birmingham-alabama
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The Ad Agency That Carpeted a Rhino to Make a Point About the Mind
Intermark Group built an advertising agency around a stubborn idea: people rarely do what a spreadsheet says they should. Its answer combines behavioral science, media buying and creative work - occasionally with a rhinoceros standing on the product.
The Agency That Had to Hide Its Founder Learned How to Make Brands Seen
O2ideas began with a handshake between two men who understood that Birmingham could buy their work before it could accept their partnership. Nearly six decades later, the agency's best trick is still the same: see the audience others miss, then make one good idea work much harder.
Jake McKenzie Made Advertising a Study in Human Nature
The Intermark Group CEO has spent nearly three decades turning a psychology degree into an operating system for brands - with data, behavioral science and one memorably carpeted rhinoceros along the way.
Bob Luckie Built an Advertising Career on the Power of Half a Sandwich
Across 43 years at Luckie & Co., Bobby Luckie rose from the mailroom to the corner office. What colleagues chose to preserve was simpler: his instinct to share.
Lisa Hasen Is Making Government Software Easier to Understand
After nearly two decades marketing specialized software, Lisa Hasen has arrived at Catalis with a deceptively difficult brief: explain the technology behind everyday government, then build a team that can make the explanation matter.
Brian Doud Built His Career Where Marketing Meets the Scoreboard
From Coca-Cola sponsorships to trucking software, Brian Doud has spent more than 25 years translating complicated businesses into stories people can use. His clearest lessons, however, may have been learned on a Birmingham lacrosse field.
Susheel John Has Spent a Career Teaching Paper to Move
From Kodak’s Asia-Pacific document-imaging business to ibml’s new AI platform, John’s career follows one stubborn corporate problem: turning mountains of paper into information that can actually move.
John Montgomery Built Big by Making Birmingham His Biggest Client
He started with a laptop, a loft and a cell phone with comic proportions. Three decades later, John Montgomery’s most durable campaign is the compact promise behind Big Com: do ambitious work, and make the hometown better while you’re at it.
How a Closet Full of Deer Feeders Became an AI That Tells a Buck From a Bobcat
Moultrie spent 45 years wiring the Alabama woods. Now its cameras text you the second a big buck steps out - and quietly ignore the raccoons.
The Birmingham Shop That Bags National Brands Without Leaving Alabama
For 30 years, a shop 800 miles from Madison Avenue has been quietly landing the kind of clients that usually skip the South. Here's how Big built it - and what a mid-market agency can steal from the playbook.
The Alabama Studio That Builds Companies From Problems, Not Pitch Decks
Shegun Otulana already had his billion-dollar exit. Then he stayed in Birmingham to build a factory for the next ones.
Doyle Williams Spent 40 Years Learning How to Sell Certainty
Four decades in an industry that sells the one thing nobody wants to think about. How Protective Life's marketing chief turned distribution plumbing, digital tools and a stack of professional letters into a career built on quiet certainty.
Jack's Family Restaurants
Alabama's answer to McDonald's turned 65 this year. Here is how a 15-cent hamburger stand in Homewood became a 280-store Southern institution - and why it still hand-breads the chicken.
Fleetio
Fleetio is a Birmingham, Alabama-based SaaS company that makes cloud and mobile software for managing fleets of vehicles, equipment, parts and drivers. Founded in 2011 by Tony Summerville, its platform helps organizations track maintenance and service history, run digital inspections, manage fuel and parts, automate work orders and connect telematics data so they spend less time wrestling with spreadsheets and more time on their core operations. Thousands of customers across more than 80 countries use Fleetio, which reached unicorn status with a $1.5B valuation after a $450M+ Series D in March 2025 and the acquisition of maintenance-authorization platform Auto Integrate.
Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.