These are the 35 rising stars of Madison Avenue who revolutionized advertising in 2022

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This is the fifth year Business Insider is recognizing rising talent within ad agencies. 
We considered people from a variety of roles and backgrounds, including media, creative, strategy, and production.
The list is based on agency and peer nominations, awards and campaigns they have won, the influence they've had on their companies, and their potential to be industry leaders.
Scroll on to see the 35 rising stars of Madison Avenue, listed alphabetically.
Tre Vayne Allison, content creator, Laundry Service
Laundry Service
Allison is a social media master for Wasserman-owned ad agency Laundry Service. He was the first hire in its mobile content creator division in 2021, which is now one of its fastest growing areas. Allison does everything from creating and editing social content to sourcing influencers for major brand clients including Meta, Google, GE, and Amazon.
DEI is a huge priority for Allison and he's responsible for broadening clients' relationships with diverse creators, including expanding Meta's influencer partnerships with the Latine and queer communities.
He also worked with talent for the behind-the-scenes videos on Burna Boy's "Vanilla" video for Ray-Ban Stories, and he was behind Meta's collaborations with celebrities Keke Palmer and Khaby Lame to showcase skills that can be built in the metaverse. Palmer's "Keep a Job" videos , for instance, focused on resume building in the metaverse, and received more than one million likes across three posts.
Vanessa Amaral, senior strategist, David Miami
David Miami
Amaral is an expert in helping advertisers connect with Gen Z consumers. At David Miami, she contributes to creative sessions, pitches in on client presentations, and develops creative briefs.
Brands like Coca-Cola, Trident, and Burger King use her insights in ad campaigns. Amaral led the strategy behind a TikTok campaign for Trident this year, with hip-hop star Chlöe Bailey encouraging people to make a song through the beat of chewing gum. And she helped create a campaign for Burger King that gave customers codes to unlock objects in the video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II."
Her work has received more than 50 honors from industry awards, including the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Effie Awards. 
She previously worked at DDB Dubai and PwC Rio de Janeiro.
Kareem Bishara, group director, strategic innovation and transformation, Initiative
Initiative
Bishara, 29, helps advertisers make changes today so they can succeed in the future.
He developed a five-step approach for winning clients who are looking to change up their marketing — including a survey that gauges their desire to change and using data and analytics to envision where a brand's category will be in five years. Bishara used his approach in recently winning Nike's global agency of record account with a plan that included a concept for marketing around the 2024 Paris Olympics. Initiative has also used the approach successfully with Lego, Salesforce, and Amazon.
Bishara also recently developed and rolled out a playbook for clients to navigate a possible recession in 2023. The playbook pulls together data from eight sources including the Harvard Business Review, Advertiser Perceptions and IPG-owned Magna. The report identified health, insurance, and telecom advertisers as sectors with a low risk during a recession compared to the shopping, dining and travel industries that are more likely to be hit with a decline in consumer spending.
Bishara previously worked at UM on Coca-Cola's advertising.
Cameron Brown, account supervisor, TBWA\Media Arts Lab
TBWA\Media Arts Lab
Brown is the account supervisor for Apple TV+ at Omnicom's dedicated agency for Apple.
Brown was behind several promotional campaigns of the hit Apple TV+ series "Ted Lasso," including "Toast Me" on Twitter where series star Jason Sudeikis complimented fans who replied to his tweet for "Say Something Nice Day." The campaign won awards at the Webby's and One Show and generated 51 million impressions in a single day.
Before joining TBWA\Media Arts Lab in March 2021, Brown was the manager of fan growth for the Los Angeles Rams, where he led the Rams' rebrand that included updating its logo and uniforms. 
His colleagues say Brown shows all the makings of a great leader in his willingness to get into the weeds with everyone involved in a campaign, including producers, creative directors, and junior employees. And he's a big proponent of DEI, having hosted The Rams' first celebration for Latinx Heritage Month and led its Black History Month campaign highlighting Black creators in LA.
