Festival Speakers

Gia Medeiros
Founder and Chief Strategic Officer
520 Collective

Gia Medeiros founded 520 Collective with the belief that all business is ultimately people-to-people. Therefore, organizations don't just need great branding, they need their people to cultivate ongoing habits of being that generate a truly great brand.

She has been on the leading edge of the branding evolution, first as an account planner at Deutsch in the early 1990s, where she saw the potential for strategy to reach well beyond clever advertising tactics, and then at Kindred Keziah, one of the country's first boutique branding firms, where she championed her clients' struggles to integrate brand beyond the marketing department.

With 520, every project—from small-scale research to large strategic planning platforms—begins with the framework of being a P2P brand cultivator. The goal is not just "an answer" but clients, customers and agencies who are more deeply engaged in the collective process of creating the brand itself. 520 clients span the gamut from agencies (GSD&M, DDB) to individuals (Hillary Rodham Clinton) to organizations small (Center for Resource Conservation) and large (Coca-Cola, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens, Office Max, the Ad Council and Oprah Winfrey's new TV network OWN).