Strategy and design form the cornerstones of both the personal and the professional relationship between Justin and Emily Nardone, founders and partners at Los Angeles-based creative agency Bellaluca. In this episode, the Nardones share how they came together to evolve their individual work to a new place -- both literally and figuratively -- creating an agency that combines strategy and creative to take brands forward.

WAR’s Brien Holman discusses how the agency creates compelling visuals for audio-only content and why  sound and music are so important in all types of marketing. 

19th and Park Co-Founders Tahira White and Whitney Headen – president and CEO, respectively – discuss how they created and launched the New York City-based agency and its newly launched production company, 1Park9.They share what the two entities’ unique positioning is in the marketplace, why they felt the need to launch a division that’s entirely focused on production and how they find and develop talent – a mission on which they each spend a lot of time. They also encourage the industry to give up-and-coming diverse talent the experience they need to survive and thrive. And finally, they share their views on how talent should be working with artificial intelligence as they forge their creative paths forward. 

12 years ago, David Jeffers suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down. But through his recovery process, the mechanical engineer launched a new career based on one of his oldest passions: music and sound. And his old friend, Ricardo Roberts, executive producer at Los Angeles-based inclusive motion-graphics studio Bien, has been there to provide assistance and encouragement all along the way.Together, Quadriphonic and Bien have produced an award-winning spot for the Paralympics and created a unique brand campaign for Quadriphonic. Now Bien is producing a short documentary about Jeffers’ life.In this episode of the Daily Brief Podcast, we talk to Jeffers and Bien Creative Director Hung Le about what it means to be an inclusive studio, how the relationship between Bien and Quadriphonic has evolved, how Jeffers operates as a quadriplegic sound designer, and what’s next for everyone.

Late last year, Rick Lewchuck, former senior vice president of creative marketing and brand standards at CNN Worldwide and former Promax board member, departed his post amid deep cost-cutting at CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery. Lewchuck had been at CNN for a decade, following a 32-year career at Canada’s CTV. While at CNN, Lewchuk and his team were named Promax’s Global Marketing Team of the Year seven times, and they won the Emmy for outstanding promotional announcement in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020. Over the course of Lewchuk’s five-decade career, he and his teams have won more than 2,000 Promax awards. In this episode of the Daily Brief Podcast, Lewchuk discusses how he first got into entertainment marketing, his time at CTV and how he ended up at CNN. He looks back on some of the most impactful campaigns that he oversaw, including “Go There,” “Donkey & Elephant” and “Facts First,” starring an apple and a banana. He also offers insight into how best to lead creatives and considers what he thinks the future of entertainment marketing holds. 

As head of Fubo Sports Network and original programming, Pamela Duckworth brings 30 years of production, marketing and branding experience together to oversee Fubo Sports Network as well as Fubo Movie Network, Fubo Latino Network and soon, Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort Network.  On Tuesday, Fubo announced that it was launching Fubo Sports Network on Amazon's Freevee, making that network available on more than 155 million devices across multiple streaming platforms.While providing sports programming to fans without necessarily having the ability to carry those games is a challenge, Fubo Sports Network has made the most of the opportunity by working with such athletes as Gilbert Arenas, RJ Hampton, Terrell Owens, Matthew Hatchett and Shawne Merriman to produce programming, distribute that programming across multiple platforms and going live with those athletes when possible. Duckworth, whose background includes car-racing and other sports productions, first learned that athletes can become premium content providers after working with Peyton and Eli Manning for 11 years. In this episode of The Daily Brief Podcast, Duckworth talks about how she and Fubo are working to build its sports and original offerings in today’s challenging streaming environment.

From NFTs to virtual influencers, augmented reality and crypto, the metaverse may feel like the Wild West, but for brands who embrace data-driven planning and are willing to iterate and evolve, it’s the biggest opportunity out there. And it’s coming fast, so it’s something all brands will want to take into consideration as they plan for the future.In this episode of The Daily Brief Podcast, Jason Rockman, president of customer experience agency Definition 6, and Shep Ogden, co-founder and CEO of Offbeat Media Group, introduce us to virtual influencer Zero and give us a taste of what it’s like to interact with him.After talking with Zero, Rockman and Ogden share how successful the virtual influencer has been as he gains followers, acquiring more than 350,000, and works with brands, such as Samsung, just since being introduced in February. The pair go on to consider other ways brands should be thinking about innovating as the internet evolves into Web3 and beyond. 

