The 2026 Franchise Marketing Trailblazers

Abby Fogel, VP Brand Management & Communications at Unleashed Brands

Nominated For: Abby led the strategy behind KidHub, a first-of-its-kind platform connecting seven youth enrichment franchise brands into one family experience. The initiative began with a national study of more than 1,000 parents. The findings showed that families cared more about building confidence, resilience, and life skills than chasing achievements. This became the strategic foundation for the platform and helped Unleashed Brands recruit renowned parenting expert Dr. Michele Borba as its first Chief Thriving Officer.

Abby then led the enterprise rollout across all seven brands. Within the first 30 days, KidHub surpassed 30,000 downloads, averaged more than 1,600 daily active users, generated over $215,000 in consumer purchases, and saw 27% of user sessions engage with two or more Unleashed Brands concepts — a rare level of cross-brand engagement for a platform built on independent franchise brands.

Aimee Harris, VP Brand Management at Primrose Schools

Nominated For: Aimee has been with Primrose Schools for many years. She has played a crucial role in helping evolve the brand’s look and voice, including refining its tone from formal to relatable for the parents it serves. She notably led a community impact campaign that resonated strongly with families and franchisees alike.

Alex Pericchi, VP of Marketing at PuroClean

Nominated For: Over his 12-year tenure at PuroClean, Alex has led the brand’s marketing through growth from 200 to more than 550 locations, launching the company’s first Online Academy, its Heartbeat magazine, and numerous other initiatives along the way. He also built, largely on his own time, an AI-powered application that optimizes and amplifies franchisee website content at scale, giving PuroClean local search visibility on par with the best-optimized competitors in the category.

Alexandra Russo, Fractional CMO (most recently with Taste Buds Kitchen)

Nominated For: Drawing on more than seven years in franchising as both an in-house VP of Marketing and a Fractional CMO, Alexandra created the Social Growth Plan, an at-scale social media methodology unlike anything else in franchising. It equips franchisees and franchisors with a customized 12-week pre-open content plan, a training presentation, a brand and competitor audit, an implementation guide, and 36 ready-to-use posts for already-open locations, all delivered on a 45-day turnaround that lets her support multiple brands at once.

One month after Taste Buds Kitchen adopted the plan as its standard for new franchisees, founder and CEO Jessi Brelsford credited it with making pre-opening social posting far more consistent and engaging. The brand now uses its pre-opening content as a proof point in its franchise development efforts.

Amy Przywara, VP of Marketing at Bach to Rock

Nominated For: Amy is a senior-level marketing and advertising executive with a proven track record of driving revenue growth, profit gains, and market share expansion. Known as a strategist and thought leader in creative service operations, she excels at improving efficiency and reducing costs while building and developing high-performing teams. Her expertise spans branding, account management, media buying, and product marketing, underscored by a leadership style that is profit-driven, process-oriented, and consistently focused on the customer.

Angela Paules, CMO at Buzz Brands

Nominated For: Angela has championed a more accountable, data-driven marketing function by advancing attribution, executive reporting, marketing automation, and digital performance measurement, while building a culture of continuous improvement that develops future marketing leaders and embraces emerging technologies like AI.

Central to her impact has been leading the integration of CRM, marketing automation, attribution, and reporting across all four brands, giving the organization visibility into customer behavior and marketing performance it didn’t have before. That data now lets marketing leaders identify opportunities faster, invest resources more effectively, and continuously improve the customer experience based on real performance insight.

Angelique McMillan, VP of Marketing at Handyman Connection

Nominated For: Angelique brings over 15 years of experience in brand building and digital marketing, leading strategies spanning SEO/SEM, social media, and public relations to elevate the service-based brand’s prominence. 

Guided by a philosophy of continuously exceeding expectations, she champions initiatives that strengthen brand awareness and online visibility while fostering a culture of ongoing improvement. Her strategic leadership reflects the organization’s core values and has been instrumental in deepening customer trust and loyalty.

