2020 AMA International Collegiate Conference

Meredith Ferguson

Meredith Ferguson is the Managing Director of DoSomething Strategic—the consulting arm of DoSomething.org, the largest global organization for young people and social impact. DoSomething Strategic uses data-driven insights from DoSomething’s 5 million members to help brands and organizations build a relationship with young people (under 30!) around purpose and social impact.

Meredith’s career has spanned both client and agency roles, where she’s led youth-focused engagement and business-driving strategies for national retail, health, and restaurant brands. She speaks globally on the power of young people and purpose at conferences including ANA, YMS, PSFK, PromaxBDA, &Then, IEG, and Brand ManageCamp.

Meredith is an adjunct professor of Public Interest Marketing at Fordham University and has served as a judge for the Positive Change Effie Awards and the D&AD Impact Awards. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School where she was a founding member of the Vanderbilt Child & Family Law Clinic. When not striving to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie, Meredith can be found watching a musical or play in New York City with her husband and two kids.

Kim Kitchings

Kim Kitchings is the Senior Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Cotton Incorporated.  Kim leads consumer and trade advertising, public relations, corporate strategy, global market insights and strategic alliances.  In this role, Kim’s primary goals are to motivate consumers and the trade to buy items made of cotton and to affirm cotton as the fiber of choice for sustainable and eco-friendly products.

Kim joined Cotton Incorporated in 1996 as manager of market research and prior to her current position she was Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Program Metrics.  Over her 20 year career in the cotton industry, Kim has been instrumental in strategic assessments of global consumer demand and market evaluations for cotton.  Market analytics are central to establishing cotton’s competitive position globally, impacting Cotton Incorporated’s product development portfolio, how to proactively communicate cotton’s benefits and sustainability to the industry as well as ease the consumer journey to find and buy cotton products.  Kim oversees the use of a wide-array of tools such as digital marketing, social media, television, strategic partnerships, and presentations to communicate cotton’s messages to various constituents.

Kim received a Bachelor of Arts in Business from North Carolina State University and Masters in Business Administration from Meredith College.  She is a frequent presenter at industry conferences on innovation, consumer insights and marketing.  Her passion beyond advocating on behalf of the cotton industry is spending time with her husband and three children and canvasing the retail market for cotton items—a professional bonus.

Amanda Nighbert

Amanda Nighbert is a registered dietitian specializing in weight loss nutrition. She is passionate about motivating, supporting and educating people to meet their wellness goals. After a 16 year career in the clinical setting she put it all on the line, leaving her full time job, to go digital as a weight loss dietitian. She started out with no office, no website, no marketing know-how, and basically no idea what she was doing. However, she persevered and learned how to leverage the power of social media.  One year later she had tripled her hospital salary! Three years later she developed her own app, employees over 15 people and has seven figure sales annually. Amanda will share her journey to becoming a digital and marketing expert. What she learned along the way and how she plans to continue to grow and scale her business in the future.

Jess Reilly

Jess leads the paid media, SEO, advertising, & data science departments, a team of full stack media strategists with a specialization in data-driven attribution and omni-channel advertising. Jess has over a decade of experience in the world of inbound marketing with a background in creative advertising and media market entrepreneurship. Her team enables Rebel to be a Google Certified Partner and Bing Accredited agency, with demonstrated success in traditional and digital mediums, in both B2B and D2C verticals, for SMB and major international brands.

SVP, Marketing Services Jess Reilly’s trademark leather jacket screams “Rebel.” But it’s her ability to crunch numbers and visualize data, as well as her creativity and background in visual arts, that enable her to approach marketing rebelliously, through both the eyes of the brand and the consumer.

Sam Joffray

Since joining the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation staff in 2000, Joffray has coordinated all communications for the organization and the events it hosts, including serving as the associate executive director for the 2013 Super Bowl Host Committee and local host liaison and executive director of WrestleManias XXX, in 2014, and XXXIV in 2018. As senior vice president of communications, he also leads event sales efforts for the organization, managing competitive bid processes that attract sporting events of all sizes to the City of New Orleans, including multiple NBA All Star Games, Final Fours, and the most announcement of Super Bowl LVIII, in 2024, marking a record 11th Super Bowl for New Orleans. Joffray’s management experience for major sporting events has also extended to providing contract services for the National Football League, where he has innovated, designed, and implemented media communications services and support for the 5,000 plus members of the media covering the past 21 consecutive Super Bowls, since 1997.

Joffray is also the founder of the New Orleans Jr Journalism Program, a 501c3 non-profit after-school newsroom in downtown N.O., where local high school students write on a regular basis to earn their access to major events. Over the past 3 years alone, students have covered an impressive list of events, building their portfolios of coverage before becoming college bound, including Super Bowl LII, WrestleMania, NBA All Star Game, College World Series, Sugar Bowls, as well as maintaining permanent seats and photo positions at all Saints and Pelicans games, just to name a few.

Vanessa Torres

Vanessa C. Torres is a vivacious, creative, talented marketing professional specializing in integrated communications, strategy and implementation. A leader in higher education marketing in San Antonio, Vanessa currently serves as the Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Management at Texas A&M University – San Antonio. Previously, she was the Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications at San Antonio College and served as the Enrollment Communications Marketing Manager at St. Mary’s University.

