From documenting combat zones to navigating the Hollywood jungle, Mark Harper’s journey is a testament to Veteran resilience and leadership. In this episode of Veteran Led, we sit down with Mark, a former Air Force Combat Camera operator who transitioned into a successful career in the entertainment industry.​
Mark shares his incredible journey from serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom to working at Paramount Pictures, where he developed digital marketing campaigns for blockbusters like Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Star Trek. He then co-founded We Are The Mighty, the first-ever digital storytelling platform for and by the military community.​
Discover how Mark’s military experience shaped his approach to digital marketing, content creation, and leadership in Hollywood. Learn about the launch of We Are The Mighty and how it filled a gap in military-focused media. Mark also discusses his role in developing the Military Influencer Conference, the first mass-scale conference focusing on military transition, career placement, and resources.​
Currently leading the Military and Defense Audience Group at Recurrent Ventures, Mark oversees six major digital brands including Task & Purpose. He offers valuable insights on career transitions and the skills veterans bring to the business world.​ Whether you’re a Veteran looking to break into entertainment, an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, or interested in military-focused media, this episode offers invaluable insights and inspiring stories.​ Learn more about We Are The Mighty and Task & Purpose at Recurrent Military. ​Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.
Mark Harper: I realize I am now way in over my head, but over the course of the next several days there, we got together, we put together this incredible pitch. We flew to New York City, and we asked Warner Music Group for four and a half million dollars, and they agreed to it on the spot.
John Berry: Welcome to the Veteran Led podcast, where we talk with leaders who use their military experiences to develop great organizations and continue to serve their communities. Today’s guest is Mark Harper. Mark was a video flight commander on the first Combat Camera squadron, deploying twice for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Mark started off in the entertainment industry, where he worked for Paramount Pictures, developing digital marketing campaigns for Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Star Trek, among others. Mark, so glad to have you here today.
Mark Harper: Thanks for having me.
John Berry: You were an Air Force Officer commissioned through ROTC, correct?
Mark Harper: That is correct.
John Berry: Then you become a brand new Second Lieutenant, and 9/11 happens. Where are you?
Mark Harper: I had a unique role. As my first assignment, I would eventually get over to Combat Camera, and these were the fundamentals that got me there. But our job was to, no kidding, deploy into the middle of nowhere and establish the communications that would then allow to build the infrastructure for a base moving forward. This is exactly what happened. The towers came down and half my squadron left a few days later, and their mission was to go out and set up, again, this infrastructure that would then become the future bases as the war started to unfold and develop, et cetera. I went from overnight being communications guy in the Air Force to part of the warfighting mission, like real fast and someone who was going to deploy had I stayed in that role.
John Berry: You wrote a great blog about it. I like the blog in that you’re running late to get to the armory, but it’s all backed up and you can’t even get into the armory. As a Second Lieutenant, you got away with being late, missing formation. You serve your time in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You get out, and then you help develop a product called Audeze.
Mark Harper: Yeah, this is one of these weird moments in time where I was at UCLA Anderson, the business school, and was working on a business plan development course. And a couple of friends of mine from a previous company in Hollywood called Technicolor had come to me and said, “We’re building these headphones, expensive headphones.” When I say expensive headphones, the price point started at $1,000 and went up from there. And couldn’t make them fast enough. And they’re making them out of a garage in Orange County. And so I took that as my project for this particular course. We got an A, we had five MBAs working on it, working through all the different components of a business plan. We had a pitch at the end of that of why this was a viable business, et cetera. Smash Cut to about a year after that, I got a call from the guys who were like, “Remember when you made that presentation for us? Well, we have an opportunity for you to fly to New York City and pitch this company to an interested party that might be willing to make an investment.” They said, “Can you do this?”
