Tagged: storytelling
30 results
Katie Babineau
Katie Babineau is the Chief Marketing Officer of Beyond Yoga, the Culver City premium activewear brand acquired by Levi Strauss & Co. in 2021. She spent roughly fifteen years in consumer technology - Sony Electronics, GoPro, Apple via TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and Snap Inc., where she was Global Head of Marketing - before joining Beyond Yoga as VP of Marketing in 2024 and stepping up to CMO. In 2025 she led the brand's first full reset, a platform called Seek Beyond built around the idea of progress over perfection, with actor and writer Issa Rae as the brand's first celebrity partner writing and performing a spoken-word anthem. She brings a test-and-learn technology mindset to apparel, argues loudly that brand and growth marketing should never be separated, and prefers hyperlocal, in-person community events to another round of picture-perfect ad creative.
Kelly Olmstead
Kelly Olmstead is the Chief Marketing Officer of Allbirds, the San Francisco sustainable footwear and apparel brand. She brings more than 25 years across sporting goods, footwear and apparel, including nearly two decades at Adidas leading brand, retail and digital marketing for North America, and a stint as CMO of children's clothing brand Hanna Andersson. Since taking the top marketing seat at Allbirds in December 2023, she has anchored the company's turnaround on brand building over pure performance marketing, launching the 'Allbirds by Nature' platform and betting that consistency, storytelling and a beloved product can lift the brand's awareness the way it lifts its Net Promoter Score.
Maisie Willoughby
Maisie Willoughby is a British marketing executive who has served as Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Timberland since October 2023. A self-described 'non-traditional, creative-first' CMO, she trained in fashion photography at the London College of Fashion and built her craft at agencies including Wieden+Kennedy, Anomaly and Cult LDN before spending roughly five years at Alexander Wang, ultimately as chief brand marketing officer. At Timberland she has repositioned the heritage boot brand at the intersection of fashion, music and street culture, steering the 50th anniversary campaign for the Original Yellow Boot and the viral 'Je T'imbs' collaboration with Louis Vuitton that drove billions of organic impressions and a sharp lift in sales.
Melanie Allen
Melanie Allen is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Brooks Running, the Seattle-based, Berkshire Hathaway-owned performance running brand. A first-generation college graduate with a mechanical engineering degree from Michigan State University, she took an unusual route into marketing - from vehicle climate-control systems at Ford, to Pampers R&D and brand work over 14 years at Procter & Gamble, to coffee innovation at Starbucks, and finally to running shoes. Since joining Brooks in 2017 she has led the brand's global marketing, e-commerce, corporate responsibility and emerging business, helping steer the company through eight straight years of growth to roughly $1.3-1.4 billion in annual revenue and campaigns like the Cynthia Erivo 'Shine Under Pressure' partnership under the 'Let's Run There' platform.
Nicole Graham
Nicole Hubbard Graham is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Nike, Inc., leading global brand storytelling across Nike, Jordan and Converse. A Nike veteran of roughly 18 years who rose from director of women's marketing to VP of global categories and consumer direct brand marketing, she left in 2021 to co-found the creative agency Adopt, then returned as CMO in January 2024. She is the architect of Nike's marketing reset, championing an 'athletes over algorithms' philosophy that produced the 2024 Paris Olympics comeback push and the 2025 Super Bowl 'So Win' brand anthem, Nike's first Super Bowl ad in 27 years.
Nicole Lauchaire
Nicole Lauchaire is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Retail/D2C at Varsity Spirit, the Memphis-based company at the center of competitive cheerleading and dance. A former high school and Florida State cheerleader who drove to Memphis in a Honda Civic to take a lower-paying camp-adjacent job, she has spent roughly 24 years full time (29 counting her camp-instructor years) building the brand: the 2007 re-brand, the launch of Varsity TV, the St. Jude partnership, and the company's social and PR presence. She is one of the rare women to hold a C-suite title in sports, a TEDxMemphis speaker on reinventing your life, and a marathon-running, mountain-hiking adventurer who preaches saying yes.
