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From a Basement Printing Press to Enterprise Tech: The Roots of Brand Obsession 📦✨

Can an obsession with a cardboard box explain a VP of Marketing's entire strategic playbook? For Ontic's Ankur Arora, the answer is yes.

Long before managing global marketing strategies, Ankur watched his father labor over hand-cut packaging prototypes in a basement printing press. That early immersion taught him to sweat the details of visual aesthetics and how a brand communicates before a single word is ever read.

In this "Beyond the Brief" Conversation, he breaks down:
🛡️ The Mission: Shifting physical security from a back-office function to a strategic C-suite partner.
👥 The Power of Authority: Leading with community, peer-to-peer trust, and best practices over product pitches.
🚀 The Growth Playbook: Unifying fragmented data into a vision of "Connected Intelligence".

"Marketing that's disconnected from what buyers actually experience is just content. We want to produce something they feel."

Check out Ankur's journey, his philosophy on buyer intimacy, and how Ontic is getting the corporate world to organize around its vision. https://tr.ee/qK1bSTnrsG

From a single delivery truck to 150 million pounds of hommus a year. 🚚💨

How does a family-owned brand become the world's largest hommus producer while staying fiercely authentic?
In our latest Beyond the Brief Conversation, Aimee Tsakirellis, EVP of Marketing at Cedar's Foods, shares the masterclass on scaling a business without losing its soul.

Here are 3 key takeaways from Cedar’s incredible growth story:
- Speed as a Superpower: With a flat, nimble organization, Cedar’s can spot a food trend and commercialize a new product in just a couple of months (hello, hot honey hommus!).
- Guarding the Brand Identity: Flavor innovation is great, but boundaries matter. If a new idea can’t be tied back to a Mediterranean profile, it stays strictly as a limited-time offering.
- The "Family Table" Culture: For Cedar’s, culture isn’t a marketing tagline—it’s an operational reality. From an employee who has taste-tested every single batch for 45 years to a CEO who refuses to sit at the head of the table, collaboration drives their empire.

👉 Read the full interview here - https://tr.ee/gtdR3Kg0f8 - to learn about their scrappy marketing beginnings, their absolute obsession with product quality, and the inspiration behind their highly anticipated, officially certified seed oil-free Reserve line.

Mission as North Star: Marketing the World’s Best-Kept Secret in Education 🌟

How many marketing leaders leave a Director-level role to take a Coordinator position? For Kristina Pae, VP of Communications and Marketing at Milton Hershey School, the answer was simple: you do it when the mission is too compelling to pass up.
Milton Hershey School is a fully residential, tuition-free school serving over 2,200 students in need, socially and financially.

Marketing a "one-of-a-kind" institution comes with a deeply complex puzzle:
- The Codependent Funnel: Simultaneously recruiting nationwide students and the rare 2% of Americans who qualify as houseparents.
- The 90+ Touchpoint Cycle: Navigating an incredibly high-stakes, emotional decision-cycle for families crossing state lines.
- Data-Driven Clarity: Utilizing tools like LeadsRX to move past educated guesses and see real-time attribution across search, streaming TV, and digital ads.

"Start with the mission and let everything flow from it... That clarity validates every content decision, every channel decision, and every partnership decision."

Check out the full Beyond the Brief conversation to get the full story ⬇️
🔗https://tr.ee/whgtZZgGr0

🎵 Is your favorite playlist legally exposing your business?

Think playing your personal Spotify account at your venue is harmless? Think again. A staggering 79% of U.S. businesses are using unlicensed music services—mostly because they just don’t know any better.

In our latest Beyond the Brief conversation, Lisa Farris, CMO of Impact One & Chief Advocacy Officer at Soundtrack, breaks down why improper licensing hurts both creators and commerce, and how she's leading a massive educational movement to fix it.

📊 The Real Value of Sound:
58% of consumers stay longer when they like the music.
36% are more likely to return.
Beware "silent churn"—customers who leave quietly because of bad or repetitive background tracks and never come back.

From pioneering early digital marketing at Universal Music Group to leading marketing for the Grammys, Lisa’s career path is a masterclass in driving innovation.
Read the full convo to learn about Soundtrack’s mission to fairly compensate artists, how AI is rewriting the rules of SEO, and why Lisa is mentoring the next generation of music leaders at LMU.

🔗 https://tr.ee/S4zcNp49JU