Ashley Mitchell, VP of Marketing at East Coast Wings + Grill / Sammy’s Sliders / Dine Growth Group / ZorAbility

Nominated For: Ashley leads marketing for East Coast Wings + Grill, where she’s driving a deliberate five-year growth strategy that balances new locations and brand awareness with franchisee economics, earning her recognition as a Top Franchise Influencer and Top 50 Franchise CMO Gamechanger. 

She brings a human-centered, partnership-driven philosophy that treats franchisees as co-marketers rather than just operators, while simultaneously leading marketing for Sammy’s Sliders and ZorAbility — giving her a rare multi-brand vantage point across emerging and established restaurant concepts and a franchise development consultancy.

Becky Beyer, Vice President of Marketing at Pillar To Post Home Inspectors

Nominated For: With more than 20 years in home services franchise marketing, Becky has built a marketing philosophy at Pillar To Post that goes well beyond brand awareness, integrating national campaigns with local relationship-building, sales coaching, and technology so franchise business owners can translate marketing into real growth. Recognizing that many owners were skilled inspectors but less comfortable with sales, she developed coaching and training that helps them build relationships with real estate professionals and convert marketing activity into long-term referral partnerships.

She has also guided the brand through some of the industry’s most disruptive stretches, including post-pandemic waived-inspection trends and a shifting housing market, introducing new technologies and digital communication tools that let franchisees keep engaging clients and real estate partners even when in-person marketing became difficult.

Brandi Kloostra, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Evive Brands

Nominated For: Brandi brings something rare to franchise marketing: 25 years of experience across brands ranging from 10 to 400 locations, combined with the perspective of being a franchisee herself. That dual vantage point shapes everything she does.

At Evive Brands, a multi-brand portfolio spanning Executive Home Care, Maid Brigade, The Brothers That Just Do Gutters, and MilkShake Factory, Brandi operates across an entire ecosystem of brands rather than a single system. Her work connects marketing, technology, and operations in ways that directly improve the franchisee and consumer experience, from cross-brand marketing initiatives to community-driven campaigns like the Caregiver Recognition partnership with John Legend’s Live Like a Legend campaign.

Brenda Febbo, Chief Marketing Officer at Lightbridge Academy

Nominated For: Brenda discovered Lightbridge Academy as a working parent commuting to New York City, and that firsthand experience relying on trusted child care led her to join what was then a family-owned company operating just eight centers in New Jersey. In 2011, she helped establish its franchise arm, and later led the transformation and rebranding of Rainbow Academy into Lightbridge Academy, building a modern, differentiated brand that has since become one of the fastest-growing child care franchise systems in the country.

As a member of the executive leadership team, Brenda has helped guide the company’s growth into a nationally recognized franchise organization with more than 100 operating centers and over $190 million in systemwide revenue, overseeing brand strategy, consumer marketing, franchise development marketing, public relations, and digital transformation.

Brooke Janousek, Founder & CMO at The Grow CMO / IV Nutrition

Nominated For: Brooke is known throughout the franchise marketing community for her bold, distinctive point of view as Founder & CMO of The Grow CMO and IV Nutrition, bringing a sharp instinct for connecting culture and content in ways that consistently set her apart from a conventional marketing playbook.

Chelsea Penzone, VP of Marketing, Franchise Development at Authority Brands

Nominated For: Chelsea provides marketing leadership and establishes system-wide pipeline development initiatives to support corporate revenue and profit margin goals. Her work with Authority Brands stands out in the franchise development marketing space with her ability to conduct aggressive market research, identify untapped and underserved markets, and cultivate new business alliances. 

Chris McGee, VP Of Marketing at Batteries Plus

Nominated For: Chris brings deep expertise in media buying to Batteries Plus, with a clear vision for how strategic purchasing power can impact an entire franchise system. She has successfully moved locations from buying media store-by-store to pooling dollars for more strategic regional buys, and implemented media mix modeling that demonstrates results and is expanded each year. Her growing scope now includes managing the brand’s creative in addition to media strategy.

Christina Parsons, Chief Marketing Officer at United Franchise Group

Nominated For: Christina oversees marketing strategy for seven franchise brands spanning more than 1,600 locations across 60 countries. Recognizing that consumers and prospective franchisees now discover brands through AI-driven search, she moved the company away from treating SEO, social media, video, public relations, thought leadership, and franchise development marketing as separate efforts, building instead a coordinated entity-optimization strategy that strengthens how each brand and its leaders are represented across search engines, AI platforms, media, and social networks.