Chelsea Brown-Ferguson, senior client engagement lead, Grow
Grow
Brown-Ferguson is responsible for making sure that ad campaigns for brands like Google and the Tory Burch Foundation work so well that clients will come back and spend more.
She works on projects like website designs and digital experiences and is responsible for walking clients through a project from beginning to end.
Brown-Ferguson helped create an online demo for Google showing how its Pixel products work. And she helped The Tory Burch Foundation identify what content to include on its website.
Before joining Grow in 2020 in her hometown of Norfolk, Va., Brown-Ferguson worked in New York at agencies including Lippe Taylor and RXMosiac.
Jeffrey Cavallo, SVP of decision science, Hill Holliday
Hill Holliday
Over the past decade, Cavallo has risen up the ranks of IPG ad agency Hill Holliday. He started as an analytics intern in 2010 and has held an array of titles including director and manager.
This year, the agency promoted him to SVP of decision science to oversee a team of 15 people working across marketing analytics and consumer research. 
Cavallo uses data to persuade clients to expand their media investments to new channels in order to be more equitable and reach a more representative audience. One client that did this saw a 24% increase in marketing-attributed conversions and an 11% rise in overall volume of conversions in the first half of 2022.
He also developed a tool that tests different marketing messages and identifies the ones that capture the greatest market share. This type of application is important as marketers scrutinize their media budgets in the uncertain economy. "We can use data to reduce risk and build confidence in their decision-making now and into the future," Cavallo said.
Cavallo also has plans to tap further into IPG's data unit Acxiom to help clients in 2023. Acxiom's first-party data can help Hill Holliday's advertisers verify a publisher's audience and can find audience duplications, which helps advertisers cut out inefficient ad spend.
Amy Char, copywriter, 215 McCann
215 McCann
Char helps Xbox stay culturally relevant through its advertising by tackling themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, she made sure a directory of influencers that the agency uses for campaigns is diverse, including people of different ethnicities and sexualities. 
Char, who got a degree in advertising in Berlin, is inspired by European ad work, which is known for being risky and innovative.
Her career in copywriting and social media started at creative agency The Many for brands including Google and Ubisoft. She has also worked at Deutsch LA on Taco Bell campaigns.
Char is also the cofounder and co-lead of McCann's Asian Employee Resource Group and she mentors the agency's BIPOC staffers and interns. 
"Although I am in account management, she has been an important part of my growth in the past year," said Akshaya Sridharan, an assistant account executive at 215 McCann. "Amy has helped me improve my ability to advocate for DEI and my perspective, and creates a safe space where I can continue to grow."
Ruth Chavez, director of planning, DentsuX
DentsuX
Chavez helps advertisers find new places where their spend can be better utilized.
She has helped clients like CarMax move from TV ads that go out to a broad group of people to more targeted ads that message people who, for instance, are most likely to buy a product. She also helps advertisers move towards outcome-based models, where advertisers only pay if the ad directly led to someone buying a product.
Chavez also helps advertisers work with new platforms. Most recently, she's directed clients to buy podcast ads with Amazon's Wondery, Spotify, and Pandora. She's also executed branded content campaigns, working through influencer marketing and product placement company Branded Entertainment Network. 
And Chavez also pushes advertisers to spend money on diverse-owned publishers and ads that target diverse audiences.
Jillian Dooley, associate director of brand marketing, Known
Known
Dooley helps brands articulate their identities and act on their stated missions. 
Her path to brand marketing was not a traditional one. An alum of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Dooley studied music business and started out her career at a management and booking agency for decade-themed cover bands. The gig taught her the ins and outs of the music industry — namely, how it creates community and nurtures fandoms within it.
As she began working in marketing — first at Viacom and then the brand strategy firm Blackbird — Dooley approached her roles with the conviction that a foundational brand identity is essential to building a motivated workforce and engaged consumer base.  
Dooley and her team have helped devise brand strategies for companies in healthcare, tech, hospitality, entertainment, and more. For the Sickle Cell Disease Foundation, Dooley's team harnessed research on donor behaviors to develop the tagline "From healthcare to humancare." The campaign aimed to shift thinking around the disease from just the physical health of patients to the holistic impact that living with an incurable illness can have on a person.
