A fishing license is a small document with an unreasonable number of jobs. It grants permission. It records a transaction. It helps fund conservation. It can mark the beginning of a family weekend, a solitary dawn, or the optimistic purchase of equipment whose instructions will be ignored. For Kelsey Hersey, it is also a customer journey.
Hersey is Chief Marketing Officer at Brandt Information Services, a Tallahassee-based company that builds licensing, registration and reservation technology for outdoor recreation agencies. Her office is in the peculiar corridor between the screen and the shoreline. The work begins with data, software and public-sector constraints. Its desired result is physical: more people fishing, hunting, boating, camping and returning to do it again.
That is the useful contradiction at the center of her career. She uses digital systems to encourage decidedly analog behavior. A campaign may begin with a search ad or an email reminder, pass through an e-commerce platform and end with wet boots. In a profession often accused of manufacturing attention for its own sake, the finish line here is refreshingly literal. Someone goes outside.
A designer learns the machinery
Hersey's first professional language was visual. She studied advertising, art direction and an art minor at Temple University from 2007 to 2011. During a 2009 internship at Quaker City Mercantile, she designed collateral and banner advertising. The assignment list included invitations, posters, menus, booklets and photo editing. It was an education in the tiny decisions that decide whether an idea arrives intact.
After Temple, she joined Band Digital as an associate account executive. Her work crossed account management, creative production and media placement, including a $400,000 online holiday campaign built from video, social media and games. The title was on the account side; the practice required fluency across the room. Budgets, hours and deadlines had to coexist with the creative pitch.
At Harborside Group, she moved closer to the tools. She wrote, edited and designed print materials, rebuilt brand guidelines, worked on websites and produced HTML emails sent to more than 20,000 recipients. Then, as a digital engagement strategist at 15Four, she developed video-centered campaigns and web properties for clients that included Under Armour, Navy Federal Credit Union and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The sequence matters. Design taught her to notice friction. Account work taught her that every bright idea eventually meets a budget. Digital strategy taught her that a website, an ad and a video are not separate artifacts when the audience experiences them as one path. By the time she entered government technology, she had already learned to see the machinery behind the message.
The outdoor economy gets a translator
In 2014, Hersey joined JMT Technology Group, a provider of geospatial and outdoor licensing solutions. Her work included government proposals for multimillion-dollar technology contracts, product launch strategy, industry presentations, event planning and user-experience design for government applications. It was an apprenticeship in translation: between agency missions and procurement language, between a technical product and the people expected to use it.
She moved to Brandt in June 2017 as Director of Marketing. Public procurement materials from that period describe her managing state digital campaigns through CRM targeting, audience modeling, search marketing, social media and e-commerce analysis. Yet the goal was not merely conversion in the retail sense. State fish and wildlife agencies rely on licenses and registrations to support their work. A useful campaign had to serve the customer, the agency and the outdoor system around both.
The methods sound familiar to any modern marketer: behavioral audiences, look-alike models, geofencing, search intent and retargeting. The context makes them stranger and more demanding. A state agency is not selling novelty for novelty's sake. It may be trying to re-engage a lapsed angler, explain a new registration workflow or invite a first-time camper without confusing an experienced customer. Hersey's public career record lists collaborations with agencies from Florida and Georgia to Iowa, Idaho, Washington and Alaska. The common challenge is not a shortage of channels. It is choosing a useful message, proving what happened next and respecting the public purpose behind the purchase.
The digital front door to an outdoor day
This is where Hersey's design background becomes operational. A license portal has to make complicated rules legible. A reminder has to arrive at the right time without becoming noise. A mobile app has to satisfy an agency's requirements and a citizen's impatience. The form, the message and the product cannot quarrel in public.
“We should not be taking full credit for the ads reported revenue full value.”Kelsey Hersey on attribution in regulatory e-commerce, 2020
Her caution about attribution is unusually specific and broadly useful. A person may have intended to renew a fishing license before seeing an advertisement. Several platforms may claim the same purchase. In a regulated market, reporting every conversion as advertising's personal triumph would be both analytically clumsy and institutionally tone-deaf. Hersey argued for transaction IDs, analytics, tracking pixels and tagged links, followed by the less glamorous work of de-duplicating revenue across channels.
Career toolkit · documented areas of repeated practice
The meeting is part of the product
Hersey's public appearances show another part of the job: convening people who own different pieces of the same outcome. At a 2021 Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies plenary, she and Tennessee wildlife communications leader Jenifer Wisniewski discussed how agencies could understand the people who adopted fishing and hunting in 2020, then give those newcomers reasons to return.
At the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation's State Marketing Workshop that year, she appeared in sessions about state marketing, license sales and customer experience. In a 2022 Kansas public meeting, she introduced Brandt's role in a new licensing system by moving through the practical inventory: licenses, limited draws, boat registrations, mobile apps, customer support, fulfillment and digital marketing. It was less a sales flourish than a systems map.
Brandt's annual customer summit turns that map into a room. Recent agendas have included marketing automation, customer portals, contact centers, licensing launches, demand-based reservation pricing and AI in digital marketing. The topics are varied because the experience is connected. A citizen does not care which department owns the reminder, the payment screen or the confirmation. They simply notice whether the trip from intention to permission feels sensible.
“It gives our teams the chance to learn from one another, celebrate successes, and shape the future of our products and partnerships.”Kelsey Hersey on Brandt's 2026 customer summit
The order of that sentence is telling. Learn, celebrate, shape. It begins with listening and ends with building. The summit is marketing, certainly, but it is also discovery, customer research and product governance wearing a name badge. In government technology, where a fashionable feature must still survive policy, seasonal demand and public scrutiny, that proximity is useful.
A career with one continuous line
Look quickly and Hersey's résumé appears to jump industries: spirits and apparel collateral, supermarket campaigns, financial marketing, corporate video, geospatial tools, then outdoor licensing. Look longer and the line is continuous. Each role asked her to reduce the distance between a complicated organization and a person trying to do something.
Colleagues quoted on her LinkedIn profile describe her as proactive, organized and alert to gaps. Those are modest words with executive consequences. A gap is where the customer drops out, where the reporting overstates its case, where the product team and marketing team hold two versions of the same story. Finding it is design. Closing it is operations.
Her professional progression from intern to CMO also argues for the compounding value of craft. The person who once worried about the hierarchy on a printed card can later ask whether a permit screen explains the next step. The account executive who tracked hours can later consider the cost of customer confusion. The strategist who connected video, web and media can later connect messaging, licensing and service.
Brandt now describes itself as serving those who conserve and those who enjoy the outdoors. Hersey's role sits on the conjunction. She helps the institution explain itself to the participant, and the participant's behavior speak back through data. When that exchange works, marketing becomes less like persuasion and more like useful wayfinding.
There will always be a screen in this story. Someone needs to search, register, reserve, renew or receive a reminder. Hersey's career suggests the screen should know its place. It is not the destination. It is the trail marker, the ticket window, the neatly labeled drawer where permission is kept. The important part begins after it disappears into a pocket.