22 OCTOBER 9, 2017|^ ADWEEK
KURT MILLS
ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR,
GOODBY SILVERSTEIN & PARTNERS“Ad vertising has the opportunity to play a bigger role these days,” says Goodby Silverstein’s Kurt
Mills, 39, who has proven that marketing can not only motivate people to participate in a campaign
but inspire them to higher civic purposes.
Mills’ best-known work of 2017 was the Cheetos Museum, a compendium of cheese twists
that bore uncanny resemblances to everything from a girl on rollerblades to Abraham Lincoln—all
submitted by customers. He also hooked up with hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd to build a smartphone-
activated music video that grew larger with each new participant.
But it was Mills’ work with Rock the Vote that highlighted advertising’s role in the democratic
process. His Election FM streaming radio network featured tunes that could only be heard at polling
places, while Doritos’ “No Choice” campaign stuffed bags full of cardboard chips labeled “No Taste,
No Crunch, No Choice”—a startling metaphor that reminded Americans of the importance of voting,
brought to them by Mills, a Canadian. “The irony isn’t lost on me,” he says. —Robert KlaraKATE TRUMBULL
DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL
MARKETING, DOMINO’STrawling her social media channels a year or so ago, Kate
Trumbull noticed something unusual: people who’d attended
wedding receptions told stories of the caterers running out of food.
That gave Trumbull, Domino’s director of digital marketing,
an idea: why not simply have the receptions (or, for that matter, the
bachelor parties or even the honeymoons) catered by Domino’s? This
was the genesis of the Domino’s online wedding registry—which might
seem like an oddball idea, until you consider that it’s Trumbull’s mission to
bring pizza to every occasion in life.
To that end, “we’ve been pushing toward thinking and acting like an ecommerce company,” says
Trumbull, 35, who was also the force behind enriching Domino’s popular Pizza Tracker app with IFTTT,
which uses web-enabled devices to announce an imminent pizza delivery. Trumbull also arranged this
summer’s free streaming of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off via Facebook Live. “There are some people who just
love pizza,” Trumbull says, and she’s pledged to fi nd digital routes to bringing Domino’s to their doors. —R.K.22
ALAN SCHAAF
FOUNDER AND CEO, IMGUR
With 150 million users viewing 6 billion pages
per month, Imgur, the photo- and video-sharing
app platform, has become a destination that
combines the meme potential of GIFs with the
voting aspect of Reddit.
The app, founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009,
has in the past year begun to build out a
niche among advertisers looking to reach
geeky millennials. Since the native ads were
introduced in 2016, Imgur has worked with more
than 150 brands while expanding beyond its San
Francisco headquarters to Los Angeles, Chicago
and New York.
According to Schaaf, 29, Imgur’s goal is to
democratize good content while also giving
people a way to “lift the world’s spirits for a few
moments every day.”
“When I think about [our users], these are
the people that are infl uential,” he says. “They’re
the people that their friends go to for advice,
that are posting in forums and leaving product
reviews. I don’t know if that makes us infl uential,
but as a brand, I would certainly want to be in
that infl uential audience.” —M.S.
MILLS: QUINN GRAVIER FROM GS&P