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Remarkable Content with Ian Faison

Remarkable Content with Ian Faison

Written by: Caspian Studios Ian Faison
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Marketing lessons from Hollywood, B2C, B2B and beyond! “A smart, goofy show that blends marketing, Hollywood, advertising and pop-culture. A must-listen for any marketer looking for fresh ideas.” - Oprah and Tom Hanks, simultaneously Hosted by Ian Faison and Meredith Gooderham and produced by Jess Avellino. Sound design by Scott Goodrich. Created by the team at Caspian Studios.Caspian Studios Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • What’s Your Michelin Star? Marketing Lessons From The Bear | Catherine Solazzo (Appfire)

    What’s Your Michelin Star? Marketing Lessons From The Bear | Catherine Solazzo (Appfire)
    Oct 6 2026
    Missing wagyu. A Michelin inspector who might be in the dining room. An ingredient that runs out with one service left to go. And somehow, the plate still makes it to the front of the house. That’s The Bear.The kitchen in The Bear runs on chaos, but it also runs on structure. There’s a hierarchy, an operating model, and a team that has to keep solving problems in real time. And in this episode, we dig into what that means for B2B marketers with our special guest Catherine Solazzo, CMO at Appfire.Together, we explore how to pivot when things go sideways, why customers shouldn’t need a decoder ring to understand what you do, and why Catherine’s Michelin star has nothing to do with marketing awards.About our guest, Catherine SolazzoCatherine Solazzo is Chief Marketing Officer at Appfire, where she leads a “CMO+” organization spanning product marketing, demand generation, technical documentation, enterprise platforms, partner programs, and field marketing. She brings more than 20 years of global experience leading modern marketing functions, digital transformation, and channel development at high-growth technology companies. Before joining Appfire, Catherine held leadership roles at Syntax, Tech Data/TD SYNNEX, and IBM.About AppfireAppfire is a leading global provider of enterprise apps that enhance and connect platforms like Atlassian, Microsoft, monday.com, and Salesforce. As a top Atlassian Marketplace partner, Appfire helps teams get more out of tools like Jira and Confluence with apps for workflow, automation, and more.What B2B Marketers Can Learn From The Bear:Define your Michelin star before you chase it. In The Bear, the Michelin star is always there in the background, but the team is really chasing overall excellence. Catherine says marketing teams need to decide what their own star is, and for her, it isn’t a trophy. “My Michelin star is did I support our EBITDA targets, and am I contributing to the revenue of the company? That’s my Michelin star.” Awards are great, but only when they line up with what your audience actually cares about.Service doesn’t stop - so build an operating model that can flex. In the kitchen, there’s always another service tomorrow. Catherine sees the same rhythm in marketing: what you do with yesterday’s lessons makes today better or worse. When the team in Season 5 runs short on an ingredient during a crucial service, they figure it out on the spot. “Something comes in at us we didn’t expect. You have to pivot, think differently, and still send that plate out to the front of the house.” A strong operating model gives teams structure, plus enough room to adjust.Speak your customer’s language, not your own. The Bear teaches you restaurant vocabulary without ever feeling like a lesson. Tech, on the other hand, is famous for acronyms and jargon. Catherine is pushing her team to cut the vague language from Appfire’s content and product names. “They shouldn’t have to have a decoder ring in order to go through our website and understand what we do.” If your buyers have to decipher what you do, you’ve already lost them.Quote“I would much rather have my team be known for delivering 30% of the revenue for the company than winning an award in Cannes. That’s personally where I would feel that we are accomplished.” - Catherine SolazzoTime Stamps[1:45] Meet Catherine Solazzo, CMO at Appfire[2:15] Why The Bear? The Creative Brain vs. the Operational Brain[3:22] What It Means to Be a CMO+[5:12] What Is The Bear? Grief, Chaos, and Real Kitchen Service[7:50] Service Doesn't Stop: Lessons From Season 5[11:23] Let Them Cook: FX, Showrunners, and Protecting Your Teams[14:08] Launch, Relaunch, Relaunch[15:37] Front of House, Back of House: Breaking Down Silos[17:27] Insider Language and the Decoder Ring Problem[22:02] Show the Warts and All[25:55] What's Your Michelin Star?[33:51] Coming Back to Your Core Competency[36:40] Content Strategy in the Age of AI[39:14] Final Thoughts and TakeawaysLinksConnect with Catherine on LinkedInLearn more about AppfireAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Head of Production). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    40 mins
  • Apollo 13: When the Mission Is Clear, the Impossible Becomes Possible | Eric Hanson (Mitel)