Mark Harper: I’m thinking to myself, Yeah, of course I can. I’m terrified, though. I tell them, “Yes, of course I can.” We get off the call. I realize I am now way in over my head, but over the course of the next several days there, we got together, we put together this incredible pitch. We flew to New York City, and we asked Warner Music Group for four and a half million dollars, and they agreed to it on the spot, which was crazy. It would take 18 months for that money to hit the bank account, for the company to fully utilize those funds. And a lot happened over that course–that timeframe. But I was one of the original founders of that company. Still exists now. I actually just sold to Sony Music not too long ago, and they make world-class headphones. I left that company right as We Are The Mighty was starting its official launch.
John Berry: Got it. And before that, you spent some time in the entertainment industry. Tell us about that.
Mark Harper: I left my final assignment, and I served for OIF and OEF. I didn’t actually go to Afghanistan. I went to Djibouti, Africa, of all places. We were winning the hearts and minds of that particular area of operation in terms of documenting the war and really focusing on the initiatives that the U.S. was working on with coalition forces to combat extremism. But I ran this thing called Combat Cameras, you mentioned in the intro. We were storytellers, documenting everything that was happening across the war–military exercises, weapons tests, you name it. We were the eyes and ears of everyone out there. And this is before the advent of things like the GoPro. So we were, no kidding, in a lot of situations that are now replaceable, but the story time component is something that’s very still important, and we still have Combat Camera and public affairs to this day, very obviously. But that job, Combat Camera, gave me the bravery and stupidity to leave my job and to leave the Air Force to move to Los Angeles without a job and try to get into the entertainment industry.
Mark Harper: I did a lot of knocking on doors, building a network, doing informational interviews.
Mark Harper: I landed as a military consultant at Paramount Pictures, back during the time frame of that G.I. Joe movie, Transformers, and Star Trek. And so this was seeing from the inside of a studio how we were marketing films in the very beginning part of digital marketing. So this is when MySpace was still a social media platform. I ran Optimus Prime’s MySpace page, not to date myself, but there it is. And Facebook had just got opened up group pages and things of that nature. So it was a very cool thing to see a historically or traditionally focused marketing engine now have to pivot into the whole new world of digital marketing. And I was on the forefront of that for some very cool films in the very early stages.
John Berry: And then how did you parlay that into We Are The Mighty?
Mark Harper: Yeah, great question. So it was at that timeframe that I went to UCLA Anderson, the business I mentioned earlier. And I had this background now of not only producing content in the military, in combat zones, but also I had this experience now working for a bona fide Hollywood studio. With this business degree, I met David Gale, who was the former head of MTV Films. He was just starting this in 2014. Actually, he had started the concept of it years earlier, but had just reached the point where he was going to launch the company. I went to David and I applied for a very junior position at the company. Again, before it launched, and when I say before it launched, I mean before WeAreTheMighty.com, the switch was flipped and the site went live. I went to David and I said, David, you found a unicorn in me because I’ve got all this experience in the military. I’ve got experience in the actual entertainment industry from the studio side, and I’ve got this degree.
Mark Harper: Let me do something for the company that is not this very junior position you’re hiring for. I think I converted that interview from essentially, I think, a low-level video producer to what would ultimately be for him his Chief Operations Officer, which was a big transition for that to kinda move that job from Point A to Point B.
Mark Harper: It didn’t happen exactly in that interview, but it happened over the course of a couple of months. It was all the right DNA, I think. He assembled a real A-Team of content creators. The goal of We Are The Mighty was to create a storytelling platform for the military community in a way that wasn’t being served. The thesis was, you have this guy from MTV Films who brought to us such treasured classics as Beavis and Butt Head Do America, the Jackass franchise. But also it’s some additional movies that you don’t necessarily always put together for it, but like your Varsity Blues, Election, they had a hand in distribution of Napoleon Dynamite, and about 20 other films. A very prolific producer in Hollywood, marrying up with authentic content creators in the military space, listening to what the military community wanted to hear about and what content they were consuming, then laddering that up from a digital platform into TV and film someday. Easier said than done, even when you have the former head of MTV at your back.
Mark Harper: Easier said than done, even when you have the former head of MTV at your back. But that was the whole point of why it started. We were one of the very few military-specific brands, and every small one, next to Military.com and the Military Time Syndicate. This is also when TaskAndPurpose.com came online. We’re talking 2014 timeframe.
