sponsorship
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Voices of Search sells the conversation.
A free SEO podcast became a business selling access to the people who keep the web discoverable. Its useful trick: give a narrow audience a reason to keep listening.
Matt Manning and the business of belonging
From international marketing to the leadership of MKTG, Matt Manning has built a career around the distance between buying attention and earning a place in a fan’s life.
The Conference Company That Sells the Collision
For three decades, Strategy Institute has sold something executives insist cannot be scheduled: a useful encounter. Its trick is to engineer the room before anyone enters it.
The Company Behind the Weekend Chicago Borrows a Street
StarEvents spent three decades turning permits, porta-potties, talent and sponsorships into Chicago tradition. Its most useful lesson arrived when the familiar festival formula stopped feeling familiar to the public.
Live Nation Entertainment
It books the band, owns the room, prints the ticket and sells the beer sponsorship. Inside the $23-billion machine that moves 150 million concertgoers a year - and the antitrust fight over whether one company should do all of that.
Kevin "K.C." Clarke
Kevin "K.C." Clarke is a Los Angeles-based consumer brand marketer who now leads marketing at DITA Eyewear, the Aliso Viejo-headquartered luxury eyewear house whose frames are handmade in Japan. His career reads like a tour of the Southern California brand economy: Hurley and Vans in action sports, adidas and the Anaheim Ducks in sport and sponsorship, ZICO in beverage, then brand marketing leadership at golf-lifestyle label TravisMathew and VP of Marketing at car-care cult brand Chemical Guys. He holds a BS from Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business and an MBA from USC's Marshall School of Business. The through-line is a preference for brands with obsessive fans rather than merely large audiences - surfers, golfers, detailing enthusiasts, and now collectors of titanium and 18k gold optical frames.
Vendelux
Vendelux is a New York-based, AI-native event intelligence platform that turns in-person B2B events into a measurable, pipeline-generating channel. It tracks a proprietary database of 250,000+ conferences and trade shows, matches a company's ideal customers and target accounts against real attendee data, books qualified meetings before the show, and attributes resulting pipeline back to specific events inside Salesforce or HubSpot. Founded in 2021 by Alex Reynolds and Stefan Deeran, Vendelux serves GTM teams at companies like Ramp, Coupa, Contentful and T-Mobile, and has raised roughly $71M across seed, Series A and a 2026 Series B.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.