Two Ad Grads Added to Grady Alumni Board

We are pleased to welcome advertising grads Dana Todd and Mike Martin to the Grady College Alumni Board.

Dana Todd is VP of the Performance Innovation team at Performics which collaborates with Performics' global network and partners to explore and evaluate opportunites throughout the performance marketing landscape. She and her team combine proprietary solutions with platform partners to unlock incremental and big-win opportunites across emerging media and new technologies. Since 1996, Todd has driven value for hundreds of companies, helping them find actionable insights and success in interactive marketing. Her career spans a variety of practices including search marketing, first leading San Diego interactive agencies Bien Logic and SiteLab, then founding SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) and its training arm SEMPO Institute. Most recently, Todd launched Newsforce, a starteup that redefines how companies think of advertorial and sponsored content. She is a favorite speaker at Search Engine Strategies, ad:tech, OMS, SMX, OMMA and regularly provides insight to the financial press and industry.

Armed with an undergraduate degree in Advertising from The University of Georgia, a stint at Oxford studying the History of the Reformation and two years of post-graduate work in Art Direction, Mike Martin started his career at DDB in Dallas where he created award-winning advertising for Midway Video Games. Tabasco Hot Sauce and JCPenney. Next, he spent four years in Boston working for Arnold Worldwide. His work for The American Legacy Foundation's "truth" campaign (anti-tobacco industry) helped create one of the most successful and highly-awarded advertising campaigns ever. During that time, he also helped Monster grow into the premier online job-recruiting site and served up some creative nuggets for McDonalds.

Boston wasn't cold enough for Martin, so he was off to Minneapolis and Carmichael Lynch where he worked on national brands that included Harley Davidson, Fetzer Wines and Jack Link's Beef Jerky which he helped win and manage. When his hometown of Atlanta came calling, he moved back and served as Chief Creative Officer at Fletcher Martin. But soon the entrepreneurial bug bit him and in 2007, Martin started his own boutique, creative agency Skylab-B, which he currently owns and manages.

Over the last several years, Martin has created fully integrated, cross-platform campaigns for the Department of Homeland Security launching the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. He worked on presidential political campaigns, The Prekness Stakes, Coke Zero and public service campaigns for the American Lung Association. In order to expand his expertise into the branded entertainment sector, Mike partnered with the acclaimed film director Glen Owen to launch Martin+Owen in 2009.

Martin's work has been recognized by numerous marketing industry awards including the One Show, D&AD, Clios, Mercury Awards and Communication Arts Magazine. He still contends that his greatest work was the birth of his twins last December.