Before there was an agency called Roar, there was a cowbell. Jacques Hart was nine, living in remote Alaska, and selling ice cream that his parents brought in on dry ice. Fudgsicles, Creamsicles, ice-cream sandwiches: inventory with the comic audacity of winter merchandise sold in a very cold place. Hart would set up his stand, ring the bell and wait for customers. They came.
He later described the little enterprise as proof that he was “always an entrepreneur at heart.” The phrase can sound inevitable when spoken by a founder after the fact. The more interesting detail is his reason. He liked being a hub, a place people could turn to for something they wanted. Long before he learned the vocabulary of conversion funnels or brand equity, he had discovered the simple pleasure of demand meeting supply.
The stand also supplied the origin story for Roar Media, the integrated marketing agency Hart founded in South Florida in 2008 with Jolie Balido. Between those two ventures came a business degree, Peace Corps service and senior work inside media companies learning, in real time, what happens when old distribution meets the internet. It is a tidy arc only in retrospect. In practice, it looks like Hart's central piece of career advice: take the responsibility, do the work, and be less precious about the title.
“Your title isn't important. What matters is the quality of, and passion for, your work.”Jacques Hart
A career built during media's rewiring
Hart studied at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business from 1992 to 1996, concentrating in marketing and international business. His public résumé lists the Dean's List and a 3.5 grade-point average. Then came work that made business less abstract: service in the U.S. Peace Corps as a business-development volunteer, helping people establish local enterprises.
Before Roar, he held senior positions overseeing digital operations at Knight Ridder, Televisa and Fox Media/MySpace. The names form a compact history of a volatile era. Newspapers were wrestling with the web. Television was learning that video no longer belonged to the television set. Social platforms were becoming media companies without behaving much like the media companies that came before them.
At Televisa, Hart was assigned to help middle managers sell content beyond Mexico. He spent a month training colleagues and, when the assignment went well, expected his role to grow with it. Senior leaders told him they valued the work but had no room for another vice president. Hart asked whether he could keep the salary and benefits if he accepted the expanded job under a different title. They agreed. So did he.
He kept the lesson. In a small company, Hart has said, a person may move from a critical account to the reception desk, the IT problem, the editing pass or the office dishwasher. The list is funny because it is familiar. Founders often advertise freedom; the early reality is jurisdiction over absolutely everything.
The useful-work route
The agency at the overlap
Roar Media arrived at a convenient inconvenience. Public relations, search, social media, advertising and web development had been treated as neighboring specialties. Customers were already experiencing them as one thing. A favorable article might create awareness, a search result might preserve it, a social post might move it and an ad might finish the job. The customer did not care which department earned the credit.
Hart's answer was “media-agnostic” planning: begin with the business result and the customer experience, then choose the channels. He wrote about turning news coverage from a brief push into a searchable, durable asset. He urged marketers to tag and publish their coverage properly, distribute it through their networks and monitor what happened next. The prose belonged to the early search era - StumbleUpon even made an appearance - but the underlying instinct has aged well. Attention becomes more useful when it can be found, measured and connected to a next action.
The agency eventually supplied a public scoreboard. Inc. ranked Roar No. 3,122 on its 2021 list of fast-growing private companies. In 2024, the firm said it had held the top position in the South Florida Business Journal's local PR-agency ranking for three consecutive years. The publication's 2025 list placed Roar first among South Florida public-relations firms by 2024 net fee income.
Those distinctions belong to the company, not Hart alone. That matters in a business whose output depends on writers, designers, analysts, account leaders and media specialists doing interlocking work. Roar's team stretches beyond Florida to Argentina. A company post in 2024 caught Hart making a spontaneous trip there and gathering the group for happy hour - a small scene, but one that makes a distributed agency feel less like a diagram of boxes.
The spreadsheet and the thank-you note
Hart likes quantitative analysis. His public advice runs through social-listening platforms, brand-perception studies, paid amplification, lead nurturing and retargeting intervals. He has argued that organic social reach alone is a poor plan and that companies should close the feedback loop by watching results. In his formulation, creativity is not excused from arithmetic.
Then he recommends a handwritten thank-you note.
After a meeting with a prospect, Hart advises writing on good paper and mentioning something personal from the conversation. Roar, he said, made this a regular practice and heard from recipients who noticed the thought behind it. The tactic is charmingly inconvenient. That is precisely why it works. Software can schedule an email perfectly; it cannot leave an indentation from a pen.
Measure the campaign. Remember the person. The two instructions improve each other.
This combination is the most revealing part of Hart's playbook. He is not nostalgic for a world before digital media. His career was built by helping companies leave that world. He simply refuses the lazy conclusion that better technology makes human consideration obsolete. Data can identify the moment. Care can make the moment memorable.
Selling South Florida to the world
Hart has also applied the agency mind to the place where his agency grew. In 2010, he joined the South Florida Technology Alliance board and became its marketing chair. Four years later, in a Miami Herald opinion piece, he argued that the region's technology community needed a shared national identity.
His proposal borrowed “coopetition” from tourism: local groups could compete for resources at home while cooperating to attract investors and companies from elsewhere. The three-county region had wireless engineering, life sciences, universities, incubators and increasingly fundable startups, he wrote, but it needed a consortium, common data and a story that could travel.
Hart's sharpest branding judgment was also his least diplomatic: most of the country, he wrote, thinks of South Florida as Miami. Broward and Palm Beach had their own momentum, but fragmenting the external message would squander the name recognition already available. The Miami brand could serve as the front door, provided the whole region shared what came through it.
The marketer's instinct is visible: reduce friction. A region, like a company, can force people to decode its internal structure or give them one memorable way in. Hart preferred the latter, then proposed road shows, familiarization trips for reporters and investors, pooled national marketing and a serious effort to cultivate angel capital. A slogan without infrastructure is merely a souvenir.
Humility as a growth strategy
When asked what movement he would advance, Hart chose mentoring. He credited early mentors with giving him confidence, knowledge and humility, and described an obligation to pass those things along to colleagues and young people. Roar has supported Big Brothers Big Sisters. Mentoring, in his telling, rewards the mentor too: you get to watch another person become more capable.
His preferred life-lesson quotation says the sign of a successful person is humility. It suits someone whose formative corporate story ends not with a grand resignation but with a negotiation over salary, benefits and the willingness to do a bigger job under a smaller label. Ambition is present. Vanity is asked to wait outside.
“Mentoring is not only a powerful gift to others, but it is also extremely gratifying and rewarding to the mentor as you watch others grow and improve.”Jacques Hart
The cowbell story survives because it compresses so much of Hart's career into one scene. There is a product people want, a signal they can hear and a young operator delighted to connect the two. Everything since has become more sophisticated: analytics dashboards instead of a checking ledger, integrated campaigns instead of a folding stand, colleagues on two continents instead of one child behind the counter.
But the essential job has not changed very much. Listen for demand. Create something useful. Make it easy to find. Treat the customer as a person. And when the work grows beyond the title, do the work anyway.