Robbie Thain - President/Founder Makai
From his work with non-profits like the American Heart Association and the Multiple Sclerosis Society to his independent private consulting with various marketing firms managing brands including Coca-Cola, AT&T, Snapple, Gatorade, and DirecTV, Robbie Thain has been a leader in the arena of promotions and event marketing for over 15 years.
Thain has worked with many companies on their marketing programs and event marketing strategies to grow market share, increase ROI, and build brand equity. From logistics to budgeting, to sourcing and sponsorship negotiation, Thain's wide range of event marketing savvy underlies his commitment to client satisfaction and campaign integrity.
At Makai, the company he launched over 10 years ago, Thain has developed proprietary, state-of-the-art reporting engines that offer best-of-breed benchmarking - a rare and valuable tool in non-traditional marketing, an area not known for its measurement capabilities.
Under Thain's stewardship, Makai has executed mobile tours, sponsorship execution, sporting events, concert tours, college tours, co-marketing strategies, multi-cultural marketing, and product sampling via event marketing, in-store demonstrations, on-premise programs and guerilla/street marketing for clients such as Red Bull, Heineken, Balance Bar, Nestle, Honda, Fox College Sports, T Mobile, Chick-fil-A, Lipton, Mervyn's, Adobe, and many more.
Thain founded Makai only four years after graduating from Loyola Marymount University, naming his company "by the sea" in Hawaiian in honor of his native state.
After getting Makai off to a successful start, Thain launched Dos Manos in 1999, a bilingual Hispanic Marketing division that focuses on marketing to the lucrative and growing Hispanic community. In January of 2006, Makai Europe opened, based out of Leipzig, Germany. And in March of 2006, Thain added yet another Makai service with the launch of the Entertainment Marketing division.
Bill Lange - Managing Director
Prior to joining Makai in September 2005, Bill spent 8 years in brand management at Nestle, most recently managing the $460MM+ Juicy Juice brand, the largest in the Nestle Brands portfolio. During his two years on Juicy Juice, Bill grew the business by over $52MM or 13%, achieving record sales levels for the brand in the process. For 6 of his 8 years at Nestle, Bill was heavily involved in Experiential Marketing, incorporating experiential marketing into his marketing plans on such brands as Nestle Nesquik and Nestle Carnation Hot Cocoa Mix.
Given his background in the “client” role for the past 8 years, Bill’s role at Makai is to enhance the agency’s credibility and expertise in providing strategic recommendations and solutions to help Makai’s clients achieve their business objectives. He is focused on demonstrating the value of Experiential Marketing and Makai in particular to new and existing clients, with the end goal being to achieve placement of Makai among its clients’ lists of retained agency partners.
Prior to working at Nestle, Bill earned his MBA from The Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA where he was awarded the “Dean’s Outstanding Student Award” in 1997. Before business school, Bill spent 4 years as a Certified Public Accountant for Deloitte & Touche in Boston. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he was a four-year letter winner and captain of the men’s varsity soccer team.
|
