A black rhinoceros named Ricko once spent two weeks pacing over a new carpet in his Birmingham Zoo enclosure. Seven videos documented the experiment. Webcams watched. Social accounts spoke in the rhino's voice. The floor, a Mohawk SmartStrand product, met the sort of spokesman no focus group would have proposed with a straight face. This was Jake McKenzie's idea of a product demonstration: give a durability claim four thick legs, a horn and a bachelor-pad makeover.
There was method beneath the zoological mischief. Flooring is bought rarely. Shoppers tend to think first about material, color and style, leaving the brand until late in the decision. A conventional advertisement had little chance of becoming conversation. Ricko did. McKenzie's team wrote a character study to settle the rhino's voice and drafted rules for handling critics. The creature became both a test and a serial story. Thousands followed along. The carpet cleaned up. Mohawk gained an audience that returned even when it was not shopping for flooring.
The episode is a cheerful miniature of McKenzie's career. He likes data, but he understands that numbers arrive after attention. He believes in psychological research, but he has spent his working life inside a creative business. He has watched advertising move from a world in which sales attribution was exceptional to one where a marketer can trace a message across televisions, phones and store visits. Through every technical turn, his subject has remained stubbornly analogue: the person deciding whether to care.
A degree that refused to stay on the wall
McKenzie studied psychology and political science at Vanderbilt University, graduating in 1995. He followed that with a Master of Public and Private Management at Birmingham-Southern College, where he also worked as a graduate assistant. The combination offered an unusually useful preparation for advertising: how individuals think, how groups organize and how institutions turn intention into action.
He joined Intermark Group in 1997 as an account supervisor. A year later he moved into Intermark Interactive, then helped build that digital operation and became its president. This was the era when an agency's online practice could still be treated as a distinct province. By 2005 he was Intermark's chief operating officer. Four years later he became chief executive.
The Intermark route
That ascent matters because McKenzie did not arrive in the chief executive's office as a theorist parachuting into an agency. He had worked the account, digital and operational sides of the company. He had helped shape brands including Toyota, Lexus, Mohawk and Krispy Kreme. His thesis about psychology was tested against budgets, deadlines, client anxieties and all the inelegant machinery required to get an idea into the world.
“When I got into the business, few clients tied advertising efforts directly to sales results.”Jake McKenzie
The art-and-science cliché gets an upgrade
Advertising people have called their work a mixture of art and science for so long that the phrase has gone smooth with use. McKenzie's version is more specific. Data tells a team what happened. Behavioral science helps it decide what to test. Creative work gives the test enough life to be noticed. Each corrects a weakness in the others: numbers without a hypothesis merely report; psychology without execution remains a paper; execution without evidence can mistake applause for effect.
From attention to action
McKenzie has argued that marketers possess more than a century of behavioral research but often fail to use it. Software developers and game designers, he notes, learned early that a product must understand the psychological needs of its user. Advertising can do the same. The aim is not to decorate a media plan with academic vocabulary. It is to replace a vague description of “the consumer” with testable ideas about real decisions.
His tone is competitive rather than mystical. “Marketing and advertising is a competitive sport,” he has said, because one brand's share gain comes from somebody else. Innovation, in this view, is an everyday discipline. Data, artificial intelligence and psychology are not a procession of shiny themes. They are tools that alter what a capable team can see and do.
A belief becomes a brief
Consider the range between a tourism advertisement and a retirement-insurance campaign. One may trade in nostalgia, the other in confidence. Both begin before product features. A traveler imagines a remembered feeling. A future retiree wants assurance about an unknowable decade. McKenzie's approach asks what belief is active, what emotional need sits below the stated choice and which message could move it without losing credibility.
The agency formalized that approach by working with PhD psychologists and building research into creative development. When Intermark moved to Highland Avenue South in Birmingham in 2024, the premise became architectural. The new office included psychology-themed rooms and a lab equipped with eye-tracking and electroencephalography tools. A logo called the “Mind Grenade” gave the philosophy a deliberately impolite symbol. The laboratory provided the sober counterweight: a place to observe what people look at and how they react.
The office as argument
Intermark's Birmingham space puts collaborative rooms beside behavioral testing tools. The arrangement makes McKenzie's proposition visible: creative instinct and observed reaction belong in the same conversation.
“No other agency thinks quite like we do,” McKenzie said at the time of the move. It is a compact piece of positioning and an invitation to verify it. The useful part is not distinctiveness for its own sake. It is the attempt to connect an agency's identity, working environment and deliverable method. Branding usually asks a customer to believe a promise. Here the office had to remind the people making the work of that promise every morning.
From the shopping aisle to the jury box
Intermark Legal, which McKenzie leads alongside the agency, looks at first like a surprising turn. The practice works with trial attorneys on jury research, voir dire, case narratives, argument strategy and predictive analysis. Yet the intellectual journey is short. Jurors, like consumers, enter the room with prior beliefs. They respond to framing, consistency, anchors and coherent stories. They do not become blank instruments merely because the setting has wood paneling.
McKenzie's legal presentations address cognitive dissonance, narrative bias and anchoring. Mock voir dire and psychographic surveys offer ways to test which ideas resonate and which language creates resistance. The purpose is different from selling a product, and the stakes are different, but the recurring question is familiar: how does a person form a judgment, and what makes that judgment move?
That continuity helps explain why his career feels less like a chain of reinventions than one long investigation. Digital media expanded the observable trail. Analytics made behavior easier to connect with exposure. A research lab brought reactions closer to the creative process. Legal consulting moved the same interest into another arena of belief. The services changed. The question stayed put.
“We leverage the behavioral sciences to produce groundbreaking creative.”Jake McKenzie
The local life behind the national work
McKenzie's professional life is anchored in Birmingham. He has volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Birmingham since 1998 and has been involved with Tech Birmingham, the Kiwanis Club and the University of Alabama's communications board. The Birmingham Business Journal named him to its Top 40 Under 40 in 2001. The Birmingham Advertising Federation followed with its Advertising Executive of the Year honor in 2004, and Leadership Birmingham selected him in 2007.
Outside work, the available portrait is refreshingly unbranded: father of four, avid reader, outdoors enthusiast. Those details fit the larger pattern without needing to be turned into a leadership parable. Reading supplies other people's questions. The outdoors is one place designed without a conversion funnel. Four children are a daily seminar in the difference between an intended message and the message received.
McKenzie's career suggests a modest corrective to the industry's appetite for novelty. New channels matter. Better measurement matters. Artificial intelligence will matter. Yet the durable advantage may begin with older material: attention, memory, emotion, social proof, loss, confidence and the stories people use to make a choice feel coherent. Technology changes the delivery and expands the evidence. It does not retire human nature.
Ricko the Rhino understood none of this, which is part of his charm. He simply walked on the carpet. People watched because the demonstration was improbable, concrete and alive. The campaign made a product truth visible and gave the audience a reason to return. Somewhere between the behavioral literature and the zoo enclosure sits Jake McKenzie's practical contribution: study the mind seriously, then make the idea interesting enough for that mind to look up.