Celebrating the People Behind the Brands: The 2026 Franchise Marketing Live Awards

On November 2 and 3 in Denver, Franchise Marketing Live launched with something new: our first-ever awards, honoring two winners and eight finalists whose work is shaping franchise marketing right now.

Why we created these awards

When we built Franchise Marketing Live and the Mastermind groups, we kept coming back to one idea: every brand is only as strong as the people behind it.

Franchise marketers take a national brand and turn it into something a local owner can actually use in their market, with their budget, on a random Thursday. And most of that work never gets a spotlight. The campaign gets the credit. The brand gets the credit. The person who built the playbook, the checklist, the dashboard, or the strategy that made it all work goes back to their desk.

So this year, we created two awards to change that.

Two awards, two stages of a career

Ones to Watch celebrates people who are newer to franchise marketing, or newer to the scope of what they are now doing, and who are already punching way above their weight. One honoree is named Rising Star of the Year.

Marketing Trailblazer of the Year honors an established leader whose vision and body of work have shaped how our field operates, and whose influence reaches well beyond their own brand.

The nominations were strong, and the scores were really close. Close enough that announcing a single winner in each category would not have told the whole story. So before each award was presented, we stopped to recognize four finalists on stage. Each of them was put at the top of a very strong field by a panel of their peers, and we wanted the room to know it.

The judging panel

Every entry was read and scored independently by five people who know this work from the inside, and who gave real time, on top of their own busy roles, to read every submission carefully:

• Brooke Janousek, Fractional CMO, The Grow CMO
• Madalina Iordache, Bright Pink Agency
• Marci Kleinsasser, VP of Franchise Development Marketing, HOTWORX
• Dawn Abbamondi, CMO, SMB Franchise Advisors
• Katherine LeBlanc, Fractional CMO, Apollo CMO

Thank you to each of them for the time, thought, and care they put into this. (And no, Liane was not one of them. She has too many favorites.)

2026 Rising Star of the Year: Kenzie Venters Bowlby, IMAGE Studios

Kenzie Venters Bowlby, Marketing Manager at IMAGE Studios, found her way into marketing during the pandemic while running her own secondhand clothing business. She realized the part she loved most was not the clothes. It was the photography, the graphic design, and the social strategy. That was the moment she knew marketing was what she wanted to do for a living.

In just the past year, she was handed the reins to build a New to Market strategy from the ground up: a repeatable framework that supports owners starting as early as 30 days before they sign a lease, all the way through build-out and opening.

She partnered with Operations on a Hot City initiative that lines up every franchise development tactic, from LinkedIn to broker communications to paid ads, behind the exact markets the brand wants to fill. She also took a tour folder that had been in use for years and turned it into an eight-page branded magazine, the first of its kind in her category.

And when one of her franchise social calendars got real pushback from owners, she stood behind it. It became one of the best-performing organic campaigns of the year, with impressions more than four times the year-to-date average.

“I’d rather produce something bold enough to get a reaction than something so safe it disappears into the feed.”

Kenzie told us that talking herself up does not come naturally. So we are happy to keep doing it for her.

Ones to Watch finalists

Leah Pinkes, Franchise Marketing Coordinator, ohDEER. Leah stopped writing blogs about what the team thought mattered and started writing about what homeowners were actually searching for. Organic clicks nearly doubled and impressions more than tripled.

Meagan Corey, Director of Marketing, Graze Craze. At a brand that grew to 130 shops in five years, Meagan and her team got boots on the ground with franchisees and changed how the whole system sees marketing.

Taylor McCarley, Director of Marketing, Black Optix Tint. A marketing team of one at a 35-location brand, Taylor built AI workflows that are delivering a new brand website in-house and saving nearly $70,000 in development costs.

Renee King, Director of Brand and Franchise Growth, Transworld Business Advisors. Renee produced Transworld’s first official testimonial videos, telling the stories of real buyers and sellers in their own voices.

2026 Marketing Trailblazer of the Year: Shana Krisan, Goldfish Swim School

Shana Krisan, CMO of Goldfish Swim School Franchising, was the very first marketing hire at her brand. Nearly 13 years later, she has helped Goldfish grow from 12 locations to 212, and built a marketing organization designed around one thing: franchisee success.

Her philosophy is simple. Franchise marketing has to work for the brand, the system, and the individual franchisee, all at the same time. National brand building and local lead generation are not competing priorities. They are parts of the same growth system.

And she proved it. In a category traditionally dominated by local, bottom-of-funnel advertising, she made the case for creating demand, not just capturing it. Her national media strategy reached 5.2 million households and contributed to nearly 17,000 enrollments, an estimated $21.9 million in lifetime value.

She also saw early that parents would start asking ChatGPT and Google’s AI where to sign up for lessons. Her team built more than 1,000 pieces of localized content to make sure every school shows up.

Shana has chaired the Franchise Growth Marketing Conference and serves on the IFA Marketing and Innovation Committee. After more than 30 years in franchise marketing, she still says there is always something new to learn.

“Franchisees do not need more marketing activity. They need marketing that makes their businesses stronger.”

Marketing Trailblazer finalists

Larisa Walega, Chief Growth Officer, Ziebart. Larisa brought Bart the Knight out from behind the shield and into the brand’s first branding campaign in more than 20 years, delivering over $30 in return on ad spend.

Lizzie Webb, VP of Marketing and Operations, Gorgeous Collective. Lizzie shifted IMAGE Studios from counting leads to measuring the whole funnel, and her AI speed-to-lead pilot hit a 44% lead-to-tour rate against a 15% benchmark. (Yes, that is Kenzie’s boss. It was a big day for IMAGE Studios.)

Abby Fogel, VP, Brand Management and Communications, Unleashed Brands. Abby helped shape and launch KidHub for families across the Unleashed portfolio, and built franchise development marketing for Water Wings Swim School from the ground up.

Ashley Mitchell, CMO and VP of Marketing, ZorAbility, East Coast Wings + Grill, and Sammy’s Sliders. Ashley led East Coast Wings + Grill back to what makes it special, making flavor the hero again with “Find Your Flavor.”

Thank you

To all ten of our winners and finalists: thank you for the work you do for your brands and your franchisees, and thank you for letting us celebrate you. We cannot wait to see what you do next.

You can see the full list of 2026 Trailblazer nominees and Ones to Watch on our website. Nominations for next year’s awards will open in July, so start keeping a list of the people around you who deserve the spotlight.