Christina also led the move to bring significant portions of franchise development marketing services in-house, creating a more integrated, accountable model that has saved the company more than $300,000 in fully burdened payroll costs while increasing internal knowledge and responsiveness.

Dan Wheeler, CMO at K9 Resorts Luxury Pet Hotel

Nominated For: Dan is bringing discipline and strategic focus to K9 Resorts at a pivotal moment for the brand, translating its ambitious vision into an executable plan for the field. He has led an effort to streamline and centralize the company’s data so decisions can be grounded in a solid base of information, positioning K9 Resorts to compete at the leading edge of its category.

Darren Keeler, VP of Marketing at Shuckin’ Shack

Nominated For: Darren champions a brand built on authenticity and genuine human connection rather than layers of new technology. He emphasizes real conversations with every customer, describing how those relationships have grown deep enough that the brand has hosted multiple weddings at its locations. 

He also plays a key role in the brand’s community-giving efforts, highlighting initiatives like the Fresh and Raw Tour benefiting the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and a St. Patrick’s Day fundraiser that raised $8,000 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association in a single day. Through his leadership, Keeler helps keep Shuckin’ Shack’s customer experience personal, community-driven, and rooted in old-fashioned hospitality.

Doug Zarkin, CMO at Take 5 Oil Change

Nominated For: As the first Chief Marketing Officer in Take 5 Oil Change’s history, Doug was recruited to build the company’s marketing organization from the ground up during a period of rapid growth, establishing capabilities the brand had never had before, including integrated brand strategy, CRM, AI-enabled consumer discovery, advanced analytics, influencer marketing, lifecycle marketing, and the company’s first national sports marketing platform. 

During his tenure, Take 5 achieved 6.2% same-store sales growth, 10.1% EBITDA growth, and an 18% improvement in marketing-driven business performance, while reversing a multi-year decline in new customer acquisition. 

Heather McLeod, Chief Marketing Officer at BNI

Nominated For: Heather has consistently combined brand strategy, digital transformation, and franchise development into a unified growth engine, leading marketing organizations that support hundreds of franchise locations across multiple brands. Most recently, she has led a global digital transformation for BNI, one of the world’s largest franchise organizations, consolidating thousands of domains into a unified global platform serving hundreds of thousands of members in more than 70 countries, while reimagining growth marketing through data-driven visitor acquisition and AI-enabled member engagement.

Earlier in her career, Heather built and led a marketing organization of more than 80 professionals at Authority Brands through a period of extraordinary growth, helping the company complete 15 acquisitions and grow to more than 1,200 locations generating over $2 billion in systemwide sales. 

Jenn Chasteen, CMO at SYNERGY HomeCare

Nominated For: Since Jenn joined SYNERGY HomeCare as CMO, the brand has grown from roughly 190 franchisees and 400 territories to about 320 franchisees and 550 territories, and was named the fastest-growing home care franchise in 2025 by Entrepreneur. SYNERGY reports it has awarded more territories than any other franchisor in the home care category for five consecutive years, adding 76 new territories in 2024 and ending 2025 with 626 territories across 44 states after a record 101 additions during the year.

Most recently, Jenn took a significant risk by shifting the brand’s marketing investment from local lead-generation campaigns to national media brand-awareness campaigns. Since making that shift, overall brand awareness and organic traffic have grown substantially, with April 2026 marking the best month in SYNERGY’s history.

Jill Sullivan, Director of Marketing at My Salon Suite

Nominated For: Jill has led improvements to how My Salon Suite tracks and measures brand fund dollars, bringing greater transparency and accountability to how those dollars perform, while strengthening the brand’s awareness programs for more consistent visibility. She analyzed spend-versus-occupancy data across 376 franchise locations, leading to a reallocation of ad spend based on actual location performance rather than historical spending patterns.