    Apollo 13: When the Mission Is Clear, the Impossible Becomes Possible | Eric Hanson (Mitel)
    Sep 15 2026
    Apollo 13 never made it to the moon. It also brought all of humanity together, set a record for the farthest distance from Earth, and produced some of the greatest problem-solving under pressure the world has ever seen.Eric Hanson, CMO at Mitel, joins us to dig into what B2B marketers can steal from the Apollo 13 playbook - and the 2024 documentary that reframed the story entirely. We cover why the clearest mission you can give your team is your most powerful tool, how to break down silos between marketing, sales, and product, why starting with the business need beats starting with the technology every time, and how going contrary to the mainstream is still the fastest path to getting your market's attention.About our guest, Eric HansonEric Hanson is CMO at Mitel, a communications platform helping organizations enable high-value and critical use cases across a hybrid and on-premises world. He is not a typical CMO: he started his career as an inside seller, moved into enterprise sales, co-founded a visual effects studio in San Francisco that worked on major motion pictures and global brand campaigns - including the design bible for Avatar's future interface - before finding his way into B2B marketing leadership. He has held senior roles at companies including DocuSign and brings a rare mix of creative, commercial, and strategic instincts to every team he leads.What B2B Marketers Can Learn From Apollo 13When the mission is clear, the impossible becomes possible. Eric's central argument is that the best B2B marketing isn't really about marketing at all - it's about creating the conditions where people come together around a common cause and do things nobody thought possible. He connects it directly to Apollo 13: "It brought all of humanity together, even for a brief moment. And so often with the way you think about what happens in the workplace, so much of it is about whether you can create that sense of a common cause, that common mission. Because the highest performing organizations, it's when you have that shared vision, that clarity of your mission, that people really come together and the impossible kind of becomes possible." His practical version of this is what he calls the triple threat: treating marketing, sales, and product not as separate functions with a waterfall handoff, but as a single coordinated strategy. When the foxhole includes everyone, you move faster, you adapt better, and you find things nobody would have found alone.Start with the business need, not the technology. Eric has a sharp way of describing the most common mistake in B2B selling: show up and throw up. Lead with the technology, the architecture, the speeds and feeds - and lose the room before you ever got it. His counterpoint is a story about a sales engineer calling on a CIO for an F1 team. The engineer launched straight into the tech, and the CIO cut him off: "If you can tell me how to make the car go faster, I'm all ears." Eric's version of this in practice is to start with the market dynamics, the specific pressures facing your ideal customer - whether it's a hospital struggling with patient flow or a multinational navigating digital sovereignty - and then work backwards to the technology. "The market can't always connect the dots on what the art of the possible is," he says. "That's our job." The faster horses problem is a marketing problem as much as it's a product problem.Tell an old story in a new, more human way. Ian's biggest takeaway from the Apollo 13 documentary is the audacity of director Peter Middleton, who looked at one of the most famous stories in American history - already immortalized in an acclaimed Tom Hanks film - and decided to tell it again. Differently. Without talking-head interviews, leaning entirely into archival footage, centering the human stakes over the mission mechanics. The result is a documentary that feels immediate rather than retrospective, and that lands differently than the movie despite telling the same events. Ian's takeaway for B2B marketers: "Every story that you think has been told can be retold in a different way." Eric adds the business version of this: the fastest path to getting your market's attention is to go contrary to the mainstream. For Mitel, that meant spending two years pushing the concept of digital sovereignty when everyone else was selling cloud. "I wouldn't say we planted it," Eric says. "But we anticipated it. And now the market is saying: yeah, you're right."Make it work with what you have - then adapt. The most memorable problem-solving moment in Apollo 13 isn't the drama of the oxygen tank explosion. It's the engineers in Houston dumping a pile of plastic bags, duct tape, and mismatched filters on a table and being told to build an air scrubber before the crew runs out of oxygen. No extra supplies. No time to order parts. Just: here's what you have, figure it out. Eric connects this directly to the George Lucas documentary series Light and Magic - where ...
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    41 mins
  • Leave Them Wanting More: Marketing Lessons from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms | Tara Corey (Optimizely)