Richard McLeod
Richard McLeod is the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Merrell, the hiking and outdoor footwear brand owned by Wolverine Worldwide. A former college basketball player and Brunel University London graduate, he has spent more than two decades building globally recognized brands, with senior marketing roles at Champion, Canada Goose, Foot Locker, Hennessy and Bacardi. Since joining Merrell in February 2025, he has led the brand's push beyond the trail into the outdoor lifestyle market, spearheading its first global brand platform, 'It Starts Outside.'
Vanessa Wallace
Vanessa Wallace is the Chief Marketing Officer of GLD, the Miami-based lifestyle jewelry brand known for its ties to sport, music and street culture. A former CMO of Savage X Fenty and a 19-year Nike veteran who led Jordan Brand marketing in North America, Wallace built a career on storytelling, cultural relevance and championing overlooked communities. She joined GLD's board in August 2025 and stepped into the CMO seat in early 2026.
Wendy Kula
Wendy Kula is a sports and consumer-brand marketing executive who was named Chief Marketing Officer of Saucony in May 2026. A former Stanford lacrosse player with more than two decades in the industry, she most recently served as vice president of women's brand marketing for North America at Nike, where she led the brand's Super Bowl return with the 'So Win' campaign and the launch of A'ja Wilson's signature shoe. Before Nike she built relevance for American Eagle's Aerie and scaled MISSION, the cooling-technology company co-founded by Serena Williams and Dwyane Wade. At Saucony she oversees global brand marketing, digital, creative, and go-to-market strategy across performance and lifestyle running.
Telfaz11
Telfaz11 is a Riyadh-based creative media studio that pioneered Arabic online video in the early 2010s and has since grown into one of Saudi Arabia's leading film and content producers. Founded in 2011 by Alaa Fadan, Ali Al Kalthami and Ibraheem Alkhairallah, it began as a YouTube-first network aimed at Saudi youth and evolved into feature films, streaming originals and branded content. Its 2022 wrestling comedy 'Sattar' became the highest-grossing Saudi film ever, and the studio holds a multi-picture deal with Netflix.
Visinema
Visinema is a Jakarta-based integrated entertainment and intellectual-property company founded in 2008 by director Angga Dwimas Sasongko and producer Anggia Kharisma. It produces award-winning Indonesian films, animated features and series, and builds long-lived IP franchises - including Keluarga Cemara, Filosofi Kopi, Nussa and the record-breaking animated hit Jumbo - across cinema, streaming, licensing and consumer experiences. The company positions itself as a storytelling powerhouse aiming to make Indonesian creative work competitive with Hollywood and Korea.
Stan Lee: How Spider-Man Came Into Being
In this short, heartfelt talk, comics legend Stan Lee tells the true (and hard-to-believe) story of how Spider-Man was created. He recounts being asked by his publisher to invent a new superhero, spotting a fly crawling on a wall, and landing on the idea of a wall-crawling, web-slinging teenager with real-world personal problems. His publisher rejected the idea outright, so Stan quietly slipped Spider-Man into the final issue of a dying magazine, Amazing Fantasy. When the sales figures came back, the character was a runaway hit. Lee turns the anecdote into an inspirational message: if you have an idea you genuinely believe in, don't let anyone talk you out of it, and always do your best work by doing what you want, the way you think it should be done.
Seth Godin on the Future of Marketing: Better, Not Louder
In an in-depth virtual conversation on the Entrepreneur Studio podcast, marketing legend Seth Godin joins host Chris Allen to redefine what marketing actually is in the age of AI. Godin argues that marketing was never about hype, ads, or hustle, but about creating the conditions for other people to eagerly spread your idea. He unpacks permission marketing, why a brand is a promise rather than a logo, why authenticity is a trap that should be replaced with consistency, how false proxies mislead companies, and why the real opportunity with AI is to make things better rather than cheaper. Threaded with vivid stories about Carmine's restaurant, a slipper-wearing boiler technician, Volkswagen's emissions scandal, and the wine merchant Garagiste, Godin makes the case that in a world of infinite noise, the winning move is to be better, not louder.