Julia Moody, Director of Marketing at British Swim School

Nominated For: Julia combines brand strategy, marketing technology, and franchisee enablement to create lasting business impact at British Swim School. Over the past year, she led the brand’s repositioning, advanced data-driven customer journey optimization, and introduced more personalized franchisee support through targeted cohorts and practical marketing resources.

She directed the repositioning from initial strategy through multiple rounds of refinement, franchisee collaboration, and rollout, building a message that better reflects the brand’s ability to serve swimmers of all ages while differentiating it in increasingly competitive markets. By incorporating franchisee feedback throughout the process, Julia built the trust and alignment needed for a successful systemwide launch.

Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO and Founder at Apollo CMO

Nominated For: When fractional marketing leadership was still a foreign concept in franchising, Katherine helped launch Franchise/Fractionals alongside a group of trusted peers, an early effort to define what fractional marketing leadership should look like in a franchise system and what brands should demand from it. 

She has continued pushing the conversation forward through the podcasts Dear Frannie and Franchise Leader Spotlight, and an upcoming Franchise Marketing Spotlight, tackling candid topics like who should and shouldn’t franchise and pressing franchisor leaders on what they’re actually doing to improve franchisee profitability.

Kelly Crompvoets, Chief Marketing Officer at CRESSO Brands, LLC

Nominated For: Kelly’s background spans franchising, marketing, wholesaling, and manufacturing. She leads with the belief that people are an organization’s greatest asset. She puts her communication and marketing expertise to work by centering the customer experience, using it as a foundation for lasting engagement and business growth.

Kelly Struble, VP of Marketing at Just Between Friends

Nominated For: A marketing executive and founder passionate about building brands that connect deeply with people, she brings over a decade of experience in marketing strategy, creative direction, and growth initiatives, helping both established and emerging brands find their voice and scale with intention. 

She leads strategic marketing and brand initiatives that support the growing JBF community of 150+ franchise owners. From national campaigns to local marketing resources, her work is focused on elevating the JBF brand while equipping franchisees with tools to grow successful, family-focused events.

Kent Miller, Sr. Director, Media and Digital at Ace Handyman Services, Inc.

Nominated For: Kent made SEO a core investment for Ace Handyman Services well before the rise of zero-click search, AI Overviews, and LLM-driven local recommendations, building the structured data, content depth, and technical infrastructure that AI systems rely on to surface a brand.

He was an early adopter of AI/GEO reporting tools to assess how Ace Handyman Services was showing up in AI-generated answers and where the gaps were, then worked with SEO/GEO partner Location3 to close them through large-scale content creation, PR and third-party authority building, technical improvements to AI crawlability, and expanded Q&A content addressing the exact queries AI systems were surfacing.

Kim Freer, Chief Marketing Officer at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers

Nominated For: Kim has built Raising Cane’s into one of the most culturally relevant brands in the country. From dunking Gronk in 500 gallons of Cane’s sauce at Fanatics Fest to launching Cane’s Sauce Coke with Coca-Cola, to producing a full fashion week collection with designer Joe Ando-Hirsh and models including Livvy Dunne and Brooks Nader, her marketing operates at the intersection of pop culture, experiential storytelling, and genuine brand love.

Under her leadership, Raising Cane’s has grown to over 1,000 restaurants and opened flagship locations that function less like restaurants and more like brand experiences — including a Los Angeles location featuring a halo screen, a 185,000-tile mirrored disco ball Cane statue, and a custom steel DJ booth. With international expansion now underway and a goal of reaching 1,600 units, Kim is helping build one of the fastest-growing chains in the industry with a marketing program that punches well above its category.

Kim Gouch, Chief Brand Officer at Retro Fitness

Nominated For: Over 30 years of experience driving profitable growth across the food, beverage, and hospitality industries, Kim specializes in building and scaling brands by connecting strategy to execution. Having led her own brand and marketing agency alongside experience in highly competitive environments, she has developed a proven track record of delivering measurable results. 

Her core strengths span brand development, go-to-market strategy, innovation, experiential events and summits, public and cause-related initiatives, and digital transformation across e-commerce and social platforms, complemented by a passion for leveraging data, analytics, and financial insights to inform smart, growth-focused decisions. 