Recently, Dooley worked with SpaceX's Inspiration4, a private, all-civilian mission to space, to build out the mission's humanitarian efforts. The mission ultimately raised $250 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Jean-Luc Ford, account director, Translation
Translation
Ford leads campaigns for AT&T, the creative agency Translation's largest client.
He's particularly interested in pushing clients on campaigns that promote diverse stories. He's most proud of working on AT&T's "Equality First" initiative — an internal platform that the telecom giant uses to train employees on workplace equality, covering topics like bias, racism, and ageism. Ford also works on AT&T's Dream in Black project, which supports 25 students from HBCUs with prizes and access to executives.
Before joining Translation, Ford worked in account roles at agencies like LeadDog Marketing Group, House of Kaizen, and 1000heads. 
Ragen Fykes, creative, Accenture Song
Accenture Song
Fykes describes herself as "a good mother, an OK lesbian divorcee, and a fair-to-middlin' friend." To the ad industry, she's a rockstar creative.
Fykes started her career as a freelance wardrobe stylist for big brands like Nike, the Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine. After that she decided she wanted to try her hand in the ad world and took a job managing the front desk at independent ad agency Wieden + Kennedy Portland. The agency recognized Fykes' drive and talent lending her creative insights to top clients like Fisher-Price and promoted her to art director in 2019.
She moved to Accenture Song, the IT giant Accenture's ad unit, in early 2022 and was soon behind its first-ever Cannes Lions Grand Prix win for Coinbase's Super Bowl ad "More Talk, Less Bitcoin." 
Coinbase is currently struggling with the rest of the crypto markets, but Fykes helped the company reach new heights. As art director, she set the visual tone, music and experience for Coinbase's Super Bowl ad, which simply had a floating QR code that directed viewers to the crypto company's website. In an event with a lot of noise, that very basic ad broke through. The ad led to more than 20 million visits to Coinbase's website during the game, 445,000 signups, and Coinbase became the second most downloaded app in Apple's App Store, according to Accenture Song.
"Ragen is a hot-pink-and-gold colored magnet. She is the rare type of leader who can listen, bring her point of view, and then walk away having made the work significantly better," said Jason Kreher, chief creative officer of brand at Accenture Song.
Lennie Galloway and Thomas Gledhill, copywriter and art director, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Galloway and Gledhill — a copywriter and an art director respectively — started working together in 2014 at ad agency FCB in New Zealand, collecting more than 25 awards including Cannes Lions. They moved to San Francisco to join Omnicom's Goodby Silverstein & Partners two years ago with their sights set on bigger brands and opportunities in the US.
In their first year with GS&P, Galloway and Gledhill created Cheetos Crunchy's 2021 Super Bowl ad, "It Wasn't Me," with actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher and singer Shaggy. Out of that, they came up with their most-awarded campaign in the US so far, "Snap to Steal," which used new machine-learning technology to allow Snapchat users to scan the Super Bowl ad with their app and unlock a virtual coupon for a free bag of Cheetos Crunchy. It became Snapchat's most successful scan-to-AR activation of the year in 2021 and Cheetos' most successful product launch ever with more than 50,000 bags given out. "Snap to Steal" won Webby, D&D Pencils, and One Show awards. 
Galloway and Gledhill also created "Break Free TV" for Capri Sun , a five-part miniseries to give kids a break in their busy days of school, activities, and homework. The series featured top animation talent like the puppeteers from the film "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and illustrators from Adult Swim. 
Jared Greene, director of Invention+, Mindshare
Mindshare
After seeing how the social and media climate changed in 2020 after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Greene was inspired to co-develop a tool for Mindshare. 
Impact Index was designed to gauge toxic news about minorities and marginalized communities. Advertisers first upload campaigns and the tool uses artificial intelligence to analyze editorial content into four buckets: positive, neutral, negative, and toxic. Advertisers can then use the data to adjust where their ads appear. For example, a marketer might move their ads to sites with positive content that they hadn't advertised on previously.
