An agency can sell a client a campaign. Nicole Newsome is interested in the conversation that has to happen first. Is the business ready for the attention? Does the offer make sense? Will a fresh advertisement merely give an old problem a larger audience? These are awkward questions for anyone paid to help a company present itself attractively. They also make a useful introduction to the CEO of Qantm Creative.
Newsome calls her approach “radical honesty.” In a May 2026 conversation with Fervent Four hosts Zack Miller and Tim Ryan, the subjects included damaged business foundations, candid client advice and protecting a team by ending difficult client relationships. The episode arrived with the deliberately impolite title “Your Baby’s Ugly.” Advertising has always understood the value of getting someone’s attention. Here, the provocation concerned what should happen before the advertising begins.
There is a practical tension underneath the phrase. A client hires an agency to help, and helpfulness sometimes requires disagreement. An executive wants growth; the people doing the work need conditions in which they can deliver it. The easy answer can please everyone for an afternoon. A useful answer may require a longer meeting.
The conversation before the campaign
For Newsome, that discussion takes place inside a career spent adapting to changes in how companies reach people. Her work has included digital strategy at The Virginian-Pilot and digital marketing leadership at WB Marketing. Search, social media and websites became part of her professional vocabulary well before the CEO title. Each asks an apparently simple question that can become inconvenient: what happened after somebody saw the message?
Measurement makes a claim answerable. A handsome campaign can still leave a business with questions about who responded, what they understood and whether the response served the original purpose. Newsome’s public interview puts another question ahead of those: whether the thing being promoted is ready. It is a demanding order of operations. The advertising comes after the examination.
Her discussion of honesty also reaches leadership, trust and the future of search. These subjects belong together because an agency’s judgment travels through people. Someone has to notice the problem, someone has to say it, and someone has to decide what to do next. Software can provide a report. It cannot take responsibility for the conversation that follows.
An agency learns to share a name
Before Newsome took charge of Qantm, she helped with the organizational change that created it. In 2023, Five Hill Capital, the Norfolk investment firm behind WB Marketing, acquired Virginia Beach’s Meridian Group. The following year, the two agencies combined under the Qantm Creative name. Newsome was WB’s director of digital marketing at the time of the acquisition.
Joining agencies creates a particular management problem. Each company already has ways of working, relationships and expectations. A shared name can go on the door immediately; a shared understanding takes human attention. Newsome’s role in the integration gave her experience with the business while its identity was changing.
As Qantm’s chief strategy and growth officer, she became a link between the agency’s directors and its CEO and president. She also handled many of its largest accounts. That placed her between the people directing the work and the people commissioning it, a useful vantage point for understanding where an organization’s promises meet its daily decisions.
In October 2025, she succeeded Jean Matacunas as CEO. Matacunas remained the firm’s owner and moved into an advisory role. The handoff brought someone who had already worked within the combined organization to its leadership. Newsome’s task now included the agency as a whole: its creative work, client relationships and collaboration.
The digital habits that travel
A month after her appointment, Newsome and Qantm’s director of digital, Lori Aitkenhead, were scheduled to share their experience in a webinar called “20 Lessons from 20 Years in Marketing: What Works and What Matters.” Its advertised topics included testing, learning from success, working with data and knowing when to launch. The questions were practical rather than ceremonial.
The inclusion of success is particularly useful. Failure attracts an immediate investigation because it is inconvenient. Success can be waved through with congratulations, leaving everyone unsure which decisions were worth repeating. An agency that wants to learn has to examine both. Otherwise, its next plan may inherit confidence without inheriting understanding.
The session also challenged the idea of a perfect marketing mix. That is a sensible subject for someone whose experience spans different channels: a familiar tool is only valuable in relation to the problem. Search advertising, email, content and traditional media each have jobs to do. A strategy becomes less useful when its author insists that every job needs the same implement.
These were themes offered to other marketers, and they help explain the professional continuity in Newsome’s career. The channels can change while the discipline of asking, testing and deciding remains useful. A leadership title widens the field in which those habits matter.
A small clasp, a larger ambition
Some of Newsome’s mentoring has concerned a much smaller object than an agency: a tool for fastening jewelry. At Kempsville High School’s Entrepreneurship and Business Academy in Virginia Beach, she worked with students behind SheClasp. In 2024, the all-female team won $2,000 at a national pitch competition in Chicago.
The product offered a concrete answer to an everyday inconvenience. That makes it a revealing business exercise. A team has to explain the problem, demonstrate what its solution does and persuade someone else that the difference matters. The jewelry may be decorative; the explanation has to work.
“I am incredibly proud of this all-female team.”
Nicole Newsome, on the SheClasp students
The students owned the idea and the achievement. Newsome’s part was mentoring them. That distinction matters in a story about leadership: helping someone develop a case for their own work is a different activity from speaking for them. A pitch competition gives young entrepreneurs a public place to test that case.
The prize provides a clear result, but the episode also supplies a more human scale for her career. Here was an experienced agency executive spending time with people at the beginning of their business lives. The question of whether an idea can be understood travels quite comfortably from a client meeting to a student presentation.
Fourteen years of showing up
Newsome spent 14 years co-leading two Girl Scout troops. That is a length of service best appreciated without a business metaphor. It means continuing to participate while the rest of life changes around the commitment. The children get older. The work calendar fills. There is still organizing to do.
Her earlier volunteering included leading The Geekettes Club, which supported women studying technology subjects, and serving on the Norfolk Division board of the Hampton Roads Chamber. Her education was local too: she attended Old Dominion University. Hampton Roads appears across her work as an ongoing community, rather than simply the location printed beside her job.
These commitments bring different groups into view: students, women entering technical fields and regional businesses. They make her career broader than a succession of agency positions. Someone who helps people at different stages can see how much confidence depends on opportunity, practice and a person willing to pay attention.
Co-leading two Girl Scout troops.
A commitment measured in return visits.
The room beyond the boardroom
Newsome also serves on the board of Hampton Roads Pride. In 2026, she was listed as keynote speaker for the YMCA of South Hampton Roads’ Women’s Leadership Symposium. Those roles place her in conversations about community and leadership beyond the client relationship. They give her work a regional setting with people in it.
The YMCA’s introduction also supplies a pleasingly ordinary detail: she enjoys coffee and cigars, and time with her children. A professional biography can become so polished that nobody seems to have an afternoon. These interests give the person behind the role a little room to exist.
Recognition followed her transition into the CEO position. She was a Virginia Business Women in Leadership honoree in 2025, appeared among CoVaBiz’s Women on the Leading Edge, and was named to the publication’s 2026 list of 175 influential people in Coastal Virginia. In late September 2026, Virginia Business again profiled her as Qantm’s CEO.
In describing her ambitions, Newsome has emphasized creative problem-solving, collaborative work and encouraging people to take risks. Her advice to her younger self was short enough to remember: “Embrace the fear of the unknown.” That is a candid starting point for anyone whose professional tools keep changing.
What she wants the next year to buy
Her January 2026 message set out practical priorities for the agency: expand its strategic offerings, refine creative processes and keep investing in its people. It also asked others to make room for both their own development and a contribution to their community.
That pairing fits the shape of her career. There is an organization to lead and a place to participate in. There are experienced colleagues, clients with difficult decisions and young people learning to present an idea. Each deserves a different kind of attention.
The uncomfortable conversation, then, belongs within a larger habit of involvement. Candid advice takes time. So does combining teams or mentoring students. Newsome’s story is interesting because she has worked across all three. The next campaign may begin with a harder question. Somewhere else in Hampton Roads, a student may be getting ready to answer one.