Larisa Walega, CGO at Ziebart

Nominated For: Larisa believes growth should create something that lasts, focusing her work on building brands, systems, and opportunities designed to endure rather than chasing short-term wins. She guides the evolution of a legacy brand while protecting the values that made it strong, with work spanning brand strategy, franchising, and market expansion aimed at sustainable growth for owners, teams, and communities alike. 

She is especially drawn to the intersection of legacy and innovation, and leads with a steady, clarity-driven style that values depth over speed and trust as much as performance. Beyond her role, she is committed to advancing women in franchising and expanding access, belonging, and durable growth across the industry.

Laura Peever, Director of Marketing at Sportball

Nominated For: Recognizing that Sportball’s biggest marketing challenge was consistency across a distributed franchise network, Laura built a comprehensive brand playbook and asset library that every franchisee could actually use, giving the brand a cohesive look and feel across all markets for the first time. She also reimagined the brand’s approach to franchise development, partnering with professionals from outside the franchising world to reach a broader pool of high-quality candidates and generate a significant wave of new, well-qualified leads.

Laura additionally introduced paid advertising as a core customer acquisition channel, educating franchisees on strategy, execution, and best practices across the network; paid ads now account for 18% of all new customer acquisition, a channel that barely existed before her tenure.

Laura Vodvarka, VP Marketing at HorsePower Brands

Nominated For: Overseeing marketing across a large group of HorsePower Brands franchises, Laura has pushed for change and transformation in how franchisees view and invest in local marketing and how much they trust the corporate team to help them get there. She has engaged outside partners to seek new ideas and ways of collaborating, commissioning internal marketing studies with external experts to understand the value of a healthy marketing mix and communicate it clearly across her team and to franchisees.

Lindsay Simpson, CMO at Showhomes

Nominated For: With more than 20 years of experience across brands including Athletic Republic, The Dog Wizard, Showhomes, and Aldea Franchise Group, Lindsay has built a reputation for transforming emerging and established franchise brands through strategic, data-driven marketing. As CMO of Showhomes and an owner of three Showhomes locations herself alongside her husband, she is rebuilding a 20-year-old legacy brand from the ground up for a 22-location system, starting with a new technology stack and marketing suite rolling out systemwide, and personally visited 17 of the 22 locations in 2025 on a Showhomes Roadshow to rebuild loyalty and gather franchisee input face-to-face.

Lizzie Webb, VP of Operations and Marketing at IMAGE Studios

Nominated For: At IMAGE Studios, a 140-location salon suite franchise, Lizzie has built a marketing function that moves comfortably between compelling storytelling and rigorous data. She produced the brand’s first-ever magazine, launched IMAGE Icons  (its first formal recognition program for outstanding studio owners) developed a “day in the life” franchisee content series, and created the Thankful AF campaign, which broke from the polished corporate tone most franchise brands default to.

On the data side, Lizzie built a complete marketing funnel visualization with store-level dashboards, ran a lead-source analysis across 79,000 CRM records spanning five years to directly shape ad spend allocation, and piloted two AI chatbots.

Madeleine Zook, Fractional CMO at Catalyst

Nominated For: Madeleine is a recognized leader in the franchise industry with a wealth of experience as a multi-brand franchisor, multi-unit/brand franchisee, and founder of franchise marketing, operations, and recruitment agencies. Her contributions to the industry have earned her recognition as one of USA Today’s Top 10 CMOs to Watch, along with a nomination for the International Franchise Association’s prestigious Crystal Compass Award, honoring exceptional leadership in franchising. 

Mandy Roan, Director of Marketing at Signarama

Nominated For: Mandy has turned marketing into a strategic business partner that connects franchisees, operations, leadership, and vendors around common goals, overseeing the brand’s national communications, public relations, brand engagement initiatives, convention planning, and major campaigns. 

Her leadership was on full display in Signarama’s 40th Anniversary celebration, which she built as a year-long, multi-channel initiative integrating PR, content marketing, social media, franchisee storytelling, internal communications, convention programming, and a feature documentary on the brand’s history. The campaign became a platform for recognizing franchisees and showcasing their entrepreneurial stories, generating lasting marketing assets and reinforcing pride in the brand across the network.

