May 20
27 stories
Mixing Board Studio Sessions
Mixing Board Member Anna Ondaatje most recently was the Global Brand & Franchise VP of Strategy at Playboy where she helped lead a massive transformation of the brand over a three-year period that also saw the company go public. Before Playboy, she was at Pramana Collective where she worked with Mixing Board founder Sean Garrett. In 2016, she served as a Fellow at the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Programmable Nanomaterials, leading an interdisciplinary team of engineers, artists, industrial designers, and physicists on work bridging the divide between the art and science disciplines.
Mixing Board Member Brandon Borrman is the Head of Communications for Alchemy — which, if you haven’t heard of them, is a very important player in the emerging Web3 world that has raised well over $500 million. Brandon joined Alchemy last October as their first non-engineering hire.
Before Alchemy, Brandon was the VP of Global Communications at Twitter for more than three years (2018–2021). He had multiple decades of serious comms work and accomplishments before diving into the Twitter role.
Mixing Board Member Aimee Woodall is the CEO and Founder of The Black Sheep Agency, a cause-driven brand strategy firm. As chief strategist for the agency, Aimee sees every decision as a responsibility to lead to the greatest possible impact.
Mixing Board member Poppy Thorpe serves on the Board of Directors of Snap and consults with founders and CEOs on how to build their brands. She was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Sesame, a direct to patient healthcare company, and the Head of Brand Marketing and Strategy at Glossier. For Glossier, this meant leading brand marketing, brand strategy and all integrated go-to-market strategy and execution for product launches, campaigns, retail openings, and consumer initiatives.
Mixing Board member Katja Gagen leads marketing and communications activities at the venture capital and private equity firm TCV. Her experience includes managing brands for innovative leaders, companies, and organizations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She was previously at General Catalyst, Cisco, and several global private equity firms. Katja currently serves on the board of Playyon, a female-led online communications and commerce platform for amateur sport and recreation activities.
The business words you say about Mixing Board member Heidi Hackemer are that she is an entrepreneur, brilliant brand strategist and strategic leader who has helped some of the most important organizations better connect with their purpose and make an impact. The human words are that she’s a force of nature, a generous mentor and helps make people around her better.
She has served as a trusted advisor to some of the world’s top brands, including Oatly where she is the now the Executive Director of the Oatly Climate/Culture Lab. She also worked as an advisor to the Obama White House, served as VP of Engagement for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded the sought-after brand strategy agency Wolf & Wilhelmine and co-founded the Creative Alliance, an organization that matches social movements with creators to make a positive change in the country. A decade ago Heidi was introduced to members of the Lakota tribe and has since focused her personal activism on Indigenous issues in the United States through supporting non-profits and grassroots movements. She has also driven her Harley Davidson across the country several times.
Mixing Board member Nina Montgomery is an archeologist-turned-designer. By day, Nina works at IDEO on social and environmental challenges that require collective action. By night, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford studying business, religion, and society. She’s written two books — Perspectives on Purpose and Perspectives on Impact — that bring together 40 executives to share their thoughts on how the private sector can engage with the biggest challenges of our time. She also writes a newsletter for LinkedIn called Reimagining Capitalism and teaches on this topic at Stanford as an appointed Lecturer.
Mixing Board member Kate Mason is the founder of Hedgehog + Fox, a strategic communications firm that works with organizations on storytelling and narrative strategy and helps leaders communicate with authority and impact. Previously, she ran global communications functions at Medium and Khan Academy, and before that, consumer PR for YouTube and Google Australia and New Zealand. Kate has a Ph.D. in English and lives in Sydney, Australia.
Dan Pfeiffer served President Obama for eight years as his Communications Director on his 2008 campaign and then in the White House as Senior Advisor to the President for Strategy and Communications. He is a noted political and digital strategist, Pod Save America co-host, CNN contributor, a very regular newsletter publisher on messaging and political strategy, and best selling author (with a new book coming out in February).
Mixing Board community member Shannon (Stubo) Brayton is known and respected as simply one of the best comms practitioners that Silicon Valley has ever seen. She was an early trailblazer in moving from a comms role to CMO at a high-profile, large publicly traded company (LinkedIn) and, perhaps even more importantly, she has generously and positively impacted the careers of innumerable practitioners over the years as a peer, mentor or boss. She is now a partner and CMO at Bessemer Venture Partners.