John Berry: Now you work with both We Are The Mighty and Task & Purpose. Tell us how that happened.
Mark Harper: Yeah. Over the years, I’ll never forget, we started our site, We Are The Mighty. We started our social media, different platforms, and Task & Purpose came online. They initially, to my best understanding, they were a funnel for HirePurpose at the time, which was a job and career placement platform for the military community. But at the end of the day, we both operated like military digital publishers, and we were creating a ton of content that was like Coke and Pepsi in terms of the competitiveness. But over those years, We Are The Mighty became more like a marketing agency for the community, and we stayed away from breaking news. Task & Purpose leaned into the breaking news from a senior NCO or junior enlisted, junior officer perspective for what the military community needed to know in their everyday life and purpose. We were carving out different niches inside of that mega niche, which is the military community writ large, but both building our platforms as we were moving along. In 2017, we started working with Curtez Riggs, who created the Military Influencer Conference, and we became a little bit more embedded with his initiatives.
Mark Harper: By the time the COVID had shut down a lot of the live event companies were out there, we joined forces with Curtez Riggs, and we actually acquired the Military Influencer Conference, and that happened at the end of 2021.
Mark Harper: A lot of work with them. Here we are in 2021, just made that acquisition. 2022, I believe, beginning of that, Task & Purpose gets acquired by Recurrent Ventures, and then we follow suit later on that year. Now what I oversee is the six digital brands that are inside of the military and defense portfolio Recurrent. It’s We Are The Mighty, Task & Purpose, the Military Influencer Conference, another conference called MilSpouseFest, and then a pretty sizable YouTube channel for Task & Purpose, about 1.5 million subscribers strong.
John Berry: Looking at your career, imagine a Veteran just getting out of service and says, I want to get my foot in the door in the entertainment industry. What’s the best way to get there?
Mark Harper: There are a lot more options now than there were when I was just leaving the military heading out there. Again, I was showing up blind, knocking on doors. Then anytime anyone would talk to me, I made sure I got the next person to go interview, the next person to go talk to. I had a fantastical story with me leading teams of Combat Camera, these combat photojournalists out in the field. I got a lot of yeses to these interviews that I think most people would still have trouble getting because I could send ahead these really rich images of our day-to-day efforts in the war that you weren’t seeing on the news. They weren’t ugly atrocities of war. It was all a very widespread of all the things that were happening. But what was just being created when I was stepping foot out there and now is fully fledged is Veterans in Media & Entertainment. It’s a nonprofit that really puts you through a finishing school and has opened up so many doors to so many people out there.
Mark Harper: But it’s specifically centered in Los Angeles, and I think it has a satellite office in New York City.
Mark Harper: It gives you the blueprint of how you get from Point A to Point B and the many different facets of what it is to work in entertainment writ large.
John Berry: And so your foot in the door was your portfolio. You had some amazing photos that you had taken. You said, look, this is the work I can do. And so you had something to show when you applied.
Mark Harper: I make it sound easier than it did, but really, anytime I’d meet with somebody, they would say, well, what do you want to do? And I didn’t have this blueprint. I didn’t really know how Hollywood worked. I didn’t really understand I knew that there was a pecking order. I did have an unpaid internship when I first got out. Again, contacts and contacts and contacts, and me just reaching out, cold calling, et cetera. I worked at this production company called Larger Than Life. It was headed by this guy named Gary Ross, who wrote and directed Seabiscuit, The Tale of Despereaux. I think he went on to do The Hunger Games. I was there. I was fetching coffee. I was picking up pizzas. I was photocopying scripts and photocopying copying books and doing script coverage. And I knew I needed to start at the very, very bottom. I needed to become an E1 or an O1 in a very specific place and then put in my time and keep moving up.
Mark Harper: But I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go. And we are right now on the other side of the writer’s strike that just happened out in Los Angeles.
