A conversation with Jim Pond & Matt Maguy, co-founders, JXM

Breaking rules and demanding results

Jim Pond and Matt Maguy sit down to talk about tattoos, boldness, targeting, credit unions and what nineteen years in the same room has taught them about their clients, the category, and each other.

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July 2026 Massachusetts Edited for length and clarity

Jim Pond and Matt Maguy have run JXM together since 2007. The firm is based in Massachusetts, has remained independent, right-sized and obsessively focused on getting outsized results. What follows is a conversation with both founders.

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Take me back to 2007. What was the specific thing you saw that made starting JXM feel worth doing rather than staying somewhere else?

MATT: Neither of us came from a fancy advertising background. We weren't trained in the industry the way most people are trained. We were outsiders. Both of us came out of the printing world — we like to say we have ink in our blood. Jim was a strategist in the front office at a print shop. I was an artist running a ten-color press at a different one. For me, there's something about how things get processed in printing that stuck with me. Things happen in layers. Things happen on a specific timeline. And you learn to deal with the back-and-forth of that to keep the presses running. That way of thinking never really left.

JIM: We were both in our late twenties. Both entrepreneurial. Both wanted to build a better life for our families. And we were both drawn to brands with a real sense of purpose — a mission worth being visible for. That was the through-line. We got hooked, and haven't looked back since.

Before JXM, where were each of you, and what were you learning that ended up baked into how the firm works today?

JIM: Sales at a print company. What that teaches you fast is that a small business does not stay in business if the press stops running. Deadlines aren't a concept, they're the whole game. You learn to talk to clients about their business, not about your tools.

MATT: Pre-press and press for me, a separate shop from Jim's. Same lesson from a different vantage point. You learn how work moves through stages. You learn what happens when someone upstream is sloppy, because you're the one holding the ink at the end of it. Both of us learned very early that craft and business live on the same floor. They don't separate the way agencies pretend they do.

Neither of us were quite sure what to make of each other at first.

Every co-founder pairing has an origin story. How did the two of you actually meet?

MATT: We met at a small agency after our printing gigs. Jim was there first. When I came in, he tried to talk the owner out of hiring me — because I had tattoos.

JIM: In my defense, it was a different era in the business. And I've been fully corrupted [chuckles] — I think I have more tattoos than Matt now.

MATT: Something clicked. Neither of us was quite sure what to make of the other at first, but the collaborations started moving forward fast. I had this ability to translate what Jim thought the client actually needed. He was reading the account from the business side, thinking through the structure of what they needed strategically. Then he'd throw the idea at me and say, 'They need a website, they need to say this, we need to get this point across.' I could take that and make it real and really make powerful work for our clients there.

JIM: That's the thing that's held up for nineteen years — we stay in our own lanes. We know what each other's strengths are. We work through them, not against them. That was clear inside the first six months.

The legal entity is "James and Matthew, LTD." That's a very deliberate choice: two first names on the shingle. What does keeping it that way signal?

MATT: We shortened it to JXM in 2021, but 'James and Matthew' is still on the masthead for a reason. It's a nod to working with our clients on a first-name basis and building longstanding partnerships. The signal to a client is that you're going to get the founders. You're going to get the partners. We're not hiding behind a punchy brand name. It's just Jim and Matt. James and Matthew. What you see is what you get, along with our team of partners, employees, and freelancers, who are the X between the J and the M. They sit at the intersection of everything we do.

So I have to ask — what's up with the dodo thing?

JIM: I'll let Matt take this one.

MATT: When we first entered advertising, we noted all these different large agencies and the same logic of using our first names applied — they had all these elaborate crests featuring birds of prey, and we thought it would be funny to make a dodo our mascot — and it just kind of stuck. It's a nod to vigilance, since we all know what happened to that bird. In my own warped world I like to think he's the last surviving one due to his wits and ability to roll with the punches.

'There is no b-team' reads as a positioning line, but it's also an operating constraint that must cost you money. What have you had to turn down to keep it true?

JIM: Honestly, we don't think it costs us money. It saves us money. Everything we do is bespoke, and there's so much relationship-building involved that a founder or a senior person has to kick each engagement off and oversee it. When you try to run this kind of work through juniors, you spend all your margin fixing what went wrong. The 'no b-team' thing isn't a marketing line. It's how we protect our results.

You judge work against four internal standards: effective, intentional, beautiful, and bold. Which of the four does the industry sacrifice most often, and where do you refuse to bend?

MATT: The industry sacrifices bold the most, especially in financial services. But bold, to me, isn't using funky colors or riding whatever trend is in the zeitgeist right now. Bold is sticking to your guns. It's being who your brand is actually supposed to be for the members you're trying to reach. Most of the category doesn't have the conviction for that.

JIM: Where neither of us will bend is intentional. Both of us have a strong dislike for advertising as it usually gets done. When we see poorly targeted work, it genuinely breaks our hearts. There are several ways to get closer to reaching the right people with the right message. The more consumers experience messaging that isn't for them, the more they tune out all messaging. Lazy targeting hurts the entire industry. It wastes money. That's not what we're about.

