James Heller, founder of Wrapify. (Photo: Jamel Toppin for Forbes)
Quick: Name one of the hottest industries right now, the one with such dizzying innovation, it’s tough to keep up.
If you’d said the advertising and marketing industry, you’d get a gold star. And at the heart of that innovation are young people, people who are filling whitespace, starting companies, and poking at the periphery of what’s possible in dramatic new ways. As is typical of their generation, these young people, people under age 30, are insatiably driven and don’t see boundaries, only opportunity.
They are changing the dynamics of the business of brands, capitalizing on the new platforms and technologies that alter how people experience and engage with brands and shop for products and services.
Traditionally the advertising and marketing business featured two main players: clients, or the marketers themselves, companies like Coca-Cola or IBM or Ford; and agencies—creative, digital, strategic or, now more typical, a blend of all three.
There are so many more players in that universe now. There are advertising technology, or ad tech, firms, bringing measurement and mechanics to a new kind of advertising on new platforms. There are behemoth media platforms like Google and Facebook. And there are new entrants plumbing brand opportunities in contexts such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), the internet of things (IoT), drones, content, mobile, events, music, robots, wearables, celebrities—you name it.
This year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising list highlights individuals finding success in many of those areas.
Notably, several have struck oil founding companies in the area of influencer marketing, matching big and small brands with social media stars whose followings are seductive to those marketers hoping to win the hearts and minds of Millennial consumers and younger. Take the cofounders of Naritiv, for example, Dan Altmann and Eric Posen. They launched the company, which connects brands with its network of Snapchat influencers and stars and develops campaigns for them, out of the Disney Accelerator program in 2014. Naritiv counts Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Marriott, among others, as clients.
Some, like Julieanna Goddard, are social-media celebrities themselves, working with brands to develop custom content and advertising. Better known as YesJulz, this social-media influencer and her business boast 445,000 Instagram followers and many more on Twitter and Snapchat. Goddard cites a 2014 Sprite Remix Party for Lebron James in Miami as her big break.
Others are working to revolutionize marketing from the inside out, holding key positions at large, legacy companies. Take Andy Bossley, for example, a disruptor in the traditionally more buttoned-up world of business-to-business marketing. As senior manager of global marketing campaigns at IBM, Bossley serves as team lead for the worldwide marketing team and guides agency partners. Experienced in bringing disruptive business technologies to market, he launched IBM's OpenPOWER LC servers in collaboration with other tech companies such as Google and Nvidia.
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Some of the young disruptors on the list are harnessing the power of social media for traditional brands and media properties. Marina Cockenberg, for example, oversees management of all Tonight Show social accounts. In 2009 she launched an initiative to start live-tweeting the show each night, and she has driven live-streaming and unique Snapchat initiatives. Since The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon's launch in February 2014, its digital audience has grown from about five million combined audience to more than 32 million. Its Facebook page has grown more than 655% since show launch and has more than 1.8 billion video views. And the show's Twitter account has grown 350%; its Instagram account has grown 2300%. The show has more than 12 million YouTube subscribers.
Vincent Cacace is an example of a young marketer finding opportunity in the evolving world of virtual reality. Following a stint at General Motors in data analytics, Cacace founded Vertebrae, which helps brands reach consumers through virtual-reality advertising, in 2015. Vertebrae enables clients, from brands and studios such as Lionsgate, to agencies such as Edelman, to advertise across virtual-reality environments and measure the impact of campaigns.
Tony Chen, meanwhile, founded Channel Factory, an online video distribution and data company, in 2010 while studying economics and classical piano at Rice University. With predictive analytics, the platform helps advertisers and agencies more effectively and efficiently advertise on YouTube. Clients include Nestle, MediaCom and OMD.
Still others, like James Heller, have built businesses when they saw holes that needed to be filled. The cofounder of Wrapify, a startup with $2.9 million in funding that pays everyday drivers an average of $350 a month to wrap their cars in advertisements and simply drive around, added a digital twist to the game: The Wrapify app automatically alerts drivers to new ad campaigns and provides brands with a dashboard that tracks how many people in real-time are seeing the ads. Wrapify has 35,000 drivers in 27 cities and counts Anheuser-Busch, Petco and eBay as clients.
And that’s just scratching the surface. There are so many more incredible entrepreneurs and fearless thinkers represented on this year’s list. Dig in and examine all of their stories.
To vet the many nominations and identify the individuals, Lilly Knoepp, reporter and producer of Women@Forbes, and I sought input and evaluation from an esteemed panel of judges who themselves represent the industry’s many dimensions: Linda Boff, CMO of GE, one of the most revered chief marketing executives in the business; Bonin Bough, former chief media and ecommerce officer at Mondelēz International and now host of “Cleveland Hustles” on CNBC; Rachel Tipograph, founder of mobile shopping network MikMak and an alumnus of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising; and Abby Wambach, the No. 1 all-time leading scorer in international soccer history, as well as a Gatorade partner and Nike athlete for her entire career who also has signed endorsement deals with Mini, Panasonic and Cree, among others.
Here, then, are the 30 twentysomethings transforming the business of marketing and advertising.
See the full list of 30 Under 30 in Marketing and Advertising.
Explore all 600 innovators in 20 industries on Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Follow on Twitter: #30Under30
