A fundraiser with archery and s’mores might sound like an evening off for a chief executive. For Emily Rex, it belonged on the list of things to get done. In September 2024, she and Perette Godwin co-chaired Girl Scouts San Diego’s Urban Campout: Fortune Favors the Bold. The gathering raised $492,849 for the organization’s programs. Behind the campfire pleasures sat the familiar business of bringing people together around a purpose and giving them a reason to take part.
Rex’s working life at DEPARTURE has a similar breadth. She is the San Diego agency’s co-founder and CEO, with a remit that stretches across brand strategy, business development, operations and client relationships. It is a useful corrective to the tidy executive portrait. The title occupies one line. The work spreads across the page.
Her career is best approached through those obligations: the client whose business needs explaining, the colleague whose work needs coordinating, the nonprofit whose ambitions need support. There are more glamorous ways to describe leadership. Most of them leave out the person checking whether the next thing will actually happen.
A hotel with somewhere to go
By September 2008, Rex was a principal at Departure and speaking about a new assignment for San Diego’s Ivy Hotel. The hotel had selected the agency for branding and creative campaign work. Its ambitions reached beyond the city, toward potential guests in Orange County, Los Angeles and New York, with consumer and business audiences both in view.
The hotel already had an identity and wanted to carry it into new markets. That distinction matters in an agency career. A client arrives with history, expectations and opinions about what makes the business distinctive. The agency must decide which of those things will mean something to somebody who has never walked through the door.
Rex spoke about building on what the Ivy had established. The assignment put her in the business of translation: turning a place into an invitation that could travel. A hotel guest ultimately judges the room, the service and the experience. The advertising has the earlier, awkward task of persuading that guest to consider coming at all.
The agenda includes the unglamorous questions
Move forward to July 2019. Rex was moderating an ACG San Diego discussion about using data to align marketing and sales. On the panel were Shaun Alger of Volohaus, Gregg Anderson of 41 Orange and Peter O’Sullivan of HighBeam Analytics. The event sold out.
Its agenda had the directness of questions people ask when they are spending their own money. How should a business choose among marketing methods? What should it budget? How can it tell whether an effort is working, or whether a change is needed? A boxed lunch accompanied the discussion. Marketing accountability, apparently, could be addressed without depriving anyone of a sandwich.
The occasion offers a small but useful view of Rex’s professional setting. Creative work was being discussed alongside sales and measurement. Her position as moderator placed her between specialists, helping frame a conversation that crossed their individual disciplines. That is also where an agency chief spends much of her time: where one person’s answer becomes another person’s assignment.
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A second use for agency skills
Rex’s connection to San Diego extends into organizations with purposes beyond selling creative services. The Gaslamp Quarter Association listed her on its board for the 2013-15 term. That places her among the businesses and people concerned with a district’s shared interests, where an individual enterprise forms part of a larger place.
She and David Rex became involved with the San Diego Police Foundation in 2012. Emily joined its board in 2017 and was serving as board secretary when the pair were named honorary chairs of the 2023 Silver Soirée. They also participated in its Police Council Giving Circle.
DEPARTURE contributed communications work to the foundation, which valued the company’s cumulative in-kind gifts well into six figures. That figure describes donated services, rather than a personal cash gift of the same amount. The distinction helps explain Rex’s contribution: professional capability can itself become a resource for an organization.
A board seat and an agency assignment bring different responsibilities. In both, someone must pay attention to how the institution presents its purpose and how other people encounter it. For Rex, this civic work adds another setting in which communications has consequences beyond the finished piece of creative work.
Fortune needed a committee
At Girl Scouts San Diego, Rex was identified as board vice chair in 2024. Co-chairing Urban Campout with Godwin gave that commitment a particular date and a particular job. The event brought adults to the organization’s Balboa Campus for camp activities, food, auctions and an evening organized around supporting opportunities for girls.
The theme, Fortune Favors the Bold, was well suited to a program concerned with encouraging young people to try unfamiliar things. It also made room for a fortune teller and a wandering magician. Even serious fundraising can tolerate a little mystery. The accounting afterward, happily, was more definite.
Raised for Girl Scouts San Diego programs
The total belongs to the organization’s collective effort, including its staff, supporters, volunteers and guests. Rex’s role was to help lead that effort alongside Godwin. The distinction makes the accomplishment more interesting: fundraising depends on many people choosing to do something together, even though their reasons for joining may differ.
There was recognition around this work, too. Girl Scouts San Diego’s account of 2024 named Rex among the finalists in San Diego Magazine’s Celebrating Women Awards. The recognition sits beside the less ceremonial obligations of board service and event planning. Both are part of the same public record.
The next person through the door
Rex also chairs San Diego Rotary’s Girl Scouts committee. Its description lays out practical possibilities: supporting outreach sites, participating in career exploration, volunteering at events, developing business experiences for girls and helping make mountain camping accessible. These are proposed avenues for committee participation, each requiring people willing to take on the work.
The career exploration component is especially apt alongside Rex’s own business life. A young person considering a profession needs access to people who can make the work intelligible. The committee’s interest in an adapted Camp Enterprise experience similarly connects business with opportunities to learn through participation.
That is a different scale of influence from a campaign’s audience. It may involve a conversation, a volunteer assignment or assistance with a camp experience. Its significance lies in the opportunity created for the next person. Rex’s commitments connect institutions that can help provide those opportunities, with San Diego as their common ground.
An aircraft carrier raises the stakes
DEPARTURE’s assignment for the USS Midway Museum brought another kind of civic institution into Rex’s working life. The museum chose the agency after reviewing nearly a dozen proposals. For Rex, the project carried the particular responsibility of working with a place whose meaning extended into national history.
She described the feeling of contributing something that might carry forward into that history. It was an unusually personal note in a discussion of an agency project. The assignment involved a public experience, a technical system and the museum’s understanding of its own significance.
There is a revealing connection here with her nonprofit work. Institutions depend on people being able to understand their purpose and find a way to participate. A museum visitor, a prospective supporter and a future volunteer arrive with different questions. Someone has to consider the encounter from their side of the door.
A new company, a familiar responsibility
Rex has since announced Ontix, a separate company intended to help organizations put AI into practical business systems. She explained that demand for DEPARTURE to lead AI initiatives had grown enough to call for a dedicated venture. Her public professional profile now features Ontix.
The announcement frames the new business around implementation and trust. Its central question is short: “Who do you trust to make it real?” That is an ambition for the venture, and one whose answer will depend on the work it delivers. The announcement itself makes the intended direction clear.
“Who do you trust to make it real?”
Emily Rex / Announcing Ontix
Seen against her earlier responsibilities, the move has a recognizable shape. There is a new technical subject, but still the need to connect an organization’s intentions with people who can carry them out. Her language about brand, people and culture keeps the business setting in view alongside the technology.
Back at Urban Campout, the evening’s pleasures were deliberately simple: a familiar activity, a conversation, something sweet at the end of a stick. Making the occasion serve a larger purpose required a considerable amount of organization. Across Rex’s agency and civic commitments, that is the work that keeps coming into view. Somebody has to turn a good intention into an appointment other people can keep.