Greene is part of Mindshare's Invention+ team, which pitches big ideas on the future of advertising to clients like General Mills, Volvo, and Dollar Shave Club. This year he helped roll out a program to guide advertisers through the metaverse and Web3 technologies. For 2023, he's working on identifying advertisers' challenges with emerging media, and will then work with ad partners like Google and Spotify to test new ad formats and beta programs.
Internally, Greene is involved with a Black employee group focused on hosting events that feature minority voices. He also participated in the agency's management accelerator program that equips Black, Hispanic and Latino, and Asian staffers with leadership development programs such as workshops and peer coaching.
Anika Grube, art director, TBWA\Chiat\Day New York
TBWA\Chiat\Day New York
Grube worked on Mountain Dew's 2021 Super Bowl commercial on her first day at TBWA\Chiat\Day, as part of its six-month "young blood" program.
In the two years since then, she has been promoted twice and worked on campaigns for Facebook and insurance company Travelers. She helped create Facebook's campaign for its video-chatting device Portal, which showed it bringing people together in both good and bad times.
Grube is also involved with TBWA\Chiat\Day New York's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program, and is the creative lead for the agency's Black employee resource group, helping to create a Black History Month zine that was distributed internally as a resource to educate staff. And she was one of two creatives involved in winning a pitch for DEI work from Goldman Sachs.
Austin Haas, senior art director, Johannes Leonardo
Johannes Leonardo
Since joining Johannes Leonardo three years ago, Haas has assumed a key role in the creative direction on campaigns for some of the agency's biggest clients.
Haas began his career as a freelance creative working in visual design for agencies including Deutsch, Dedica Group, and Frank Collective. 
His work has included several campaigns promoting Instagram as a platform for the next generation of content creators through video ads filmed for and by creators themselves. Haas also worked on Volkswagen's "Those Guys" and "Break Free" campaigns, which aimed to challenge stereotypes around SUVs in automotive advertising through spots that emphasized the cars' boldness and safety. Volkswagen reported a significant year-over-year leap in brand trust and image after the campaigns ran, according to Johannes Leonardo. 
In 2020, Haas received a D&AD Wood Pencil and a merit award at The One Show for his work on Volkswagen's "The Last Mile" campaign — an animated short film commemorating the retirement of the Volkswagen Beetle. 
Jo Hayes, director of data insights and analytics, Barbarian
Barbarian
Hayes leads all data projects for the Cheil Worldwide-owned agency, Barbarian. One of her biggest focuses is preparing clients for Google's depreciation of third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser, which the ad industry anticipates will happen in 2024 .
Hayes calls this period "The Great Cookie Reckoning," and partnered with Barbarian CTO Laurence Edmondson to come up with its "data as a service" offering. This offering is meant to replace third-party data by helping clients find insights from their own consumer data. Hayes is focused on giving agency clients, which include American Express and Mucinex, more control over their data while she and her team help them decipher that data and turn it into insights for marketing purposes.
Outside of her day job, Hayes uses data to push the industry forward on diversity. She is one of three founders of Agency DEI , an initiative that collects, analyzes, and reports DEI data across the industry and provides benchmarks and goals for agencies to improve.
Brandon Heard, senior brand strategist, Droga5
Droga5
Heard works with one of the agency's largest clients Chase on campaigns that promote humanity, diversity, and authenticity. His work spans across Chase's consumer bank, business division, and JPMorgan Chase commercial bank.
He also plays a key role in Droga5's intercultural practice — a group that makes sure that race and ethnicity plays a role in every part of creative development. He developed a playbook for the agency on how to advertise to diverse audiences. For example, advertisers often cast diverse people in ads for the sake of having diversity. Heard's approach goes beyond visuals and asks advertisers to think about how a product impacts a cultural experience or someone's identity. An upcoming 2023 campaign from Chase will use the approach Heard pitched.