Mark Harper: I showed up the day I got out there on the first day of the first major writer’s strike. It was happening back in the 2007 timeframe. And so my pool of opportunities really shrunk the day I was first boots on the ground. Productions, TV shows, movies were going on hiatus left and right when I first stepped there. So this is why I ended up on more of the business side of the entertainment world. That’s why I ended up over in marketing and would ultimately lead me to We Are The Mighty. And I didn’t necessarily go through the creative journey that most people do, which most are out there trying to become actors or directors and writers. That’s really what Veterans in Media & Entertainment helps facilitate. I don’t know how I would explain my path. My path doesn’t sound, I think, to someone that coming to Hollywood as sexy or glamorous, doing marketing or working on the business side of that world. I have been able to dip into the creative side.
Mark Harper: Right here, I’ll show you, we won an Emmy two years ago for a production that we made that air it on CBS after the Army-Navy game.
Mark Harper: We do a lot of really cool content. We’ve always made a lot of really cool things. I just happened to be able to move into that because that opportunity struck and I had the background that allowed me to roll into it.
John Berry: Great, great background. I like the fact that, hey, you went hat in hand and said, Hey, I just want to…where can I get an opportunity here? And be willing to do the work. You didn’t say, Oh, I’m an Air Force captain. I should get this opportunity. We know that that doesn’t happen. This was in Vegas last year, the Military Influencer’s Conference. Now it’s in Atlanta, and I believe it’s September 30th through October 4th. Is that correct?
Mark Harper: Correct.
John Berry: What’s it about, who should go?
Mark Harper: Yeah, great question. The Military Influence Conference is a very special type event for and by the military community. We’re looking for leaders, entrepreneurs, content creators, creatives, people who work in impact. There’s a lot of components to it. And unfortunately, the name Military Influencer Conference, the word “influencer” got confiscated from us a handful of years back. When the conference came out, “influencer” meant anyone who’s connected to the military community, in our estimation, was an influencer. Influence happens through advocacy, through inspiration, through innovation, through collaboration.
John Berry: Not through doing some stupid TikTok dances. I can’t just be an influencer that way, no?
Mark Harper: Yeah, you can. And we absolutely have a track for that. We have an influencer track at the conference. That’s what it is. It’s split up over all these different areas of impact. And if you go to the site at militaryinfluencer.com, you’ll see all of it that the conference offers people out there. But Curtez Riggs, a retired Army, he came up with this back in 2017 to fill a void. That void was, how do we get people from our community to come together and help each other? It started in Dallas. I remember being there that first day, and Curtez invited me to it. I remember him basically saying, “Okay, all of you here in this room–I don’t know what this is going to become, but I know that together we will figure some version of value out for each other.” It was primarily entrepreneurial focus in the very beginning of it. Fast forward to this year when we’ll be in Atlanta, we’ll have all kinds of different components to it than its first iterations way back when.
Mark Harper: There is a very strong chance that I’ll be interviewing Jon Stewart at our conference. We’ve got some other incredible leaders that will be there, some other keynotes, some comedians.
Mark Harper: We always do our Mighty 25 list announcement and our Mighty 25 gala there at the same time. So there’s a lot, and I’m missing many, many different activations. There’s a military spouse component to it as well. It’s really grown, leaps and bounds from those 100 people in Dallas to now we’re tracking around 2,000 that will show up in Atlanta.
John Berry: Wow. And your role in the conference is what?
Mark Harper: I am an official firefighter, where Curtez is still…he leads all of the Military Influencer Conference. And so my role is to support him in that, in what we’re doing. And we have an incredible partnership team that lends a lot of help to this. Actually, a military spouse, her name is Katherine Pummill. We have a small but mighty team that puts this on. It really is an incredible feat for just how many people show up to this and are impacted by what we do. Over the last two years, I’ve started off the conference. Curtez throws me up there to kick it off sometimes. My component, I will ask people who have a military influence or a MIC success story to come find me, because I love hearing about someone who created a company because they met so and so, or someone who found their next job because they bumped into this individual, or they had become friends at MIC in Dallas and MIC, Orlando. They had gone to a different iteration of their relationship.
