATION
2015-2017
Master's in Fine Arts
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
Graduated from #1/most competitive Creative Writing program in country, Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I published several short stories and won first place in Writers' at Work and published in 25 and Under Fiction anthology. Studied with masters in fiction and storytelling. 4.0 GPA and published thesis.
2012-2014
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
English program with emphasis on psychology and fiction writing.
Bachelors in Arts
Bringing Stories to Life.
In Writing.
Co-authored with my CEO, wrote a chapter on RealWear's challenges and tremendous growth during COVID-19, describing my marketing actions that led to the quadrupling o sales. Book was a best seller on Amazon.
Conceived and wrote joint blog for Microsoft FLW and RealWear for Hannover Messe event as part of BOM.
source: RealWear Blog that I own.
Drafted, pitched and accepted to elevate my own personal brand and thought leadership in the tech sector. This piece was one of highest ranking VB pieces that quarter.
Source: VentureBeat
Aaron's overall planning & execution was beyond my expectations. Aaron's quick response and creative approach to various ideas played huge in how we landed the partnership and how we addressed COVID-19 requirements for Healthcare.
Duncan Barnes
Former Microsoft FLW Marketing Director
TOOLBOX
Productivity
Microsoft 365 - Advanced
Funnel Marketing
Hubspot - Advanced
Product Spokesperson
SOV
Meltwater and Cision
Storytelling
Learned techniques from award-winning writers and editors
Many other Martech - Advanced