Noelle Jones Aladesuyi and the business of being believed

At 9:30 in the morning, Noelle Jones Aladesuyi’s colleagues nearly brought her to tears. They had made a video for her, gathering people from different chapters of We Thrive Media. She had hoped to let the day pass quietly. Her team had other editorial plans.

When she described the surprise in September 2025, she returned to the things ownership had given her: creative freedom, work with intention, and opportunities for Black women in marketing. She also returned to the people who had helped make those things possible. A founder can put her name on the paperwork. A team has considerable influence over whether the name means anything.

That exchange offers a useful entry into Aladesuyi’s working life. There are recognizable clients, degrees from Howard and Georgetown, and now an award for a music festival campaign. Underneath them runs a less tidy story about learning to meet people, earning their confidence and eventually becoming responsible for their working day.

The networker who had to practise

Aladesuyi graduated from Atlanta’s Grady High School, now Midtown High School, in 2009. Before college, she participated in 21st Century Leaders. Its summer programs put her among students from other schools and, during a residential experience at Emory, gave her a preview of campus life.

She remembers the relationships as well as the lessons. Former participants reappeared as she moved through college and into employment. Meeting strangers had never felt entirely natural to her; she has described networking as something she still has to work on. That admission gives the later business story its texture. The person who built through relationships had to practise making them.

“Learn before leading.”

Noelle Jones Aladesuyi

Her vocabulary for leadership pairs caring with daring: serve people, protect relationships, welcome ideas and learn to speak with confidence. In June 2024 she returned to the program’s orbit as a leadership dinner panelist. The student had become someone students could question. Few professional milestones make the passage of time quite so visible.

A journalist learns the other side of the story

At Howard University, Aladesuyi earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism. Georgetown followed with a Master of Professional Studies in public relations and corporate communications. Reporting and organizational communications occupy different positions in the life of a story. One investigates what happened; the other has to consider how an institution explains itself to the people outside it.

Her career brought that second task into several settings. At the High Museum of Art, she spent two years as a public relations specialist, working on touring and local exhibitions. She also launched the museum’s influencer program, the HMA Collective. An exhibition needs people to encounter it. Communications supplies some of the invitations.

By June 2019, she was working as public relations manager at Atlanta agency You Are Here. Her professional background included sports and entertainment activations for national companies. Alongside that employment, she was developing We Thrive Media and participating in event production through the family business AEE Productions. The arts, corporate communications and entrepreneurship were already sharing space in her career.

Those settings bring different expectations. A museum exhibition, a corporate sponsorship and a small-business assignment cannot all be explained with the same announcement. The subject changes; so does the audience’s reason for caring. Her path put her close to that problem repeatedly, well before she had an agency team of her own to lead.

The agency gets the whole day

We Thrive Media dates its founding to 2015. Aladesuyi’s decisive change of schedule came in October 2020, when she left agency employment to run it full-time. She and her business partner had secured a substantial civic-engagement assignment in Georgia. The enterprise she had been building after work was demanding more than the hours left over.

She gave herself roughly six months of financial runway. Later, she would report reaching a first million-dollar revenue year. Her account places equal weight on hiring: employing people brought continuing obligations to their livelihoods and development. A business that begins as a bet on your own time eventually starts making promises about other people’s time.

Her ambition also concerned who held authority. As a Black woman working in marketing, she wanted more scope for women like her to shape decisions and own the organizations making them. “I wanted to build the table,” she said. That is a fairly practical wish. Someone still has to select the chairs, pay the rent and make the meeting worth attending.

The people behind the posts

Today, Aladesuyi oversees organizational strategy, daily operations and growth at We Thrive Media. The agency’s work spans digital and social media, creative production and influencer marketing. Its description of itself puts Millennials in leadership and Gen Z among the people powering the work. Age is part of its account of how the team understands its audiences.

The roster also makes clear how much an agency’s output depends on distinct responsibilities. Nia Testamark leads strategy and client relationships. Other team members specialize in paid social, video production and influencer marketing. The founder’s job includes making those capabilities work together. The finished post is a very small window onto the organization required to produce it.

An Adobe Express feature offers a particularly unglamorous, useful example. The team sets up Brand Kits so colleagues can make edits without repeatedly reconstructing the brand’s visual rules. Aladesuyi’s company describes tools in terms of quick turnarounds and creative delivery. A template, in this context, is an agreement that saves everyone from having the same conversation again before lunch.

This is a revealing companion to creative freedom. Someone has to arrange the conditions that make freedom usable: assets colleagues can find, designs they can adapt, decisions they understand. Otherwise, every small revision becomes an expedition. The operational side of an agency earns little applause from an audience, which is generally too busy watching the video.

Clients notice different things. Professional Pricing Society marketing director Angie Jackson praised both the team’s video work and the people delivering it, describing them as “kind, smart, and caring humans.” The compliment belongs beside the portfolio. For a service business, the experience of working together travels with the work itself.

When the work meets the audience

We Thrive Media’s client relationships extend across music, sport, education and social impact. They include the Atlanta Falcons, Coca-Cola Florida, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Live Nation Urban’s Roots Picnic. That range gives Aladesuyi’s cultural strategy a concrete setting: different organizations trying to reach people whose attention has plenty of other places to go.

The agency’s 2025 ONE Musicfest campaign supplies a measurable example. It treated the festival’s social accounts as a continuing cultural conversation, with practical information and audience responses alongside entertainment. Seven festival-weekend videos each passed a million views. Across April through November, the campaign reported 2.6 million engagements and 48.9 million content impressions.

The work won the Campaign by Diverse-Owned Businesses category at the 18th Annual Shorty Awards. Aladesuyi shares the entry credits with Testamark, social and digital strategy manager Ayannah Love, and social and community engagement lead Kayla Hutto. The credit list keeps the achievement attached to the people who made it.

Celebrating the win in May 2026, Aladesuyi emphasized the preparation behind apparently spontaneous posts. She thanked the team and the supporters who had helped her keep going. Her response had the exuberance of someone entitled to enjoy the evening, and the insistence of someone who knows how easily skilled work can be dismissed as luck.

Trust has a longer working life

Aladesuyi is now listed on the jury for the 11th Annual Shorty Impact Awards. That puts her in a different relationship to the work: assessing campaigns from other organizations as well as leading her own. Her background spans institutional arts, brand communications and community-focused projects, a useful range for considering what an audience is being asked to do.

Her public reflections after the agency’s award return to consistency. Systems, talent, leadership and processes occupy the space after the celebration. There is a familiar founder problem here: a successful project creates the expectation that the next project will receive the same care. Recognition increases the number of people who may be watching.

We Thrive Media’s name makes a promise. Keeping that promise involves clients, colleagues and the communities represented in the work. Aladesuyi’s career has moved steadily toward a position where she can make more of those decisions herself. Each gain in authority comes with more people affected by how she uses it.

The colleagues who interrupted her quiet morning understood one part of that story. Their video gave the founder a view of the company through the people around her. For someone whose business depends on being trusted, there are worse ways to begin the working day than discovering that the team has something it wants you to see.