brand-management
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The Firm You Call Before the Story Calls You
ProActive Strategies built a business around an awkward truth: the most expensive sentence in public life is often the one nobody prepared to say. For nearly three decades, the Virginia firm has helped organizations decide what to say, who should say it, and what should happen next.
The Publicist Who Turned Charlotte Into a Rolodex
For 20 years, Jameka S. Whitten has built publicity the old-fashioned way: by knowing which story matters, who needs to hear it, and why Charlotte is often the perfect place to begin.
The Hype Machine That Stayed in Philadelphia
Nicole Cashman's first partnership fell apart. Her answer was to stay put - and turn Philadelphia's restaurants, hotels, shops, civic moments and famous parties into a communications network with national reach.
The Basketball Agency That Made Distance Its Home-Court Advantage
Bill Duffy built BDA by treating international players like first-class clients. Then he tested whether a relationship business could borrow the scale of Hollywood without losing its bedside manner.
The Publicist Who Turned a One-Letter Mistake Into a 24-Hour Business
Anderson Group PR learned its trade in old Hollywood, survived the shutdown by looking beyond actors, and built a business around the one thing a platform cannot automate: knowing which story to tell, to whom, and when.
Hollywood stopped filming. Anderson Group kept pitching.
Liza Anderson built her agency around people worth talking about. When Hollywood shut down, that definition made room for bakers, creators and experts with something to say.
Venture IAB and the business behind the personality
A dog expert, television actors and a rock band for small children belong to the same business story. Venture IAB worked where a distinctive personality could become a show, a booking or a brand partnership.
Titan Public Relations makes the first client real
At Cal State Fullerton, a student-run agency trades pro-bono PR for something a classroom cannot supply: a client with an actual problem. The lessons include a barbershop move, a clothing drive and one missing screenshot.
Serene Agency knows who needs to hear your story
From record releases to gallery openings, Nia Rice’s Los Angeles agency sells a particular kind of judgment: which story belongs in which room.
AM PR Group’s business is the next move
Vanessa Anderson’s Los Angeles agency works where celebrity, commerce, and culture meet. Its relationship with Issa Rae offers a useful lesson: the next opportunity may require a different job description.
Superside Fired the Marketplace and Built a $16,000-a-Month Creative Department
The first version did everything from PowerPoints to measuring roofs on Google Maps. Then weak retention forced a sharper bet: design only, subscriptions only, and a global team built for enterprise creative overflow.
Beautiful.ai Built a Presentation App That Tells You “No” - and 100,000 Businesses Said Yes
The PowerPoint challenger’s cleverest idea was not generating more choices. It was removing the bad ones - then selling that constraint as a faster way for teams to think in public.
Canto Built a Business on the File Nobody Can Find
AI made it cheap to create another image, video or campaign. Canto is betting companies will pay to remember which version they can actually use.
MediaValet Built a Business Around the File Nobody Can Find
A photography company choked on 20 terabytes of its own work. The fix became a cloud-software business - and a useful playbook for any team whose content library has turned into a junk drawer.
The Company That Buys Yesterday's Favorites - Then Teaches Them New Tricks
Marquee Brands has turned nostalgia into infrastructure. Its portfolio runs from Martha Stewart's kitchen to Body Glove's surf break - and the real product is a global machine for making familiar names useful again.
WHP Global’s Product Is the Name on the Box
In seven years, the New York firm assembled 15-plus familiar names and more than $8.5 billion in annual retail sales. Its real product is not a dress, sneaker or toy - it is a system for making old brands travel farther.
The Poker-Chip Seller That Built Retail’s Invisible Endless Aisle
Trademark Global started with collector plates, swords and a mountain of poker chips. Twenty-seven years later, its real product is the machinery behind the product - brands, data, warehouses and direct-to-door fulfillment for retail’s endless aisle.
The Company Running the Store Behind the Store
Baozun built its name doing the unglamorous work behind online retail. Now it is testing whether the machinery that runs a brand can become a brand business of its own.
Kraft Heinz Has a $25 Billion Pantry. Now It Has to Make It Hungry Again.
The merger built a pantry few rivals can match. A decade later, Kraft Heinz is spending more, reorganizing faster and asking whether famous brands can become growth brands again.
The HEINEKEN Company
HEINEKEN sells beer, but its harder-to-copy product is a global machine for making a local ritual travel. Now that machine is being rebuilt around alcohol-free occasions, connected breweries and a sharper portfolio of brands.
Treasury Wine Estates
The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
Interparfums, Inc.
Interparfums turns other people’s fashion names into a $1.49 billion fragrance business. Its advantage is an asset-light system that connects brand mythology, bottle design and a distribution network reaching more than 120 countries.
Procter & Gamble
The company behind Tide, Pampers and Gillette has spent nearly 190 years turning tiny household frustrations into repeat purchases. Its real product is a system for making ordinary things feel worth choosing again.
Haleon
The company you have never heard of makes the toothpaste, painkillers and vitamins you buy without thinking. Here is how GSK's cast-off brands became a £30 billion bet on self-care.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr spent fifteen years arguing that the software companies use to talk to customers is broken into too many pieces. Now it is betting the whole business on AI stitching those pieces back together.
Etaily
Etaily is a Southeast Asian commerce enablement platform that helps global and regional consumer brands sell online across the region. Founded in 2020 by Alexander Friedhoff, it runs an end-to-end operation - marketplace and D2C store management, social commerce and livestreaming, digital marketing, data analytics, warehousing and fulfillment - so brands can launch and scale on channels like Lazada, Shopee, TikTok Shop, Zalora and brand.com without building local teams. Headquartered in the Philippines with offices in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, Etaily has processed over 40 million orders and works with brands including Levi's, Skechers, Abbott and L'Oreal.
PlayPlay
PlayPlay is a Paris-based B2B SaaS company that lets communication and marketing teams turn ideas and text into professional, on-brand videos without editing skills. Its browser-based platform pairs drag-and-drop templates with AI tools - avatars, auto-subtitles, voice-over, translation and clipping - plus enterprise brand governance. Founded in 2017 by Thibaut Machet, Aurelien Dayres and Clement Moracin, PlayPlay is used by 3,000+ companies including IBM, L'Oreal and Booking.com, and has raised roughly $65.8M, led by a $55M Series B from Insight Partners in 2022.
Playbook
Playbook is a San Francisco-based software company building a visual, AI-powered cloud storage and digital asset management platform for creative professionals. Founded in 2019 by Jessica Ko, it blends a Pinterest-style gallery with Dropbox-style storage, adding automatic AI tagging, GPT-powered search, real-time review, and workflow automation so designers and marketing teams can find, organize, and share images and video without digging through folders. Backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Founders Fund, Playbook has grown to millions of registered users managing hundreds of millions of assets.
Omneky
Omneky is a San Francisco generative-AI platform that automatically produces, tests, and optimizes advertising creative - image, video, and UGC-style spokesperson ads - and launches campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Founded in 2018 by Hikari Senju, it was one of the earliest movers in applying generative AI to advertising, using computer vision and multimodal analysis to predict which creatives will perform and to close the loop between making ads and measuring them. The company has since pivoted toward 'agentic' AI advertising agents that set campaign goals, execute subtasks, and reallocate budget across channels.