The 30 Under 30 Rewriting The Rules Of Marketing And Advertising 2019 Running a house-painting franchise at 17 may seem an unlikely career milestone for the founder of a digital consumer-research company. But it taught serial entrepreneur Nadia Masri how to run a wholesale bags business, key prep for launching Perksy, a company that’s exploded onto the marketing and advertising scene and boasts lucrative engagements with some of the world’s most innovative brands, such as Diageo and Cirque du Soleil. Masri, the Toronto-born daughter of a Syrian immigrant, is just one of 30 young people on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 listtransforming the practice of marketing and advertising. This year’s 30 are curious, daring, creative, driven and empowered—and they are using their skills and unique vision to start companies, reshape agencies and bring innovation to both new and legacy brands. They are changing the dynamics of customer experience, leveraging the power of advertising and marketing in new ways. They hail from clients, or the marketers themselves, companies like Tesla, Peloton, IBM and Hint; and agencies—creative, digital, strategic or, now more typical, a blend of all three—think Ogilvy, Droga5 and Giant Spoon. Some have launched advertising technology or research firms; Masri, for example, in launching Perksy, created a company that helps brands better understand their Millennial and Gen-Z audiences and test advertising, products and content to see what will fare best with them—by essentially turning consumer research into a mobile game: The company’s app enables consumers to answer questions, collect points, and get rewarded at more than 100 participating retailers like Nike and Delta Airlines. For brands, Perksy is DIY consumer research—something for which they don’t have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to an outside market-research firm. Others are working to advance marketing strategy for media behemoths Facebook and the New York Times; some are leaning into new brand-engagement mechanisms such as influencers, VR and AI. But most striking this year is the number of list-makers who are bringing meaning to marketing—and are, through their work, furthering cultural platforms and supporting priorities such as diversity, women’s leadership and social good. Frederick Joseph's mission to expand media representation found an audience on GoFundMe: The #BlackPantherChallenge raised nearly $1 million to send some 73,000 children worldwide to see the black superhero movie. That was but one success from the New Yorker's nonprofit creative marketing agency, We Have Stories, which provides free support to marginalized storytellers and organizations that can shift cultural bias toward better inclusion. Dani Roche founded Kastor & Pollux with a mission of empowering independent creatives and gaining increased representation of Asian women in media and business. In 2018, she founded School by K&P for entrepreneurs, which will provide course access to marginalized communities. Instagram’s first music and youth culture hire in 2015, Shavone Charles created Instagram’s first-ever Black History Month program and a #BlackGirlMagic partnership with Spotify and the launch of the #CelebrateBlackCreatives program. Arielle Gross, meanwhile, helped launch Facebook’s #MoreLikeMe initiative in partnership with HP Inc. and serves as the Facebook representative for the UN Women Global Innovation Coalition for Change. She founded the Arielle Gross Engineering Visionary Scholarship Fund at the University of Illinois. And Droga5’s Nedal Ahmed has worked on Emmy-winning “The Talk,” a Procter & Gamble ad addressing racism. Others, like Kenny Nguyen and Gus Murillo, ThreeSixtyEight cofounders, have leaned into social good: They host a conference series to inspire entrepreneurship and innovation in the local Baton Rouge community. Reddit’s Bryan Rosenblatt has been recognized by the Ad Council for championing nonprofit advertising that builds awareness around suicide prevention and has invested in startups led by underrepresented and minority founders. And in the realm of pushing the limits of technological advancement in marketing, Taylor Patchen leads augmented- and virtual-reality branding at Vertebrae; Aakriti Srikanth headed AI product management at IBM and built AI product marketing from scratch at open-source enterprise-software developer Red Hat; and Johnny Wong's marketing-intelligence platform, Operam, provides AI-powered solutions around media, creative and analytics. And there are many more. To vet the hundreds of nominations and identify the individuals, Katherine Love, assistant editor on the Forbes Leadership team, and I sought input and evaluation from an esteemed panel of judges who themselves represent the industry’s many dimensions: Jim Stengel, author, professor, speaker and former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble; Rohan Oza, investor, marketing expert and iconic brand mastermind, as well as Guest Shark on Shark Tank; Musa Tariq, recently named marketing director for experiences at Airbnb and previously chief brand officer at Ford; and Katrina Craigwell, a 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising alumna and now executive director, head of marketing at Finn by Chase. Also See: Top 5 wholesale home decor distributors