Mark Harper: Then by Mick DC, they were humming along. Then by MIC DC, they were humming along. These are the really cool things that I really love about what this conference affords. It’s one of our very few face-to-face conferences that allows people to do this in-person networking that is just so critical to everyone’s path.
John Berry: It’s a lot easier, I’ve noticed, in the Veteran community as well. I’ve been parts of other groups, but generally, Veteran to Veteran, you can have honest conversations, and we want to help each other. It seems like that is just so much more prevalent than any other conference or community you go to. The Veterans don’t get jealous. Veterans want to see other Veterans succeed. I found it, whether it’s your conference or somewhere else, if you can go and surround yourself with successful Veterans, they will want you to be successful. They’ll lend a hand and help you up and say, “This is what I did.” They don’t want to have any secrets or hold you down. They want you to be as successful or more successful than them. I think that’s the great thing about the Veteran community is that we see a bigger future after service, and those of us that have got there want to help the next person up. There’s always a next level.
John Berry: You may have reached one level, but there’s a Veteran on that other level that you want to get to who can tell you exactly how to get there and is usually willing to help if you’re willing to ask.
John Berry: As you did, go there saying, Hey, I just want to learn. I’ll get coffee, I’ll get donuts, I’ll do whatever it takes. I don’t expect special treatment because I was a Captain in the Air Force. I just want the opportunity to serve again and to learn another skill. I think that’s one of the great things about the military. We learn so many skills, but the greatest skill was that we knew that we need to develop more skills to get the next opportunity, just like moving up through rank. The skills you had as a Captain won’t get you to Major. And so the job of the Platoon Leader is to learn how to become a Company Commander. And the Company Commander’s job is to learn how to become a Battalion Commander. And so we want to move up and develop those skills. So I think this is amazing. This is great stuff. Now, let’s get to the fun part, the After-Action Review. I want to hear three examples of great leadership that you learned about or experienced either in the Air Force or in the entertainment industry or in the business world, and then three of the worst examples.
Mark Harper: Interesting. Okay. David Gale, the guy who created We Are The Mighty, had this incredible…I’ve heard different iterations of it, but I remember him saying one time to be careful and to be considerate and nice to those people on your way up because of the same people you’re going to see on your way down. And I’ve watched this play out time and time again, and it just reminds you to not be a jerk. So that was a great one. Back in the Air Force, I think my Commander at 9/11, was someone who I really looked up to because he was charting uncharted territory with the towers coming down. The mission of our squadron being so important to the very early stages of getting people out there, watching him stay calm, cool, collective when the entire world was coming down around us and we’re getting so much conflicting intel from all the different sources. We had people in our squadron all the way from secret, top secret, and who knows on from there, because we were tracking all these different components of where we were able to establish bases, et cetera.
Mark Harper: He did such an incredible job as a Major in helping take so much chaos and turn it into something that was so positive in terms of getting people ready to get out the door and keeping everyone calm and collective.
Mark Harper: And then here’s another one, too, from maybe the entertainment space. My boss at a company called Technicolor, he identified that you can bury the entirety of your life into your work. He didn’t want anyone to forget that they had a family, or if they didn’t have a family, go out and make one. And so he would put guardrails up for us, and he would, I think, over-index on allowing people to take the time off or to spend time with their family to get things done for their family. I think from his perspective, he just watched so many entertainment executives just grind into the ground, and he wanted to create a culture for us. It was a rather…I was part of this marketing and special business unit there. The whole company was 22,000 people. He probably affected the better part of a hundred of us. But he wanted to create that culture that it was okay to have a work-life balance, which is something that many companies struggle with, even like early-stage companies.
Mark Harper: Okay, so three train wrecks.
John Berry: Three down. And you don’t have to name names on this. Yeah.