As a futurist, Tom Savigar spent decades helping companies like L’oreal, Sony, Ikea, Dyson, Lego, and UBS see around corners and shape their path forward. Now, from his new Norwegian-based boutique consultancy, Avansere, Tom is now focused on helping enterprises navigate the planet’s changing climate in a meaningful way.
Erika (Brown) Ekiel has been behind the stories of Silicon Valley since the dot com era. First as a respected journalist at Forbes for more than decade and subsequently in marketing and advisory roles to VC firms and startups. At her boutique consultancy, Storyboard, the Mixing Board community member has worked with the likes of Accel, Google, Kitty Hawk, Patreon, Salesforce and more.
Allison Braley is an Operating Partner at Playground Global, where she brings more than 20 years of marketing, brand-building and communications expertise to the venture firm and its portfolio. The Mixing Board community member also is a generous soul who actively provides advice and lessons to others looking to better understand comms or move up in the industry.
After leadership roles at Medium, IDEO and CAA, Mixing Board community member Gabe Kleinman joined the early Obvious Ventures team five years ago to run portfolio services and marketing. More profoundly, he was asked how the firm could best take the organization’s founding philosophy of being ‘World Positive’ and, not only apply it in venture capital, but in additional areas that the firm and partners could touch.
Carolyn Penner is one of the most sought-after comms consultants for a reason. The Mixing Board community member has only worked for interesting companies in interesting moments. She joined Google in 2007 and then became Twitter’s second comms hire as head of product comms (hired by Mixing Board founder Sean Garrett). She parlayed the trust she built at Twitter into running marketing and comms for Vine (RIP), and then later ran North American comms for Dyson. Along the way, Carolyn has created a well-deserved reputation for being both a savvy strategist who gets great results and someone who deeply understands the ins and outs of a product at least as well as most product managers.
Mixing Board community member Greg Swan is the Head of Creative Innovation at Fallon where he builds “never been done before” programs for brands like Nike, Verizon, State Farm and The Coca-Cola Company. Just as impressively, he coined the term #snowmageddon, tweeted as the voice of Punxsutawney Phil and launched the first Snapchat from outer space.
Greg also has a weekly Substack on the latest trends, viral videos and new technologies that we should be paying attention to.
Mixing Board community member Nancy Douyon discovered big, powerful companies seeking to create value for the world were saddled with misunderstandings of the world’s value created by simple human bias and the insecurities of the humans creating products.
As a human experience design trailblazer, she uncovered and strived to remedy this paradox while working for the likes of Uber, Google, IBM, and Intel. To create even bigger change, she founded Douyon Signature, which helps companies big and small remove natural biases and make better design decisions that create massive new business opportunities through greater inclusivity. These decisions can also shift narratives about companies, make it easier to attract the right employees and increase the overall value of businesses. The absence of these decisions can do quite the opposite.
What's most striking about Tony Weisman is not the 30+ years of award-winning experience as a marketing leader. It's not that he was the former CMO of Dunkin' Brands when they went through transformational change or was the CEO of Digitas North America after nearly 20 years at famed agency Leo Burnett. It's that someone with his experience is waking up every day excited and enthusiastic about where marketing, brand, and the social purpose of organizations is headed. If you want jaded, go elsewhere.
It's also no coincidence that Tony is a highly sought after board member and advisor to top business leaders going through great change. The Mixing Board community member was named a Forbes World's Most Influential CMO, a Business Insider's 25 Most Transformational CMO, and an Adweek Brand Genius.
Mixing Board community member Ambika Nigam has made multiple career pivots, from finance to stand-up comedy to marketing to design to product development. As she was getting ready to make her last pivot, she stopped to wonder why there wasn't more support for people who want to make job changes that stray far from a linear path. That's why she created Zeit, which supports both today's ever-evolving professionals discover new career paths and helps organizations reimagine how to retain and inspire employees who want to do new things.
Mixing Board community member Jeremy Briggs has had a knack for being where video has been evolving as a communications and marketing tool for the last decade-plus. Perhaps it's a coincidence but perhaps not. He has led video production efforts at places like Twitter, Buzzfeed and Players' Tribune and, in between, was super early on Vine and what that foretold for the TikTok era.
Most recently, Jeremy has been helping organizations big and small create their own video strategies. And, breaking news, he will be joining the mental health-focused start-up Modern Heath this summer.