Heard previously worked at R/GA for brands like Dunkin and the Ad Council. For the Ad Council, he led the strategy on a campaign called "Love Has No Labels" that involved a website with educational resources to create a more inclusive world.
Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the "Love Has No Labels" push took on new urgency. Heard helped create a short biopic about Floyd, called "The Gentle Giant," told from the perspective of his sister Bridgett Floyd.
Heard has also worked at AdColor, a nonprofit organization for diversity in advertising.
Outside of work, Heard is involved with UNICEF USA.
Monica Herman, VP, group creative director, experiential, Giant Spoon
Giant Spoon
Herman was working with some of the world's top architects in lighting design before she pivoted into the world of experiential advertising at Vice Media in 2018. In December 2021, she started heading up the experiential department of independent ad agency Giant Spoon, which has become known for its splashy activations for brands like HBO at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas.
In 2022 alone, Herman and her team will have executed more than 15 activations for clients in the US and abroad including mobile retail pop-ups, social-driven contests, and immersive entertainment experiences at major festivals and events.
In an environment where there are a slew of forces competing for consumer attention, Herman knows how to create moments that attract eyeballs. During the return of SXSW's in-person event this year, she and her team flew 400 drones for Paramount Plus's TV series "Halo ," that culminated with the drones forming a QR code that sent fans to the show's site. 
She was also behind Netflix's experiential promotion of "Stranger Things" season four, in which Giant Spoon put portals into the show's horrific alternate dimension on major monuments like The Empire State Building and Mumbai's Gateway of India. That campaign garnered more than 190 million organic impressions, hundreds of news stories, 110,000 global in-person visits, and thousands of more engagements across digital livestreams.
Kari Jensen, senior director of analytics, Saatchi & Saatchi
Saatchi & Saatchi
Jensen leads the agency's data and analytics work that helps advertisers find the right audiences.
Recently, her team helped Toyota, one of the agency's largest and oldest clients, focus messaging around people specifically interested in Tundra trucks. She also leads an analysis of Toyota's ad-targeting strategy to find even more effective ways of messaging its customers.
And Jensen spearheads the agency's reports that assess whether TV ads drove sales for clients. A yearly Super Bowl report looks at how consumers viewed commercials, which informs future creative and ad-buying strategies. Finally, she produces reports that break down what aspect of different TV commercials drove the desired results.
Shan Jin, creative technologist, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Jin began her career developing human resources software but took up art and design because she wanted a more creative pursuit. She then became a creative technologist for the ad industry and landed her current role at Omnicom Group-owned Goodby Silverstein & Partners in 2018.
Jin has been heavily involved in several of the agency's most innovative projects since joining. She was the lead developer on "Dalí Lives," a project that brought the late Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí back to life using deepfake technology at the The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. She coded the experience using TouchDesigner, which made Dalí interactive and also oversaw the software and hardware production. In the first month, more than 25,000 visited the project.
She also helped create the Snapchat filter for Megan Thee Stallion's music video for "Flamin' Hottie," the single she wrote for Doritos' Super Bowl 2022 commercial .
As a personal project, Jin also helped build a First Responder Twitter bot in 2020 that helped curtail the influx of racist tweets against Asian Americans during the pandemic.
Collin Joseph, associate director of data science and analytics, Good Apple
Good Apple
Joseph has degrees in physics from Yale and UCLA, and he uses that academic training today to help brands rethink how ads are measured.
He joined the media agency six years ago and his team has designed an algorithm to track if digital ads drove in-store sales. That team has also developed attribution models for clients like clothing brand M.M. LaFleur that measure sales driven by campaigns that use a mix of ads, like digital ads combined with billboards. 
These models will help the agency's clients continue to find customers online and measure whether their ads were effective, which is becoming increasingly difficult due to policies from tech giants like Google and Apple that restrict access to consumer data.
Levi Liao, VP and director of data science, Mediahub
Mediahub
Liao is a self-proclaimed sneakerhead, avid "NBA 2K" player, and nationally recognized math whiz. He is also responsible for a 30% year-over-year revenue increase for Mediahub.