Earlier this year, two veteran creative directors – Ryan Summers and Brian Eloe – joined Denver-based creative agency Spillt, working with Owner and Executive Creative Director Ed Rhine. Summers comes from a motion-graphics background, while Eloe’s work has mostly been in live action, but together, the team takes on all sorts of projects as they look to expand Spillt’s clientele and expertise."The most unorthodox way is often the best way to find a solution," Eloe says.Rhine, Summers and Eloe join this episode of The Daily Brief Podcast to discuss how they collaborate to deliver the best work for clients, how they try to keep their egos out of their work, and what they see coming down the pike for entertainment marketing. (Hint: it involves Web3). And stay tuned until the end for a fun, thoughtful and off-the-cuff conversation about main titles.

As Loyalkaspar Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Beat Badenbacher hunkered down, like everyone else, during the pandemic, he began to think. He thought about how brands define the world around them and how people turn to brands – or familiar symbols – in times of strife. And then he turned those thoughts into a book.“Somewhere Yes: The Search for Belonging in a World Shaped by Branding” combines both written and visual language to ask questions and consider ideas. More of a thought exercise than a conclusion or a prescription, the book asks readers to consider what branding means in our current society and how it can be used for good."Somewhere Yes" is available from Amazon and other booksellers on July 12.

Today’s episode is a replay of an interview from August 2020 with leadership consultant Esther Weinberg, developer of a program called The Ready Zone. Weinberg has more than two decades of experience working with executives to help them evolve their careers – particularly in the entertainment space.Esther, in collaboration with Promax, is getting ready to launch the next cohort of program Promax Next, which has been custom built to help entertainment marketers with an interest in leadership progress both themselves and their teams. Listen in to hear Esther describe how The Ready Zone and Promax Next could help you move your career to the next level and then head to promax.org/next to apply. Applications are due by next Friday, March 18, 2022. 

Boulder, Colo.-based agency Human Design lives by the motto “do well by doing good,” and it carries that over to its clients – whether that’s helping SmartWool return to its roots of keeping people warm while they play outside or Land O’ Lakes get the message out that the company is much more than just butter. In today’s episode, Human Design founder John Weiss and partner Dan Clarke join to discuss the agency’s unique approach to branding, communications and design as well as its new documentary division and how it’s looking ahead to web3 and the metaverse. 

When Black News Channel, now BNC, came to SmithGeiger Group and its in-house creative agency, Vivid Zero, to conduct a top-to-bottom rebrand, much like Dorothy and her ruby slippers everything they needed was there from the start. It just took many hours of meetings and many people staring at design and copy and sketches for the synchronicities to make themselves known. In the end, BNC emerged with a sleek, futuristic new logo and gleaming 3D motion graphics to match, a clever tagline, and a new sonic brand from music production company Dynamite Laser Beam. BNC President and CEO Princell Hair and Vivid Zero Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer Michael Vamosy join the podcast to talk about how, through a process of close collaboration and digging into lots of data, the rebrand came together and prepared BNC for a future of expansion. 

For this year’s holiday gift, Troika Media Group sent out a different kind of offering: A non-fungible token, or NFT, created by Venice, Calif.-based artist Claire Salvo. Recipients could quickly and easily sign up for their own crypto wallet on Troika’s marketplace, Redeeem, and then download Salvo’s unique NFT, which is a realistic drawing in pencil of a disco ball in recline. Those who wanted to sell their NFT could donate a percentage of the proceeds to First Descents, a charity selected by Salvo.In this episode of The Daily Brief Podcast, Salvo is joined by Kevin Aratari, Troika’s head of new business development, and Zach Jacobs, Troika IO’s head of entertainment to discuss the holiday giveaway, what NFTs have meant to her as an artist and to the artistic community as a whole, and what we should all expect to happen next in the NFT, Web3 and metaverse in 2022. 

Trollbäck + Company's Elliott Chaffer and Bo Bishop join to discuss ABC's recent rebrand -- why the team made the choices they did, how they evolved the logo to make it function better across today’s many platforms and how and why they tweaked the palette. They also talk about their work with Brooklyn, N.Y.-based music production company YouTooCanWoo to devise a new mnemonic for the entertainment brand.

