digital-storytelling
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Lisa Martinez and the Business of Beginning Small
She began with an Etsy shop that barely sold, then built a studio, a nonprofit, and a storytelling ministry. Lisa Martinez has made a career from the stubborn idea that small work can carry serious weight.
The Agency That Gave Public Policy Better Lighting
Policy communication is usually built to survive a committee. NJI builds it to win attention - then gives the committee something it can actually use.
The Rivals Who Decided Michigan Needed Both of Them
A Republican operator and a Democratic trailblazer stopped competing, joined forces, and built a firm around a useful Michigan truth: the hardest messages must travel through more than one room.
The Agency That Put a Three-Eyed Alien to Work for New Mexico
MediaDesk discovered that public information travels farther when it stops looking like public information. Its proof is an Emmy-winning alien, a water campaign with 1.5 million views, and a business built for clients whose hardest product to sell is participation.
The People Who Renamed a Fish
M. Harris & Kern built a marketing agency out of an editor's oldest trick: cut until the point becomes impossible to miss. Then it used that discipline to sell banned books, revive routine vaccinations and persuade Americans to eat an invasive fish.
The Source Behind 70,000 Stories
Fuente Latina found the missing desk in international news: the one that answers in Spanish. It turned that gap into a donor-funded network of fixers, producers, translators, and fellowships built for reporters on deadline.
Casey Neistat Still Wants to Make the Thing
He built a career by treating the city as a set, the deadline as an editing tool and the audience as a collaborator. Now the platform he helped define feels unfamiliar, so Casey Neistat is returning to his oldest advantage: making unmistakably human work.
Matthew Glick Put the Athletic Department in the Publisher’s Chair
A high-school highlight app became a communications toolkit for athletic departments. Matthew Glick’s useful insight was that small sports programs did not lack stories - they lacked the time and tools to publish them well.
Andrew Laffoon Is Teaching AI to Respect the Family Album
For twenty years, Mixbook's co-founder has worked on the same deceptively difficult problem: turning a camera roll into something people will keep. His latest answer uses AI, but the product test remains stubbornly human.
The College Visit Moved to a Phone. This Atlanta Company Got There First.
StudentBridge turns virtual campus tours into enrollments for 250-plus colleges. Its founder is a former race-car driver who thinks admissions offices have been showing recruits the wrong thing.
The LA Agency That Ditched 'LA' - And Won the Year
In September 2024, Deutsch dropped the two letters that told everyone where it lived. Three months later, Adweek named it U.S. Agency of the Year.
Ankarino Lara
Ankarino Lara is a product-minded entrepreneur who co-founded Thismoment, a San Francisco enterprise content-marketing platform that helped global brands collect, curate and publish user-generated content across social channels. A Harvard-trained archaeologist who once conserved Maya artifacts at the Peabody Museum, Lara moved from museums to the early consumer web, building products at CNET and Yahoo! before launching Thismoment in 2008 around the idea that the basic unit of human experience is the 'Moment.'
Thismoment
Thismoment was a San Francisco marketing-technology company that built the Thismoment Content Cloud, a digital storytelling platform that helped the world's biggest brands monitor, moderate, secure rights to, and publish user-generated content alongside professionally produced media across social, web, and mobile touchpoints. Founded in 2007-2008 by gaming and tech veterans Vince Broady, Ankarino Lara, and Scott Bedard, it served more than 150 brands and agencies including Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Sephora, Levi's, Microsoft, Mazda, and AB InBev, and raised more than $50 million across four institutional rounds.
Niles Lichtenstein
Niles Lichtenstein is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nestment, a San Francisco-based platform helping first-time homebuyers purchase property through co-buying and expert coaching. Shaped by watching his immigrant mother rent rooms in their Berkeley home to stay afloat after his father's death, Lichtenstein spent a decade quietly co-buying properties with friends and family before formalizing the model into Nestment in 2021. The company has since raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding and facilitated over $200M in real estate transactions, with 74% of buyers being first-timers and 62% identifying as BIPOC or immigrants. Before Nestment, he founded The History Project (later Enwoven), a digital storytelling platform backed by The New York Times Company that powered Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's history into an HBO documentary.