The VP and director of data science joined IPG-owned agency in 2018 to apply his passion for sneakers and sports to marketing analytics and has worked across brands like New Balance, NerdWallet, and The National Basketball Association. 
As marketers try to make sure their media dollars aren't being wasted amid a looming recession, Liao has retained and expanded the agency's business by developing new tools and models for predicting the brand and sales impact of clients' media investments before they make them. For example, clients Royal Caribbean and NerdWallet improved their business outcomes by 10% and 20%, respectively, using a tool he developed called "The Simulator." This tool scenario plans thousands of media strategies to find the ones that will generate the best results. 
Liao said one of his proudest and most challenging moments was helping the NBA drive a 10% lift in League Pass subscriptions. By testing different media models, he found that the streaming app got more subscribers when its promotional campaign ran simultaneously with an NBA brand campaign. The NBA made this a permanent change to their media strategy after seeing the success.
Martin Magner, creative director, Virtue Worldwide
Virtue Worldwide
Magner spent most of his career working as an art director in South Africa, where he had a knack for integrating brands like Adidas and Spotify into the local culture. He's now a creative director for Vice-owned ad agency Virtue Worldwide in New York, where he leads the art direction globally for Coca-Cola.
Coke is leaning on his expertise helping brands connect with Gen Z. Magner played a big role in the launch of Coca-Cola Creations , a digital platform for younger consumers to find limited edition soda flavors. He's also pushed Coke to test experiences on new channels like the metaverse. For example, Magner is behind the beverage giant's release of Creations flavor Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Byte in the metaverse. The Byte launch got 565 million impressions in the US and 72% positive social impressions, while more than 6,000 people waited in a digital line on Coke's website to buy the soda.
Magner also was part of the team that helped create the Cannes Lions Grand Prix-winning "Backup Ukraine" , an app that allows people to use their mobile devices to scan Ukraine's statues, buildings, and monuments being bombed by Russia in 3D and preserve them into the cloud. As of October, the app had more than 50,000 downloads and 35,000 scans on the ground.
Elizabeth Marsten, group director of marketplace strategic services, Tinuiti
Tinuiti
Marsten is the agency's expert on all things retail media. 
As retailers like Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon build out their advertising businesses, Marsten helps advertisers understand the nuances of each platform. Adtech firms that power retailers' ad businesses — such as Criteo, InMobi, and Cooler Screens — are also under her purview. 
Marsten has built out Tinuiti's retail media practice into three areas. One group works directly with retailers with new ad offerings such as DoorDash. Another unit zeroes in on retailers with established ad businesses like Walmart and Kroger. And a third group works on day-to-day campaigns for advertisers, including alpha and beta test programs with retailers.
Under Marsten's leadership, retail media now makes up 15% of Tinuiti's revenue, representing 12X growth between 2021 and 2022.
Before joining Tinuiti in 2019, Marsten worked at e-commerce platform CommerceHub and digital marketing agency Portent.
Tess McGourty, strategy director, Elephant
Elephant
McGourty got her start in the traditional advertising space, working at agencies like Initiative, 180LA and MullenLowe and handling strategy for brands including Dr. Pepper, Mitsubishi, Facebook, Expedia, and Caesars Entertainment. 
At Elephant, McGourty has helped improve over ten lines of business for Apple, one of the agency's top clients. As one of her most successful endeavors, McGourty and her team developed strategies to raise awareness for Apple Pay, which only 38% of Apple owners used when she began working on the project in 2018. McGourty's team worked to show the ease and safety of using the product, and Apple Pay usage has now nearly doubled, according to Elephant.
McGourty has also contributed to more than 10 new business wins at Elephant, including Twitch, MAC Cosmetics, and EA Games.
She is a founding member of Elephant's XD Academy — a free virtual boot camp that teaches the foundations of digital product design. The program focuses on BIPOC talent, sourced through Elephant's partnership with 4A's Multicultural Advertising Intern Program, who have an interest in the field but may have limited exposure to it. 