Emily Brittain
Emily Brittain is a Senior Communications Manager at Microsoft, working within the Office of the Americas Markets & Industries President. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, she crafts the stories that shape how Microsoft's largest regional business - spanning Canada, the United States, and Latin America - communicates its vision internally and externally. A Northwestern University-trained journalist with over 11 years at Microsoft, she brought a multimedia storyteller's instincts to one of the world's most consequential technology companies, producing town halls, executive narratives, and brand messaging at scale.
PocketGuide Inc.
PocketGuide is a GPS-based audio travel guide app that turns a smartphone into a hands-free personal tour guide. As travelers walk through a city, the app detects their location and plays professionally produced commentary from local narrators about nearby landmarks, restaurants and hidden corners. Founded in Hungary in 2009 by Martin Retai and later incorporated with a US presence in Redwood City, PocketGuide grew to cover more than 150 cities across five continents, with tours that work offline to avoid roaming charges.
Sekai
Sekai is a San Francisco Bay Area consumer platform where anyone can build software just by describing it. Users type a prompt and get a playable, shareable mini-app - a game, quiz, utility, poll or interactive story - in seconds, then play, remix and share what others make. Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Lucky Zhang, Sekai (Japanese for 'world') began as an AI anime fan-fiction tool and pivoted into general-purpose app creation as AI coding models improved. By mid-2026 users had created more than 15 million mini-apps, with roughly 200,000 new ones a day, and the company had raised about $26 million across Seed and Series A rounds from Khosla Ventures, Connect Ventures, a16z speedrun, Mayfield and others.
Inspira Education
Inspira Education is a New York-based edtech company that runs a house of brands connecting students with expert mentors for high-stakes admissions - medical, law, business, and college. Founded in 2020 by Kamir Kothari and Arush Chandna, it pairs applicants with vetted consultants (often former admissions decision-makers) through an AI-enabled matching platform, layering mentorship, essay coaching, interview prep, and test tutoring to improve odds at the world's most competitive programs.
Stephanie Trunzo
Stephanie Trunzo is the CEO of MERGE, a hybrid marketing-and-technology firm working at the crossroads of health, consumerism, and storytelling. A 20-plus-year technology leader, she launched Oracle Health and steered the Cerner acquisition, scaled the IBM Garage across 16 co-creation studios worldwide, and earlier doubled revenue year over year as COO/CDO of PointSource before its acquisition by Globant. She holds more than 20 patents, is a certified yoga instructor, and is a vocal advocate for authentic leadership and women in technology.
Spiegel & Grau
Spiegel & Grau is a New York independent, multi-platform publisher founded by veteran editors Celina 'Cindy' Spiegel and Julie Grau. After Penguin Random House shuttered their acclaimed imprint in 2019, the pair relaunched as an indie house in 2021, deliberately capping their list at 15-20 books a year so each title gets full editorial care across print, audio, podcast, and screen. The house treats a story as an asset to be developed across formats rather than a single book to be printed, and its very first independent release, Catherine Raven's 'Fox and I,' hit the New York Times bestseller list out of the gate.
Eugénie Fontugne
Eugénie Fontugne is a Swiss-French operator who runs Strategy & Operations inside the Office of the CEO at Inkitt, the reader-powered, AI-driven publishing startup behind the Galatea app. She built a career that jumped from selling chocolate and flavor at Firmenich to leading community at Global Shapers Geneva, writing about French food and culture for MerciSF in the Bay Area, advising the AI firm VCG.AI, and pulling together a 90-person Lovable x Project Europe hackathon in Stockholm on little more than a walk-around-London hunch. She works where storytelling, product, and operations overlap.
Gavin King
Gavin King is VP of Portfolio Marketing at ServiceNow, where he connects the platform's sprawling product launches, AI vision, and strategic narrative into one coherent story. After 25 years at Microsoft - including a stint as Chief of Staff to CEO Satya Nadella - he brings a rare combination of brand-scaling experience, executive proximity, and B2B marketing depth to one of enterprise tech's most ambitious growth stories.
Celina "Cindy" Spiegel
Celina "Cindy" Spiegel is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau, the independent New York publishing house she runs with her longtime partner Julie Grau. Over a 30-plus year editing career she helped launch the literary careers of James McBride, Khaled Hosseini, Bryan Stevenson, Chang-rae Lee and Gary Shteyngart, and edited bestsellers by Yuval Noah Harari, Yann Martel and Dan Pink. After Penguin Random House shut down their acclaimed imprint in 2019, Spiegel and Grau rebuilt it from scratch in 2020 as an independent house publishing 15 to 20 books a year alongside original audiobooks and podcasts.