Mark Harper: It’s maybe the counter to that. When you see, I think I had a leader in…we had a pretty rigid OPS tempo back when these things were kicking off. But the exact opposite, which is, I need you here all the time. If the military wanted you to have a spouse or a child, they would issue you one. And that is not the case. So get to work and make sure that you’re sitting in the seat all day, all night, and not particularly to any positive effect to the mission at hand. It was more of just, I want to see faces here, and seeing the faces equals in this person’s estimation that work was being done. But it was really killing the culture. Inside of that Audeze world, we had one of our leaders who was very much swayed by external opinions and wasn’t able to articulate and resolve a very firm mission-oriented process for us. We had more of a clear goal of design, create, sell world’s best headphones at the timeframe.
Mark Harper: But there was so much ambiguity coming out of that leadership style and so much shift that everyone was stuck in this perpetual whiplash.
Mark Harper: And it caused more than a lot of confusion and a lot of missed goals and things of that nature. So that, focusing where appropriate was something that was missed. And then I think watching some, maybe subordinates of mine back in the military, various leadership styles, I can see that…I’ll take one. Watching some junior officers get very, very chummy in the very early days of their roles as junior element leaders and things of that nature. I think it’s a lesson that many junior officers have to learn, and sometimes they learn the hard way. I was watching this individual spending a lot of time going out, doing things that technically were not allowed, and then seeing these things play back to him as his troops let him walk into many closed doors or watch him do and make these big blunders because I think he’d gotten too comfy and was trying to be such a fan and a friend to everyone that they needed leadership, and they actually wanted leadership. They did not want this extra friend that was trying to be inserted into the group.
Mark Harper: I think that lesson there was the boundaries are created for very specific reasons.
Mark Harper: They’re tested and true over the course of many years that the military has been in operation. So watching these things unfold, it’s always the same meaning to that story.
John Berry: Yeah, I found that that’s probably one of the first lessons we learn as officers. I always think there’s three Lieutenants. The First Lieutenant is the hard charger who thinks he knows everything. The team respects that lieutenant because he knows his stuff, and he will make sure that the standard is applied, uses the knife a lot, but they don’t like him. It’s like, “We’ll follow you because we respect you because you’re a hard charger, and we know if we don’t, we’re going to be punished severely.” Then there’s the chummy Lieutenant, like you talked about, that wants to be everybody’s buddy, is going out drinking with the Joes. They like him, but they don’t respect him. He’s not competent. He’s not a hard charger. But he’s the funny guy. The Platoon Sergeant will take charge of that platoon, and they’ll…let’s move the Lieutenant to the back here. The team won’t let him take charge because they know he wants to be liked, but he never really wants to be in charge.
John Berry: Then there’s that Lieutenant that hits it just right. They’re both liked and respected. When you can do that, when you can have those boundaries and your men know that you care about them and that you will take care of them, but you will hold them accountable and that you have high standards, then when you reach that point, your soldiers go to hell and back for you with a smile on their face because they like you.
Mark Harper: For sure.
John Berry: But it’s tough to learn those boundaries. I’ve seen Lieutenants fall off either way. The ones that are just a super hard chargers and their platoons hate them, oh, man. Once they screw up, because we all screw up. Like you said, those you see on the way up, you’re going to see on the way down. When they screw up, their platoons would dime them out in a second. Because, oh, there’s a hard charge Lieutenant. He thinks he’s so great. Oh, he just screwed that up. I can’t wait till he gets nailed. Right.
Mark Harper: So true.
John Berry: Well, thank you so much for being here today on Veteran Led. Mark, where can our audience learn more about you? I know we’ve talked about where they can find the Military Influencer Conference, and we will have it in the show notes, but where can they learn more about you and Recurrent Ventures?
Mark Harper: We have got a site that does an overview of all of us. It’s military.recurrent.io. So I can send you that link as well for your notes. That covers the six brands that I run there. I always love hearing from people in the community. I really do. So if anyone connects with me on LinkedIn, mention the podcast. I’m always checking that. Again, thank you so much for having me on the show here. This has been great.
John Berry: Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earn. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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