Madeline Murphy, associate media director, mSix&Partners
mSix&Partners
WPP-based media agency mSix&Partners attributes a great deal of its success over the last year to Murphy, an associate media director who joined in March 2021. She leads the agency's accounts for luxury jewelry brand David Yurman and confectionary giant Haribo.
Murphy convinced David Yurman to expand its partnership with mSix&Partners to include its UK, France, and Canada media businesses, after originally only leading its US market. Murphy then led the successful opening of David Yurman's first boutique in Paris , which relied on a mix of traditional and digital ads including citywide out-of-home placements and an influencer campaign that generated more than 109 million impressions in less than two months.
Murphy also encouraged Haribo to add online video to its existing linear TV efforts, helping it connect with more potential customers.
Internally, Murphy is also always thinking outside the box to keep her colleagues engaged as they continue to work remotely. For example, she started a book club that's gotten participation from 30% of the New York office, in-office wine tasting, and volunteer nights at St. Jude's Children's Hospital.
Lacey Nein, creative technologist, Mediahub
Mediahub
Nein was a painter, silkscreen artist, and technology professor for San Jose State University before she became a creative technologist for IPG media agency Mediahub in November 2021. She's been the key person educating the agency and its clients on how to navigate emerging and confusing topics around the metaverse, NFTs, decentralized finance, and tokenomics. 
She's also an avid VR gamer on the Sandbox and Roblox virtual worlds, pushing the agency and clients like Netflix to experiment with ads in emerging channels.
She single-handedly built and launched Mediahub's first metaverse office in Decentraland and on Discord. Nein also opened Mediahub's new Web3 practice, Rabbit Hole Ocean, and formed a partnership with one of the biggest metaverse developers, LandVault, to identify new Web3 opportunities for clients. 
Nein also tests six of the top metaverse spaces weekly to analyze the best use cases for clients to ensure their money is being spent wisely on these experimental campaigns.
Jess Noel, associate director of creative strategy, Majority
Majority
Noel creates campaigns for brands like GM, Realtor.com, and AWS that convey empathy and social impact. 
Her work often focuses on Black communities that are typically underrepresented in media. For example, she worked on a campaign for Realtor.com about Black home ownership starring hip-hop artist Big Boi. Another campaign for dating app BLK encouraged Black adults — a group with low vaccination rates — to get the Covid vaccination. That campaign also boosted the app's membership by 30%.
She previously working at agencies like BCG BrightHouse and eightvillage where she honed her talents in art direction, documentary photography, and graphic design.
Pedro Petter-LaManna, platform specialist, Media Matters Worldwide
Media Matters Worldwide
Petter-LaManna, who moved to the US from Brazil in 2011, was working as a food server when the pandemic hit in 2020. Left without a job, he hunkered down in his home and got several online programmatic certifications that helped him land an internship with independent media agency Media Matters Worldwide. He was the agency's first intern in August 2020. Petter-LaManna quickly proved himself an indispensable member of the team and was promoted to a full-time position as an associate media buyer that year. 
He's continued to rise through the ranks and now as a platform specialist he's taken over more responsibility and leadership across accounts like Mountain Hardware, SAP Concur, and Shipt.
Petter-LaManna also started leading all programmatic initiatives for the agency's pro-bono work for Alameda County Food Bank last year, generating $2.5 million in donations, which exceeded the client's goals by 800%. 
But Petter-LaManna had to diversify media tactics in 2021 because the food bank had less volunteers as people returned to work, and its ability to drive donations through Facebook also declined, due to Apple's privacy changes. Still, he helped the Alameda County Food Bank generate $1 million in donations and 2,863 volunteer engagements in less than three months last year, with a budget of just $80,000.
Within Media Matters Worldwide, Petter-LaManna helped build out its first official internship program through a partnership with Students Rising Above, an organization that helps first-generation students from low-income communities start their careers.
