brand-partnerships
(12)
Nick Keller Is Building Careers Beyond the Feed
The Insight Media founder works in the quiet space between a creator's viral moment and a durable career - where contracts, calendars and careful choices matter more than applause.
From Cereal Aisles to Game Commerce, Berkley Egenes Keeps Following the Fan
His route to the games business ran through retail promotions, racing, virtual reality and esports. At Xsolla, those lessons have become a practical brief: make global commerce feel local, and make an infrastructure company useful to the people creating the games.
Adam Lebowitz Is Selling Stretch Jeans Everywhere - Even on a Ski Lift
Mugsy's CMO came up through sports media, then traded brand partnerships for the daily arithmetic of DTC. His playbook is unusually public: test more, protect the second purchase, own the mistakes - and keep pitching when the office happens to be a chairlift.
Alden Reiman Bet His Career on the Brand Side of Fame
After learning the machinery of talent at CAA and the NFL, Alden Reiman chose a less glamorous seat at the table: representing what brands actually need. An acquisition, a new firm, and a decade of creator-economy work followed.
Daniel Broukhim Put the Gift Bag on a Balance Sheet
FabFitFun began as a newsletter, found its business model in the event gift bag, and grew by treating surprise as an operating system. Daniel Broukhim’s career is a study in pivots, partnership, and the unglamorous math behind a delightful box.
Jennifer Ilecki Makes Big Brands Feel Personal
From hotel-lobby dance parties to personalized cardholder journeys and pickleball courts, Humana's CMO has built a career around one deceptively hard idea: make the institution meet the person.
Wendy Schenker
Wendy Schenker turned a bank’s marketing brief into a Chicago invitation - pairing sponsorships, public rituals and community work so the brand is experienced before it is advertised.
Iris Yen
Iris Yen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cupshe, the California-founded swimwear and beachwear brand that grew from a single-category bet into a global direct-to-consumer business with roughly $420 million in annual revenue. She joined in February 2025 after a run through some of the loudest brand-building rooms in the business: Head of Media, Content and Partnerships at Nike; VP and Head of Media, Strategy and Audiences at Red Bull; VP and Head of Communications at GUESS?, Inc.; VP of Communications at American Eagle Outfitters; and VP of Global Marketing and PR at Quiksilver. She started in music, running marketing and PR at Universal Records in the early 2000s, and has built campaigns around names including Britney Spears, Nelly, Kelly Slater, Tony Hawk and Torah Bright. A Washington University in St. Louis graduate who studied anthropology alongside marketing, Yen tends to treat brands as cultures rather than catalogs - a habit visible in Cupshe's 10th-anniversary work, its fourth Miami Swim Week runway show, and its 2026 Casa del Sol collaboration with Jessie James Decker.
Chris DeAppolonio
Chris DeAppolonio is the CEO of Evil Geniuses, North America's oldest esports organization. A sports-business lifer who wrote his 2008 NYU master's thesis on the coming rise of professional gaming, he spent a decade in traditional sports marketing before crossing into esports as a team president and innovation chief. He now runs EG on a data-first, 'Moneyball' philosophy, pairing proprietary analytics and AI with player development to scout undervalued talent and chase championships.
Ninja
Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins is the world's most recognized gaming streamer, having transformed competitive gaming into mainstream entertainment. Starting as a Halo pro in 2009, he became the face of Fortnite's cultural takeover - playing live with Drake to a record 628,000 concurrent viewers in 2018 - and parlayed that moment into a media empire spanning Twitch, YouTube, brand deals with Red Bull and Adidas, a Chief Innovation Officer role at GameSquare Holdings, and a co-founded cashew milk brand. With 19+ million Twitch followers and 23+ million YouTube subscribers, he continues to define what a professional streamer can become.
Samira Behrouzan
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Lia Haberman
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.