The full story
I've spent twenty years building the part of marketing that doesn't make the deck.
It's the part that decides whether the deck is worth anything.
I started my career at the Ritz-Carlton, coordinating PR events. The Gold Standards shaped how I think about everything I've done since. Every guest, every interaction, every problem that landed in front of you was yours to solve, no matter whose department it technically belonged to. You were fully empowered to deliver. And you felt it: you were working together, part of something greater, and your work ethic had to match it. That mindset, that it's all about your audience and meeting them wherever they are, carried straight into marketing and has never left.
I transitioned into tech at Nokia, working in B2B marketing for network equipment. That was my first partner marketing role, and where I learned that the relationship between two organizations, when structured well, could create something neither one could build alone. That foundation became the through-line of my career.
From Nokia I moved to Motorola, then Samsung, then Google. Each role bigger in scope, more complex in partnership dynamics, more demanding commercially. Galaxy was a new brand when I joined Samsung. Pixel was a new brand when I joined Google. Building something from zero and teaching a market how to adopt it is a kind of marketing problem most people never get to touch. It also taught me how compounding actually works, and how a coordinated push from product, partner, channel, and retail can turn a new entrant into a category.
At Samsung, our team managed a $100M+ co-marketing portfolio contributing $7B+ annually, with full revenue accountability and commercial governance. We broke revenue records and became the top-performing team globally, not just within the mobility category, but across every product category inside the company. The way we got there was simple and hard to copy: we treated every insight as a lever, and built it into the system so it kept paying. One of those levers was a retail innovation for device launches. It addressed a gap in the shopper experience and subsequently increased pre-order conversion by 5-6x and became the global merchandising standard that was eventually adopted across the industry. Taking an insight, turning it into a system, and letting that system become the category standard is how we won, over and over.
At Google, I joined the Pixel carrier marketing team as essentially a one-person operation. There wasn't a playbook. Over the course of nearly eight years, I built one. I wrote the frameworks, expanded the team 250%, grew the partner base 250%, and stretched the product portfolio 375%. A single carrier and a single device became a multi-carrier, multi-product ecosystem. The program grew from zero to over $1 billion in annual revenue.
I led all of the carrier partner marketing launches and co-marketing campaigns, including one for a flagship device release that connected Disney, Google, Snap, and Verizon into a single cross-platform consumer experience. Four organizations, four sets of stakeholders, a cultural moment anchored to a new 5G and AR product truth, one coherent execution. It won the Webby People's Voice Award and established a new standard for building brand partnerships and cultural moments.
Over time the growth and partnerships started to stall, and the prevailing view internally was that it couldn't be scaled further. The framework needed tweaking, not replacing. We built a Joint Marketing Agreement that unlocked deeper partner marketing support, and ran a full-funnel campaign that anchored the turnaround. It delivered 228% YoY revenue growth and 4x the marketing efficiency of what we'd achieved on our own, and became the global benchmark adopted by other regions.
After nearly two decades inside enterprise tech, I wanted to be closer to the work and closer to the audiences I cared about most. So I founded Ford Marketing Collective. A private practice built to deliver the growth systems I'd spent twenty years architecting inside some of the largest companies in the world, now paired with AI as a force multiplier. The same rigor, compressed from quarters into weeks.
YouTube Shopping became FMC's founding engagement. When the opportunity came to architect the global creator education strategy and GTM deployment system for YTS, it aligned perfectly. Creators, beauty, tech, commerce, content strategy. All of it connected to what I cared about personally and what I'd spent years building professionally. Two teams, YouTube Shopping's own internal organization and their agency partner, implemented the strategies FMC created at global scale, reaching 700K+ eligible creators.
Every one of these roles was, at its core, a partnership problem. Two or more companies trying to build something together that neither could build alone. That's the work I've spent twenty years architecting, and the work FMC is built around.
FMC exists because the most valuable thing I've ever built wasn't a campaign or a launch. It was the system behind it. The architecture that made the campaign work, the launch land, and the marketing compound. That's what I install now.
For founders, brands, and creators ready to build their marketing on the architecture that makes it compound.
