Jessica Rader
Marketing
Jess brings together brand strategy, creative direction, trade marketing, programming, digital, and production, with a pretty good ability to figure out how to actually get the idea made.
Role at BrandAmped
As Chief Marketing Officer, Jess leads marketing and creative strategy across BrandAmped and the brands we work with. She helps brands figure out how they should show up in the market, then works with the team to actually make it happen.
Her work covers brand strategy, creative direction, campaigns, digital and social, on-premise programming, trade marketing, sales collateral, POS, merchandise, events, and creative production. She also manages the network of designers, photographers, creators, printers, fabricators, and other resources we bring in when a project needs something our internal team doesn’t do.
Basically, if it has the brand’s name on it, Jess is probably involved.
Background
Jess grew up in hospitality, starting as a busser at a golf course in Minnesota and eventually working just about every job the operation had. She spent years serving, bartending, working events, and helping manage the business before moving to California and continuing her career in fine dining.
She later helped open and build a new restaurant concept, developing its training and private dining programs before leaving hospitality to build Golden Eagle Vodka alongside her husband, Dakota. With Golden Eagle, Jess took on the marketing side of building a beverage brand firsthand, developing the website, sales materials, trade programming, campaigns, content strategy, POS, events, and much of the creative and commercial support the brand needed as it expanded into new markets.
That experience eventually became part of the foundation for BrandAmped. Today, Jess works across the BrandAmped portfolio, helping independent brands develop stronger marketing strategies and giving them access to the creative resources and execution they would otherwise have to build themselves.
Her background is a little unusual for a CMO, which is also kind of the point. She understands the restaurant, the salesperson, the consumer, and the brand, and she is just as comfortable building the strategy as she is sitting down and designing the sales deck.