In addition to her day job, Vanessa is an adjunct marketing/communications professor and has been a mentor with Big Brothers, Big Sisters of South Texas since 2012. She is also on the Board of the American Marketing Association (AMA) – San Antonio and served as its president in 2017-2018. In 2019, Vanessa joined the AMA’s Professional Chapters Council (PCC), a national advisory committee for AMA.

A native of San Antonio, Vanessa moved to Chicago to pursue higher education. She earned a B.A. in Marketing Communications with an emphasis in Public Relations from Columbia College Chicago and a M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Roosevelt University.

Matt Schaeffer

Driven by creative and contrarian thinking, Matt is a teacher at heart. Working in creative and unconventional ways to answer the question “Why?” Matt has created and executed effective marketing campaigns for CPG brand Tillamook County Creamery Association (if you don’t know, now you know) and health care companies Kaiser Permanente and Cambia Health Solutions.

Matt doesn’t believe successful marketing comes from large budgets, but that the opposite is often true. Successful marketing is made possible by teams of engaged individuals, coming together around a passionately shared cause, who look to uncover the needs of the audience; then who take action to deliver a compelling story that drives desired behavior.

Matt considers himself a futuristic who enjoys learning, reading and generally improving. When not working, he can be found spending time with his wife and two kids (3.5 and 2 years), mentoring students at Portland State University and volunteering as a Special Olympics soccer coach.

Jennifer Schultz

Jennifer is a marketing and communications professional with more than 20 years experience in fitness, athletics, health care technology and higher education, presently serving as the Director of Marketing and Communications at the University of Nebraska Foundation. With a passion to always contribute, whether it is through professional or volunteer commitments, it is no surprise that her top five CliftonStrengths are: Individualization, Achiever, Analytical, Harmony and Focus. She’s a planner and an organizer. She loves the AP Stylebook. She fears failure and letting others down. She loves being in marketing because no single day is ever the same, so it feeds her need for organized chaos.

Personally, she has a wonderfully supportive husband of nearly 20 years and two children, Jacob (14) and Julia (9). They spend most of their “spare” time coaching and spectating at their kids’ sporting events, attending Husker football and volleyball games and occasionally relaxing on the deck of their relatively quiet home in the country.

Stacy Armijo

Kirby Hasseman

Kirby Hasseman is the CEO of Hasseman Marketing & Communications, a full-service marketing company and promotional products distributor.  Hasseman Marketing has four full-time internal employees and six salespeople.

Hasseman is a thought leader in the promotional products industry. He was also named as a Rising Star in the industry by PPB magazine.  Recently, out of 300,000 (some) industry professionals, he was recognized as a top social media influencer on two different industry lists.

Kirby hosts a weekly Web show called Delivering Marketing Joy where he interviews business leaders from around the country.  In addition, he co-hosts a weekly (award-winning) podcast called unScripted.  He is an industry leader in content creation.

Kirby has published four books.  His most recent is “The Give First Economy.” His book, called Delivering Marketing Joy is about doing “promo right” and is perfect for people in the industry and customers.  He also wrote “Think Big For Small Business” and “Give Your Way to Success.

RJ Thompson

RJ Thompson is the Associate Director of Student Engagement in the College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a former tenured Assistant Professor of Graphic + Interactive Design in the Department of Art at Youngstown State University.

He is also the Co-Principal and Creative Strategist for +Public, a Pennsylvania-based social enterprise that focuses on cultivating community and economic development impact through the creation of branded communication platforms, creative place-making, and storytelling initiatives for communities-in-revival.

In 2015, he was one of several recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant, valued at $100,000, for the INPLACE (“Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts & Community Engagement”) project. In 2017, RJ received a “Best of Marketing Award” from the Ohio Economic Development Association for his efforts in rebranding the City of Youngstown, Ohio.

RJ was accepted into the prestigious Cohort 2 of the National Arts Marketing Project, a program supported by Americans for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. RJ also received a scholarship to join the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy through the School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Katie Fabry

Katie Fabry is the senior marketing manager for student memberships at The Wall Street Journal. In her current position, she is focused on shifting student brand perception and driving student consideration. She oversees all campaigns and creative, on-campus events and newsroom promotion for students and young audiences. Prior to joining WSJ, Katie served as brand marketing manager for Clique, where she lead experiential, influencer and partnership marketing for the College Fashionista brand. She is an alumna of Stonehill College in Massachusetts where she studied communications and marketing.

Sabir Semerkant

Drew West

Drew West is the General Manager of Global Academic Partnerships, overseeing global partnerships and programs with academia for The Trade Desk.

Since joining The Trade Desk in 2014, Drew has built The Trade Desk’s Global Services organization, including follow-the-sun coverage Support, Business Intelligence, API Support and Data Capture Support and Business Intelligence delivery capability from offices in New York, Chicago, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Hong Kong and our headquarters in Ventura, California. In 2019, Drew launched The Trade Desk’s Data Capture team to expand The Trade Desk’s capabilities in providing quality, actionable data that enhances the success of our clients, as well as the Global API Support team.

In 2020, Drew takes on a new challenge of building The Trade Desk’s global academic partnerships and programs. This new initiative will position The Trade Desk to collaborate with traditional and non-traditional education institutions to prepare students for successful careers within the AdTech industry.

Drew lives in Ojai, California and is an avid supporter of community service initiatives related to education, shelter and housing, food and nutrition, and at-risk senior and child assistance programs.

Melissa Minneci

Neil Golden