Charity Pourhabib, brand executive, Wieden and Kennedy Portland
Wieden and Kennedy Portland
Pourhabib helps brands like Nike lean into their messaging around diversity.
She worked on Nike's tribute to retiring tennis star Serena Williams in September. She also worked on Nike's Yardrunners campaign this year, which is a collection of clothing honoring Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Black college students. 
Her passion for helping HBCU students extends beyond working on brands' campaigns. In 2020, Pourhabib founded a program called ADMagic to introduce HBCU students to the ad industry. Participants of the three-month program got mentorship, and worked on real briefs from clients Old Spice and Nike. Graduates from the program have landed jobs at Wieden and Kennedy, Gap, and United Talent Agency.
"Anytime one of us clears a path, we get to open doors. But I want to do more than that," she said. "I want to be able to truly invest in my community and ensure those walking through the doors are well equipped to not only survive but thrive and shine."
Pourhabib joined Wieden and Kennedy Portland in 2019 and previously worked at Campbell Ewald and Zambezi for brands like Kaiser Permanente, IHOP, Venmo, and Beats.
Sofia Rosell, associate creative director, Gut
Gut
Rosell is just five years into her advertising career and already she has three Super Bowl ads under her belt, including the launch of Google Pixel's "Real Tone " starring Grammy winner Lizzo, where the tech giant showcased camera technology that better captured a full array of skin tones. 
Rosell may be young but she's a force to be reckoned with. Rosell has pushed some of the biggest brands to use their platform to champion diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. For example, when she served as art director for the agency David Miami, she helped create the "Share for Good" campaign for Anheuser-Busch InBev's Estrella Jalisco that pushed Facebook to change its algorithms that promoted harmful stereotypes of Hispanic groups.
Justin Roth, group creative director, The&Partnership New York
The&Partnership New York
In his decade-long career in marketing, Roth has made a name for himself through his expansive range as a writer and also as a creative. 
Prior to joining The&Partnership at the start of this year, Roth worked on award-winning campaigns like "The Receipt," which netted Walmart its first Cannes Lions award in 2017. The campaign, unveiled at the 89th annual Academy Awards, challenged Hollywood filmmakers like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to create stories based on the items listed on a Walmart receipt. 
This year, Roth led the creative development for a new series of Snickers campaigns, as well as Mars chewing gum brand 5 Gum's first campaign in years. He also played an integral role in helping The&Partnership win Audible's social business. 
Carly Taitz, director of analytics, RPA
RPA
Taitz moved from senior manager of digital measurement at AT&T to RPA's analytics team in the summer of 2020. As one of her first tasks on the new job, she faced the challenge of onboarding CKE, the parent company of fast food chains Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, as its foot traffic vanished during the pandemic.
Taitz helped optimize CKE's campaigns, which helped marketing directly contribute to sales during the first two years of the pandemic. Taitz draws from media data, like clients' sales and brand-tracking data, as well as competitive data, to create dashboards that provide a full picture of campaign performance. 
Earlier in her career, Taitz had worked with quick service restaurants at the agency MullenLowe Mediahub Global, and she used that experience to guide CKE as it debuted new apps and loyalty programs. 
This year, Taitz assisted Apartments.com with a project designed to measure the success of its campaigns. Her use of automated reporting helped to improve Apartments.com's measurement strategy and uncover the impact of media on its most important KPIs.
Prerna Talreja, managing director of digital activation, Crossmedia
Crossmedia
Digital advertising is changing, and Talreja helps advertisers adjust to these changes by educating them on new strategies.
She helps clients adapt cookieless advertising tactics, advises them on how they can prepare as it becomes harder to find users on Apple devices, and how to use Amazon's quickly-evolving ad platform. 
Talreja developed more than 250 tests for Crossmedia client US Bank to measure whether ads drove sales, which products to feature in retargeting campaigns, and how cookieless ads perform.
She also leads the agency's publisher team responsible for negotiating rates and programs for advertisers.
Under her leadership, Crossmedia's digital activation practice has grown business by 94% year-over-year to manage $250 million in ad spend. 
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