Marci Kleinsasser, Founder at Kleinsasser Growth Advisors

Nominated For: Marci has built her career scaling multi-brand systems by focusing on what drives real results: strong unit economics, consistent lead generation, and franchisee success in the field. Sitting at the intersection of marketing and franchise development, she connects brand strategy to execution across hundreds of locations, balancing data, technology, and AI with hands-on partnership.

She is especially passionate about the evolving role of AI in franchising, believing it can unlock efficiency without replacing the grit and human connection required to succeed at the local level. Active in the franchising community, Marci serves on the International Franchise Association’s Women’s Franchise Committee and as Co-Chair of the South Florida Women’s Franchise Network, championing collaboration, mentorship, and the advancement of women in franchising leadership.

Maria Boyle, Senior Marketing Director at Best Life Brands

Nominated For: For the past five years, Maria has led digital marketing and technology transformation at Best Life Brands, overseeing franchise development marketing and consumer digital marketing across five distinct brands. She led the effort to integrate the company’s HubSpot website lead instance with two additional brand CRMs not traditionally used for consumer digital lead flow, creating more closed-loop tracking and giving franchisees the ability to build more effective nurture campaigns through a phased rollout spanning two years.

Mario Castrejon, VP, Marketing at FranNet

Nominated For: Mario consults on marketing best practices, and manages client expectations and relationships for FranNet. He performs in-depth campaign analysis on a wide variety of digital channels and draws insights based on market trends, data analysis and client goals to advise on the best ways to improve client revenue. 

Matthew Judy, VP Performance Marketing at Floor Coverings International

Nominated For: Matthew is known for consistently pushing boundaries in digital marketing with franchisee revenue and performance always top of mind, demanding excellence from his agency and vendor partners. This past year, amid significant industry change, he stayed ahead of shifting conditions, collaborating closely across agencies and his internal marketing team to test new ideas and approaches to driving customers for the brand’s franchisees.

Michelle Morris, CMO at Clear Summit Group

Nominated For: A thoughtful, grassroots marketer, Michelle has grown something incredible at Clear Summit Group, continuing to innovate with AI and solutions built from scratch to support both her internal marketing team and customer-facing interactions.

Michelle Wells, Vice President of Marketing at Ziebart

Nominated For: Over 13 years with Ziebart, Michelle has led through collaboration to shape many of the initiatives driving the brand’s growth today, representing Ziebart within the broader franchising community through her service on the International Franchise Association’s Marketing & Innovation Committee. Among her standout initiatives is her leadership of Ziebart’s annual Detail for Dad Father’s Day contest, where she manages multiple agency partners to keep messaging and strategy aligned across the franchise system, balancing operational precision with emotional storytelling to grow the campaign’s scale and impact each year.

Nick Way, Senior Director, Brand Marketing at Home Helpers® Home Care

Nominated For: For more than a decade, Nick has been a cornerstone of Home Helpers® Home Care’s marketing success, blending compassionate, mission-driven storytelling with technology like the Cared-4™ program and Direct Link® technology, and bridging the gap between complex healthcare services and consumer-friendly brand messaging. He led the transition of the brand’s messaging from traditional service-based marketing to a “future-resilient” narrative, amplified across trade publications, targeted social campaigns, and public relations placements.

That storytelling directly fueled the brand’s national expansion, contributing to 41 new franchise territories awarded in both 2024 and 2025, with 21 more awarded year-to-date in 2026.

Scott Curkin, VP of Marketing at Window World

Nominated For: Scott is an avid storyteller and firm believer in the power of building relationships. He began his career in TV news as a content producer in both Baltimore and New York before shifting into PR and marketing amid changes in the news industry and a desire to spend more time with his family. What started as a one-year experiment while figuring out his next step turned into a lasting passion, as he fell in love with marketing. Working with major brands and non-profits to raise brand awareness and tell compelling stories across multi-media platforms to reach the right audiences.