Has a client ever wanted something you were convinced would hurt them? How did that land?

JIM: Honestly, it hasn't really come up. We push back on things we think are unwise. But at the end of the day, the client wins. If we need to disagree and comply, we'll do that. Our job is to bring a strong point of view, not to hold work hostage over it.

What kind of prospect do you turn down, and what's the tell early on?

JIM: Two reasons, usually. One is that they're not really serious yet. They're working through ideas, unwilling to meet us in the middle, not ready to share information, sign an NDA, put a budget on the table. That's like walking into a bank asking for a loan and refusing to hand over ID. It doesn't work.

MATT: The other tell is treatment. If we're being treated like a vendor instead of a partner in the very first conversation, that's an indicator the relationship isn't going to grow the way it needs to. We don't really 'turn people down.' We just recognize when it's not going to be the best fit.

Banking and credit unions are a textbook parity market. What does the rest of the industry get wrong about that fact?

MATT: The rest of the industry gets it wrong because they still think features sell product. There's always a place for the rate. There's always a place for the shiny credit-card transfer fee. But ultimately, those brands need to think about benefits, about themselves in the context of how their products and services actually impact a member's lifestyle. That's true for prospects, and it's especially true for current members. Most credit unions struggle to grow wallet share. They've got single-product households, or maybe two products in a household, and they can't get past that. A lot of that is because other agencies just help them 'get the word out.' That's not what we do. We help them get the strategy right first, then amplify.

When you say 'engineering preference,' what does that actually look like on a random Tuesday inside JXM?

JIM: It looks like a targeting stack. Not boilerplate. We build plans with sometimes over a hundred layers of targeting: geography, demography, psychographics, behavioral, affinity. There are several ways to skin the cat. What matters is that every layer is rooted in a specific belief about who the consumer is and where they are in their life. Engineering preference isn't a slogan. It's the mechanical work of figuring out who we're trying to reach, what their day looks like, and where in that day we can show up in a way that earns attention rather than steals it.

Lazy targeting hurts the entire industry. It wastes money. That's not what we're about.

Nineteen years in financial services. What do outsiders always miss about this category?

MATT: Outsiders tend to come in with this jaundiced view, that financial services is boring, that it's purely rate-based, that consumers move on the best deal and nothing else. What we've found is that people respond best to messages that feel like they're reaching them when they need it. Engineering preference is really about helping people choose a specific credit union or bank because the message arrived at the right moment, in the right place, in a way that felt like it was for them. That's the part the category still doesn't fully understand.

If a credit union CMO called tomorrow and said, 'give me one hour and one piece of advice,' what would it be?

JIM: Do less.

MATT: [Laughs] Oh, well played. We'd both say that. You've got 120 different promos and obligations running at once. You need a firm like JXM to take care of the outbound and the paid media so that you can focus on what's actually important internally — the psychology of premium onboarding, for instance. So important. That takes marketing energy and marketing dollars, and you're spreading yourself so thin that none of it gets the attention it needs.

Nineteen years in a room together. What have you learned about each other that would have surprised you at year one?

MATT: We have very different views, and they don't overlap the way you'd assume two co-founders would. Jim is a cold, hard read on data and analysis. He doesn't have much stomach for creativity or brand-based opportunities. I'm the opposite of that.

JIM: I'd tell a credit union that if they don't have money, they don't have a mission. Which is true.

MATT: And I'd tell that same credit union that if they don't have a strong mission, no one's going to give them money. Which is also true. We approach the same problem from opposite ends. That's the partnership.

You're both fathers, entrepreneurs, and creatives at the same time. How does personal life actually show up in the work?

MATT: We try to keep it real. We're family guys. We're entrepreneurs. And we let personal life show up in the work because we believe work-life balance is a bit of an oxymoron. Whole-life integration is the honest way to run a business like ours. We try to extend that to our employees and partners, too. Good ideas don't just show up 9-to-5. At the same time, we're not policing anyone's availability. We're all working in our own lanes, in our own zones, trying to get things done.

What are you sharpening right now that isn't fully public yet?

MATT: A lot of the industry is looking at AI. We're looking at it from the human side. We're using it to speed things up, to ideate, to create advantages, even in some client circumstances, with permission. But everything is human-reviewed. Everything goes through a 'how does this make us feel' test before it ever gets in front of a client. We put our human suit on and try to figure out how real people are actually going to respond. Because ultimately, an LLM is a prediction engine based on what it's been fed. It doesn't understand nuance. It doesn't understand spontaneity. It doesn't understand human emotion. Those are still our jobs.

When a CMO at a community bank finishes reading this, what do you want them to walk away believing about JXM?

MATT: If you're interested in shaking things up, if you're interested in pushing the envelope and getting results unlike anything you've seen before, beating industry standards significantly, we're the shop for you.

JIM: If you want us to plug in as a vendor, as a media partner just running your plan, we're probably not going to be a good fit long-term. That's not a slight. It's an honest fit conversation, and the sooner we have it, the better for both of us.