Cindy Spiegel
Cindy Spiegel (born Celina Spiegel) is a New York book publisher and co-founder, with Julie Grau, of the independent press Spiegel & Grau. Over three decades she helped build Riverhead Books and the original Spiegel & Grau imprint, editing and launching authors including Khaled Hosseini, James McBride, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Trevor Noah and Piper Kerman. After Penguin Random House shut their imprint in 2019, the two partners rebuilt the company from scratch in 2020 as an independent house that pairs books with audio, podcasts and a first-look film and television deal.
Prezi
Prezi is a cloud-based visual communication company best known for inventing the zooming, non-linear presentation - an open-canvas alternative to slide-by-slide decks. Founded in Budapest in 2009 and now dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Budapest, Prezi has grown into a full suite spanning Prezi Present, Prezi Video (presenter-on-screen overlays), Prezi Design/Infograms, and Prezi AI. More than 160 million people have used it to create roughly 400 million presentations.
Anne Fulenwider
Anne Fulenwider spent 25 years turning sentences into magazine covers, capped by eight years as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Then she walked away from the masthead to co-found Alloy Women's Health, a digital company that connects women in perimenopause and menopause to menopause-trained physicians and doctor-prescribed treatment delivered to the door. She runs it as co-CEO alongside Monica Molenaar, applying an editor's instinct for storytelling to one of medicine's most overlooked subjects.
Nuseir Yassin
Nuseir Yassin, better known as Nas Daily, turned a self-imposed dare - a one-minute video every day for 1,000 days - into a media company that now reaches hundreds of millions of people each month. The Harvard economics graduate and former Venmo developer left a comfortable salary to chase a simpler question: how do you make a stranger care about a place, a person, or an idea in sixty seconds? The answer became Nas Company, an ecosystem spanning Nas Daily, Nas Academy, Nas Studios, the creator platform Nas.io, and the AI-driven agency 1000 Media.
Eddie Shleyner
Eddie Shleyner is a conversion copywriter and the founder of VeryGoodCopy, a newsletter of short 'micro-lessons' on writing, persuasion, and creativity read by millions of people a year. A former Copy Chief at the software-review company G2, he turned a private Google Doc of notes-to-self into one of the most-followed copywriting brands on the internet, a HackerNoon 'Email Newsletter of the Year,' and a 2024 book collecting 207 of his lessons. He works and lives in Chicago.
Caitlin Epstein
Caitlin Epstein is VP of Corporate Communications at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering customer engagement for businesses worldwide. Since joining in 2015, she helped navigate Twilio through its IPO and became one of tech PR's sharpest voices on human-centered storytelling - best known for turning a CEO's breakfast burrito delivery into a Forbes-covered $3 billion acquisition narrative.
Jeffrey Whipps
Jeffrey Whipps is Vice President of Marketing at Google, where he leads the company's global brand studio and holds global responsibility for strategic brand and reputation topics spanning sustainability, digital wellbeing, crisis response, and diversity and inclusion. Before Google, he spent seven years at Apple as Director of Worldwide Advertising, contributing to iconic campaigns including the iPod Silhouettes and Mac vs. PC series. His career spans over two decades at the intersection of technology and storytelling, with earlier roles at Netscape, Shutterfly, Sun Microsystems, and McCann Worldgroup.
Marvin Chow
Marvin Chow is Vice President of Consumer and AI Marketing at Google, where he leads marketing for flagship products including Search, Maps, Shopping, Google Assistant, Photos, and Google AI. A 16-year Google veteran, he has become the company's de facto 'AI General,' orchestrating the Gemini marketing rollout including a high-profile Super Bowl LX campaign. Before Google, he led Nike's marketing across Greater China, Japan, and Korea, collaborated with Steve Jobs on Nike+, and helped launch Dora the Explorer at Nickelodeon. He grew up working in his family's 7-Eleven store in New Jersey, the child of Taiwanese immigrants.