Scott Krupa, Vice President of Franchise Development at Propelled Brands

Nominated For: Scott has modernized one of franchise development’s most persistent pain points — territory management — at Propelled Brands. Rather than settling for a slow, manual, spreadsheet-based review process, he partnered with Franchise Ninja to launch an automated Territory Check (T-Check) system for FASTSIGNS, then moved directly into a deeper CRM integration project with ClientTether that connects the platform’s dashboard, territory data, and lead activity into one system, cutting out the manual cross-referencing that used to slow down nearly every franchise development conversation.

Shana Krisan, CMO at Goldfish Swim School

Nominated For: With more than 25 years in franchise marketing, Shana has been instrumental in growing Goldfish Swim School from just 10 locations to more than 140 across North America, consistently connecting brand strategy, franchisee success, and measurable business growth. Under her leadership, the brand has developed award-winning omnichannel campaigns, including one that won Marketing & Branding Innovator of the Year.

Shana also championed one of the industry’s first marketing mastermind groups, GLOF, which continues to meet quarterly and brings together some of franchising’s best marketing minds. Her work chairing the Franchise Growth & Marketing Conference and her ongoing involvement with the International Franchise Association reflect her commitment to raising the standard for franchise marketing across the industry, not just within her own brand.

Stacey Vogler, Chief Marketing Officer at Floor Coverings International

Nominated For: Stacey joined Floor Coverings International’s in-home sales business in March 2020, just as the pandemic brought in-home selling to a halt. Rather than waiting it out, she helped drive a state-by-state pivot back to in-home sales, rebuilding the process around each state’s regulations and building safety into every step so customers felt comfortable welcoming FCI into their homes.

Stacey has closed the gap between corporate strategy and franchisee confidence by grounding decisions in data and being transparent about what is and isn’t working. She commissioned a rigorous end-to-end customer journey study to identify where FCI’s customer experience was strong and where conversion was being lost, using the findings to set priorities around changes that could be executed at scale. Since she joined in 2020, FCI’s network has tripled in size, and average unit volume has grown roughly 40%.

Tim Hackbardt, CMO at Playa Bowls

Nominated For: Tim has brought deep marketing experience to Playa Bowls, elevating a category some might dismiss as “just another smoothie concept” through a standout limited-time-offer strategy. The brand’s Mermaid SZN campaign for its summer LTOs drew widespread attention across the category this year.

Tyler Sherwood, Director of Marketing at Fully Promoted

Nominated For: Tyler recognized that Fully Promoted’s future required a scalable ecosystem that helps franchise owners confidently market their businesses locally. He has built systems, training programs, technology initiatives, and support structures that help franchisees understand not just what to do but why it matters, repositioning the brand from a promotional products company into a strategic branding and marketing partner through SEO, content development, AI adoption, and national brand storytelling.

One of his most significant contributions was leading a comprehensive brand transformation that included a website redesign, a brand anthem video campaign titled “Who Are We?”, and a library of digital assets for franchisees. When the new work was unveiled to the Ad Fund Board, members were genuinely surprised by its quality and strategic direction, a moment that reignited confidence in marketing and inspired franchisees.

Will Fraker, VP of Brand & Performance Marketing at MPR Brands / The Good Feet Store

Nominated For: Across leadership roles at The Good Feet Store, Modern Performance + Recovery Brands, and previously FranNet, Scorpion, and Sky Zone, Will has built systems that turn fragmented franchise data into actionable insight, helping franchisees connect marketing activity to in-store impact. 

He has become one of the franchise industry’s leading voices on the practical application of AI, helping brands move past experimentation into technology that improves lead generation, customer engagement, and marketing efficiency, including through his AI in Franchising survey and report that quantifies how franchise systems are actually using AI.

Yona Smith, Senior Director of Franchise Development Marketing at Threshold Brands

Nominated For: With 15 years building franchise development marketing programs, Yona now does it at scale across Threshold Brands’ full 10-brand home-services portfolio, a level of complexity most franchise marketers never touch. Rather than running each brand’s development marketing in a silo, she built and now runs a single, unified development marketing engine that serves all 10 brands at once, an infrastructure that helped Threshold award 35 new franchises in a single quarter.