Mike Wheeler and the business of getting you through the gate

A ticket is a small object carrying a rather large promise. Someone has to organize the day, persuade the family, make the journey and decide that the experience will justify the trouble. Mike Wheeler has spent his working life close to that decision. At Knott’s Berry Farm, at Discovery Cube and now at Rocket Launch, the agency he co-founded, his career has kept returning to the business of giving people a reason to come.

Consider the range of invitations involved. A theme park offers escape. A science museum offers discovery. A county fair offers a summer day that might include a concert, an agricultural exhibit and something fried that had previously led a respectable life. Each has to become specific enough for someone to choose it. Recognition helps, but a familiar name alone cannot organize a Saturday.

Wheeler is president and CEO of Rocket Launch in Orange, California. The agency works across marketing and public relations, with assignments stretching from consumer products to nonprofit organizations. Its portfolio can look wonderfully miscellaneous. Follow Wheeler’s professional path, though, and a consistent problem comes into view: connecting an organization’s invitation with the people who might accept it.

A career on the other side of the turnstile

Before he ran an agency, Wheeler worked inside attractions. His Knott’s Berry Farm background includes park operations and marketing. Those disciplines meet at a useful point: the visitor actually arrives. Operations has to deliver the day that marketing has encouraged someone to imagine. A campaign can promise excitement; somebody still needs to open the gate.

Rocket Launch’s account of its founders’ earlier Knott’s work places Wheeler alongside Michele Wischmeyer and Bob Ochsner in the park’s development as a broader resort destination. The work encompassed promotions, partnerships, special events and public relations. Its scope extended beyond the main park to waterparks, a hotel and the surrounding marketplace. That is a substantial collection of reasons to visit, each requiring its own explanation.

The distinction matters for understanding Wheeler’s later business. The resort work was collective, carried out while the people involved were on the Knott’s payroll. It belongs to their professional experience before Rocket Launch. For an agency founder, that experience offers a particular perspective: the advertisement is one part of an operating organization, with visitors, competing priorities and a day to deliver.

The co-founders were already colleagues

Discovery Cube brought Wheeler into science education and supplied the working relationship from which his agency would emerge. He held a marketing and communications leadership position there; a County of Orange publication identified him as a vice president in 2014. The setting changed from amusement to learning, while the need to connect an institution with an audience remained.

One public glimpse places him at an Eco Challenge event involving Discovery Science Center and the County of Orange, alongside young poster-contest winners. It is a small scene in a longer career, but a useful one. An educational organization reaches people through events and partnerships as well as through its building. Its invitation can travel into the community before a visitor ever arrives.

At Discovery Cube, Wheeler worked with Erin Gibbons and Dan Nasitka on the in-house marketing and communications team. The three went on to found Rocket Launch in 2017. Their partnership began with experience of doing the work together. Before dividing responsibilities in their own business, they had shared the circumstances of somebody else’s.

The agency combines marketing and public relations, an arrangement Nasitka has connected to that in-house background. In practical terms, it puts several parts of a client’s communications in the same conversation. The advertisement, the press pitch and the wider marketing plan can be considered together. That was a choice about how to organize the business, as much as which services to put on a list.

Summer needs a plan

The OC Fair makes the connection between Wheeler’s earlier career and his agency’s work especially clear. Here is an attraction with a history, a calendar and an audience that may already have strong opinions about its favorite parts. The assignment is to give those memories a current invitation, with enough practical information to turn affection into a visit.

Rocket Launch’s fair work covers commercial production and media planning and buying. Its case study describes a six-week campaign with more than $1 million in media investment across channels including outdoor advertising, digital, television and radio. The figure measures the campaign’s media investment. It gives a sense of the coordination involved in getting a seasonal event in front of people.

There is also the map. The agency developed a visitor guide and map illustration that could be adapted into a food guide and signage. It is an appealingly concrete piece of marketing: a way to help someone imagine where they will go, then help them find it. The invitation continues to work once the visitor is inside the grounds.

