Most people notice a waste company at the exact moment something goes wrong. A truck arrives late. A bin is missed. A label on a package raises a recycling question no one can answer. The normal state is the opposite: thousands of routes completed, millions of small promises kept, an industrial system disappearing into the background of ordinary life. That is the strange canvas Jeni Bell accepted when she became executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Republic Services in April 2025.
Her job reaches far past advertising. Bell oversees marketing, communications, product development, customer engagement and revenue management. In plain terms, she owns much of the layer where a sprawling physical operation becomes a customer experience. Republic has 13 million customers, 17,000 trucks and more than 1,000 locations across North America. It handles recycling, solid waste, hazardous waste, field services and emergency response. The machinery is enormous. The interaction is often one person, one account, one curb.
Bell arrived with an unusual preparation for that tension. She had spent roughly two decades inside another infrastructure business, AT&T, moving among territories, technologies and executive mandates. Before marketing phones and networks, she worked in design and publishing in Salt Lake City. She then crossed nine territories in roles that asked her to think like a designer, operator, strategist and seller. In her own shorthand, the journey covered five brands and ten moves.
The career was a map, not a ladder
A conventional marketing biography advances through a clean sequence of bigger brands and larger budgets. Bell's is messier and more useful. She worked in regional marketing, helped design the experience for AT&T's first flagship retail store on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, launched LTE markets and mobility rate plans, and served as chief of staff while developing a six-year operating plan for AT&T Mobility. Later she ran mobility and entertainment operations in Northern California and Nevada and in the Rocky Mountain region.
Those general-manager assignments widened the frame. They involved performance, business development, multichannel revenue, costs, capital priorities, audience analytics and market share. A promotion could no longer be separated from the store carrying it, the network supporting it or the economics underneath it. Marketing became one instrument in an operating score.
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At WarnerMedia, Bell led corporate synergy across the media company and AT&T's family of businesses, organizing cross-enterprise teams around revenue and subscriber growth. She returned to AT&T leadership as senior vice president of product marketing and sales in December 2020, then took over performance marketing and platforms in November 2023. Each move changed the object in front of her: a territory, a plan, a partnership, a device, a channel. The recurring work was translation.
“These leaders didn't just open doors, they loaned out belief in rising leaders until we could stand in it ourselves.”Jeni Bell, reflecting on her AT&T career
That sentence says something about how Bell understands advancement. Her story is full of movement, but she frames the useful inheritance as confidence passed from one person to another. When she left AT&T, former colleagues publicly described returning to her teams more than once and learning from her example. Bell's own emphasis stayed on carrying that culture forward and investing in the people ahead.
A giant basketball and a tiny path to delight
One artifact from Bell's AT&T years is wonderfully literal. During the 2023 NBA playoffs, the company installed an automated 20-foot basketball at The Grove in Los Angeles. Existing customers scanned a QR code, then watched a prize spiral through an illuminated hoop. Signed basketballs, tickets, merchandise and cash emerged from the giant object. Bell explained the mechanism in practical terms: it took about 30 seconds.
The spectacle was loud. The customer path was short. That pairing is a compact lesson in Bell's product-marketing work. Technology provided the mechanism, but the experience did not require a lecture about the technology. The invitation was obvious, the participation was quick and the reward was tangible.
When the system underneath is complicated, shorten the customer's path through it. Let the engineering carry the weight and make the action feel obvious.
Her device launches used the same instinct in a quieter register. Bell talked about flexibility, listening and offers that treated new and existing customers alike. Whether the object was a foldable phone, a new iPhone or a basketball big enough to walk around, the message returned to what a person could choose, save or do.
Strong enough to bend
Bell's most personal public writing begins on a stage with her eight-year-old daughter, Ivy. Speaking before hundreds at a Women of AT&T luncheon in Southern California in 2022, Bell asked Ivy what resilience meant. The answer: unicorns shooting rainbow gummy bears from their horns.
Bell kept the image. A gummy bear, she reasoned, can absorb impact and bounce back while still smiling. From there she connected the joke to a physics definition of resilience and then to leadership. Her practical list was simple: practice, perspective, presence and permission to rest. She called a resilient person “strong and flexible,” a phrase with enough room for effort and recovery.
Resilience, in Bell's telling, looks less like armor and more like elasticity - plus a rainbow gummy bear.A lesson delivered with her daughter Ivy
The story reveals a useful communication habit. Bell does not strip the color from an idea to make it sound executive. She can start with material physics, borrow a child's surreal image and end with four things a leader can practice on Monday. The humor is doing real work. It makes the abstraction portable.
It also gives those ten moves a different shape. Mobility across jobs and cities can read as ambition from a distance. Up close, it means repeatedly entering a new room, learning a local system and rebuilding a sense of home. When the Bell family prepared to move west to Phoenix, she gave her children the optimistic version without pretending the move was small: “Your friends don't disappear when you move!” New geography could widen their world rather than replace it.
Making an invisible service visible
Republic Services is a physical network with a financial scale more often associated with technology platforms. It reported $16.6 billion in 2025 revenue. At year end, its footprint included 377 collection operations, 255 transfer stations, 79 recycling centers and 207 active landfills, alongside hazardous-waste and industrial facilities. It was also engaged in dozens of landfill gas-to-energy and other renewable-energy projects.
The system behind a single pickup
The environmental story is changing with that network. Republic is investing in polymer centers, advanced sorting, electric collection vehicles and renewable natural gas. In 2024 it reported processing 4.5 million tons through its recycling operations and diverting 6.4 million tons of recyclable material for customers. By the end of 2025, a new Polymer Center in Indianapolis had begun operating and nine renewable natural gas projects had started during the year.
Bell's remit places her at the junction of those investments and the people expected to use, buy or understand them. Product development decides what the company offers. Communications explains why it matters. Engagement catches friction. Revenue management disciplines the economics. Brand is what remains when those parts agree.
This is where the old AT&T experience becomes relevant. Telecom networks are also vast systems judged in a small moment: a call connects, a video loads, a bill makes sense. Environmental services work the same way. Customers do not experience the map of facilities or the capital plan. They experience the route, the response and the answer to a basic question about where something goes.
The next translation
Bell joined Republic saying she was energized by sustainability as both a platform for innovation and a path to growth. Her word for the goal was “customer zeal,” an active phrase for a category commonly described with passive satisfaction scores. It suggests that the assignment is not merely to make waste service tolerable. It is to make environmental choices clearer, service more dependable and the relationship useful enough that customers notice.
There is no giant basketball at the curb. There may be a cart, a schedule, an app, a truck and a driver completing a route before most of the neighborhood starts work. The theater is smaller. The system is larger. Bell's career has prepared her for precisely that mismatch: understand the machinery, find the human moment, and give people a short path through complexity.
The most revealing line in her arrival note was not about a campaign. It was about widening a world. That is now the work in front of her in Phoenix - taking a business people routinely look past and showing the decisions, technology and people inside it. If the service succeeds, much of it will remain invisible. The customer experience does not have to.