Fox Entertainment Music’s new executive vice president, Mamie Coleman, joins the conversation to discuss all things music at Fox-owned FEM, Tubi and Bento Box and how the team uses music to tell stories and drive revenue across all of Fox’s platforms. Part of Coleman’s oversight is turning Fox’s original music into revenue creation. Now that Fox has spun off many of its major assets to Disney, Fox has gone back to its scrappy entrepreneurial roots, acquiring Bento Box, Tubi and TMZ and launching a new non-fungible token business with Blockchain Creative Labs. As EVP, creative music, Coleman helps oversee Fox’s fun, poppy, electronically-driven sound, which includes mnemonics for all three brands as well as a music catalog of more than 200 original songs, 17 theme songs and growing. Many of Fox’s alternative series are musically driven, including number-one broadcast hit The Masked Singer as well as I Can See Your Voice, Name That Tune and new show Alter Ego.Coleman has a strong legacy from which to draw: Fox has a long history of emphasizing music in its shows with such programs as American Idol, Glee, Empire and Star and the upcoming country-music series, Monarch, starring Susan Sarandon, Trace Adkins and Anna Friel. 

On September 15, Inspiration4, the first all-civilian mission to space, will blast off in a SpaceX Dragon capsule to spend three days orbiting around the Earth. Creative agency Known worked with mission commander Jared Isaacman and his company, Shift4 Payments, to brand the mission, produce a docuseries for Netflix and lead the marketing. Known Co-Founders Mark Feldstein and Brad Roth discuss the sprawling project from conception to literal launch in this episode. "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space" premieres on Netflix Sept. 6.

Since 2005, Robb Wagner, through his creative studio, Stimulated-Inc., has produced high-level creative solutions for global brands such as Disney, ViacomCBS and YouTube, among many others.These solutions include raising the giant head of Peter Dinklage up through a virtual lake for the Spike Scream Awards and creating live music videos in real time for such artists as Eminem, Lady Gaga and Arcade Fire with Spike Jonze for the YouTube Music Awards using Live Cinema technology. Stimulated-Inc. also has worked with Carnival Cruise Lines to create immersive multiple media entertainment live on stage and with the Foo Fighters to design dynamic LED screen content for the band’s concert tour.Prior to the pandemic, Stimulated-Inc. had already created a remote workforce and systems to efficiently run workflow across a distributed network of multimedia artists. This summer, Stimulated-Inc. released Stimulated.Works, a workflow solution that helps in-house creative teams scale their digital asset creation, including animation, motion, development and design.In today’s episode, Wagner talks about some of the cool experiential projects he’s done recently, how he and his team functioned during the pandemic, and how he’s sharing those lessons learned with the industry.

When the pandemic hit, Alibi Music was already set up for success. The music production company operates out of different offices across the country and makes its music available for clients via its website, which recently incorporated a powerful search engine into its interface.But the company has not only been able to survive over the past 18 months, it’s also been able to expand, partnering with companies such as Allstar Games to allow creators on the Allstar platform --  many of whom stream their live video game play on Twitch -- to pair their content with Alibi’s Music using an advanced algorithm.Alibi Music also offers creators all sorts of music to accompany promos, teasers, trailers, social media content and much more. The company’s music has recently been used in such projects as Disney Plus’ Marvel Studios: Assembled -- The Making of WandaVision, the official game trailer for Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War season three and several segment themes for Fox's hit reality competition series The Masked Singer. Alibi Music Founder and CEO Jonathan Parks joins the podcast to talk all things music and marketing. 

Creating art that sparks conversations is the driving force behind The Love Project, a non-profit launched by CNBC Marketing VP and Promax Thriver Robert Poulton.In the heated summer of 2020, Poulton took his art to a new level, drawing pictures as a kind of personal therapy fueled by the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd as well as by the Black Lives Matter movement.Having received a positive reaction to these works, Poulton decided to create prints from some of his drawings, and to donate them to friends and colleagues who, in return, agreed to make a contribution to organizations fighting for social justice reform, education and the arts.A friend who was helping Poulton with the printing recommended that he reach out to artist Shepard Fairey, feeling that the two had similar sensibilities. The two hit it off quickly and The Love Project was born.Poulton joins Promax Editorial Director Paige Albiniak to discuss his art and ideas, how his collaboration with Fairey began and what’s next for the project.

In the past few years, Los Angeles-based brand performance company Troika Media Group has made some big moves.In 2018, it acquired Mission to add to its international public relations and experiential marketing capabilities. In April, it went public. And in May, it acquired fintech platform Redeeem, which will help the company enter the burgeoning blockchain and NFT space.Tune in to hear Promax Editorial Director Paige Albiniak chat with Troika Media Group President Dan Pappalardo and Head of New Business Kevin Aratari about why Troika made these moves, what they mean for the agency and how they reflect the future of the fast-moving entertainment industry.