The 2025 campaign used the theme “Find Your Happy,” with commercials incorporating a map concept and the fair’s different experiences. In March 2026, Rocket Launch announced first-place Western Fairs Association honors for the television and radio advertising. The fair received 22 awards overall; those two recognized advertising created with the agency. A campaign has many contributors, and the distinction keeps the applause attached to the right work.

“Four campaigns in, we know the OC Fair deeply”

Mike Wheeler · March 2026

For an agency president, the fair also presents a leadership problem with a very visible deadline. Creative work, production and media placements have to arrive in sequence. An audience sees the commercial as a single finished thing. Behind it are different responsibilities, and the credits on the next campaign make those responsibilities visible. That is useful context for Wheeler’s role. Leading the business means bringing people and assignments together so the organization can deliver the work it has agreed to do. The fair eventually opens, and the invitation has to be ready.

The continuing relationship gives that brief remark some weight. Familiarity with a client can mean knowing which experiences audiences value, which formats explain them and which details need another look. In the same announcement, the agency outlined its next fair campaign, “Your Adventure Awaits,” with Gary Low leading creative and Ryan Maples of Xlantic handling production. Wheeler’s presidency sits within that named network of collaborators.

Occasionally, the invitation is a pineapple

Attractions explain much of Wheeler’s background, but his agency’s portfolio has room for a different sort of spectacle. Fresh Del Monte’s Rubyglow pineapple arrived with a deep-red shell and a retail price near $400. Rocket Launch’s public relations work positioned it as a luxury gift and an occasion for entertaining. The price itself gave people something to discuss.

The campaign is an agency example, rather than an individual creative credit for Wheeler. It shows the breadth of the business he leads. A pineapple is familiar; a pineapple priced like an extravagant present requires a new frame of reference. The team’s approach put it into the world of special purchases, where the unusual packaging and rarity could become part of the appeal.

That sits comfortably beside the more familiar attraction work. Both assignments ask an audience to imagine an experience before committing to it. One may involve a fairground; another may involve explaining an exceptionally expensive fruit to dinner guests. The distances between client categories can be large. The act of finding an intelligible invitation travels rather well.

Keeping room for different sizes

Rocket Launch moved into its Old Towne Orange office in 2020. Its client relationships have included local businesses as well as national brands. For Wheeler, the range carries an explicit ambition: retaining the ability to help emerging companies while serving larger organizations. Growth brings a choice about whose work an agency can still make room for.

“It’s the smaller companies that need a little bit more help”

Mike Wheeler · July/August 2023

His nonprofit work adds another dimension. In January 2026, Rocket Launch announced agency-of-record appointments for Union Rescue Mission and YMCA of Orange County. The assignments brought brand storytelling, communications strategy, media relations, advertising, social media and content development together. Here the desired participation can mean community involvement and support, as well as understanding what an organization does.

Those appointments extend a client roster that includes the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation, Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast and Orange County Community Foundation. Wheeler’s background at Discovery Cube gives the sequence a continuity. Public-facing organizations need to make their purpose understandable to people whose attention is divided among many worthy invitations. The work asks for specificity about whom to reach and what to ask of them.

His current team biography assigns him client strategy and growth. It also volunteers a smaller detail: he has been known to comment with a fire emoji on his own posts. There is a certain administrative efficiency in arranging one’s own applause. The joke fits a team page that gives colleagues similarly playful miniature biographies alongside their responsibilities.

The professional story is more grounded than the company’s space-flight vocabulary might suggest. Wheeler worked inside places that had to attract people and deliver an experience, built a partnership with colleagues, then carried that experience into an agency. The settings now include fairgrounds, consumer brands and community organizations. Somewhere beyond every campaign is a person deciding whether to buy, visit, participate or support. Wheeler’s work keeps meeting them there.