    Leave Them Wanting More: Marketing Lessons from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms | Tara Corey (Optimizely)
    Sep 1 2026
    Three episodes in, you will be willing to die for Ser Duncan the Tall and Egg. No backstory required. No sprawling lore to decode. Just a knight who may not even be a knight, a boy who follows him anyway, and storytelling so elemental it hits like a gut punch. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms works because it does what most B2B content refuses to do: it puts the human at the center, leaves you wanting more, and trusts the oldest storytelling mechanics in the world. In this episode, we dig into what that means for marketers with our special guest Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely. Together, we unpack why the best content finds the friction point in a story rather than avoiding it, why you should be the biographer and not the subject, and what Optimizely's upcoming rebrand taught Tara about bravery and standing out from the B2B sea of sameness. About our guest, Tara Corey Tara Corey is SVP of Marketing at Optimizely, where she leads brand, content, and the company's upcoming rebrand. With over 20 years in marketing, she's known for building editorial-driven content strategies, championing authentic human storytelling, and running toward the hard moments — in her career and her content. She's a passionate believer in community, mentorship, and the idea that bravery isn't optional. What B2B Marketers Can Learn From A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Put the human at the heart of the story — then leave them wanting more. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn't try to tell you everything at once. It earns your investment in two characters and then trusts that investment to carry you through. Tara connects this directly to how B2B content fails: "Creating content has never been easier than it is right now with AI. But creating quality content that truly has that art of storytelling and a truly human-connected story — I think that's harder and harder to stand out and do well." Fewer things, done better, is the whole strategy. Be the biographer, not the subject. Most origin stories are boring because the subject tells them. The interesting version requires someone who knows which parts actually matter. Ian's challenge for B2B marketers: "Volunteer to be the biographer. Don't let someone else tell their own story. Tell their story in a way that you think is interesting." That means getting in person, asking the follow-up questions people skip, and hunting for the moment of friction — the "no kidding, there I was" — where everything shifted. Find the elemental story hiding in your B2B content. Betrayal. Honor. Trust broken and rebuilt. These mechanics work because they've always worked. Ian ties them directly to the world every marketer lives in: "How many of us have been there when it's like, 'You said you were gonna promote me. You said you were gonna do this. Why did you never do it?' — that's so elemental. And yet we just don't put it in B2B marketing, even though it's all around us." The richest stories aren't in the product. They're in the people. Quote"Bravery isn't optional. There's fear, there's excitement — but we've got to be brave, try not to be afraid, and be excited about what's possible. And also try to balance that with the simplicity of a great story and that human connection." — Tara Corey Time Stamps [1:22] Meet Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely [1:40] Why A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms? [3:02] What Is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms? A Brief History [7:20] What Makes It Work: Heart, Humor, and Unexpected Turns [10:47] Marketing Takeaways: Put the Human at the Heart of the Story [12:01] Leave Them Wanting More [13:51] Simple Storytelling Mechanics That Always Work [19:09] Be the Biographer, Not the Subject [21:03] How to Train a Team to Capture Better Stories [24:54] Find the Friction: Where Great Stories Actually Live [31:44] Critique vs. Tearing Down — And Why It Matters for Marketers [37:06] Bravery Isn't Optional: Optimizely's Content Strategy and Rebrand [38:30] Final Thoughts and Takeaways LinksConnect with Tara on LinkedInLearn more about Optimizely About Remarkable! Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering — The Business Thriller — Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Head of Production). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is "Solomon" by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    40 mins
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