Leadership

The Left Brain DGA team is comprised of tenured marketing and sales executives, all of whom come directly from the marketing automation and demand generation industry. Our experience includes a mastery of the growing set of new marketing tools and traditional marketing and lead generation tactics. As a team, we’ve worked with major brands in a wide variety of industries with a strong focus in technology.

Malcolm Friedberg

President

Malcolm Friedberg is a former CMO with 20 years of marketing experience. He’s built marketing departments from the ground up, managed large marketing budgets and developed award-winning campaigns for a wide variety of media. He first became involved in marketing automation when he was running marketing for a leading financial services company and brought in Eloqua to support his 60+ sales reps. Since that time, he’s developed marketing automation programs for numerous companies including Motorola, Apple, Avery Dennison, and McKesson. Malcolm is a California-licensed attorney, published author ( Why We’ll Win) and has been nominated for an Emmy Award.

Malcolm has been named one of the Top B2B Marketing 2.0 luminaries to follow in 2010 by Propelling Brands.

In his free-time Malcolm writes novels, coaches little league and AYSO and wrestles with his three sons.

April S. Brown

Vice President, Demand Generation Strategy

April Brown has been a marketer for nearly 20 years, filling roles as CEO, VP of Strategy, Marketing Strategist, and Creative Director. Her double major in Physics and Fine Art from Reed College launched her on a career examining the intersection of the art and science of intention.

April’s strength and passion lie in the fundamentals of visual analytics — the interaction of human perception and visual data for decision support. Pursuant to that, she has collected a stock of analytics tools for marketing intelligence. She binds those with her understanding of marketing metrics, message and content, design, and data analysis to provide strategic recommendations based on a solid marketing methodology. Outside of marketing, April is an amateur naturalist and scientist. She reads voraciously, with a propensity for British mystery novels, and she has a rotten little dog called Dottie.

Valerie Peck

Vice President, Demand Generation Strategy

Valerie Peck brings over 20 years of experience from the field of Customer Experience Management (CEM) and is focused on helping enterprise marketers build sophisticated, sustainable demand generation programs. Prior to joining Left Brain DGA, she was founder and managing partner of East Bay Group, Inc., a consultancy providing comprehensive, customer-focused methodologies designed to create more profitable customer relationships. Previously, she was a west coast practice partner with Peppers and Rogers Group, a CRM consulting firm specializing in one-to-one marketing strategy. Valerie has also served as a director of Marketing for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). In addition, she was Director, Business Development and Market Strategy with Teris Consulting; Senior Manager with KPMG Peat Marwick; and Executive Director, Market Management, with Pacific Bell.

Valerie has a B.S. in Marketing as well as an MBA from the University of Southern California. In her free time, Valerie enjoys adventuring traveling, kayaking, and hiking with her three golden retrievers.

David Raab

Vice President, Analytics and Optimization

David Raab helps clients interpret the results of their marketing programs and designs complex tests that help improve results over time. Prior to joining Left Brain DGA in 2012, he operated his own technology consulting business for 25 years. As a consultant, he served business and consumer marketers in retail, insurance, financial services, communications, transportation, hospitality, and other industries.

David has written hundreds of articles on marketing technology for publications including Information Management, DM Review, DM News, Relationship Marketing Report, Bank Marketing, Target Marketing, and The Journal of Database Marketing. He is the author of Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit (Racom Books, 2009) and the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool. An archive of his published articles is available at www.archive.raabassociatesinc.com and additional research appears regularly on his blog.

He has addressed audiences in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia including the National Center for Database Marketing, Direct Marketing Association, Canadian Direct Marketing Operations Conference, CRM Evolution, DemandCon, Newspaper Association of America, National Convention on Data Driven Marketing (Australia), and Asia Business Forum.

David holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Melanie Erickson

Vice President, Sales Enablement

Melanie Erickson has 25 years of experience in enterprise sales and sales development. Her expertise lies in evaluating/redesigning existing programs as well as architecting and implementing custom sales enablement programs for large enterprise that range from onboarding to formal certification in product, domain and the C-Level Sale. Melanie most recently held the position of Director of Sales Enablement at Yammer, Inc, where she built a formal Sales Onboarding program and a Social Sales Enablement University for International SMB, Enterprise and Strategic account sales teams utilizing Yammer’s Enterprise Social Networking platform. Throughout her career, Melanie has trained or coached over 1,000 enterprise sales professionals across every major vertical market. Her past performance includes reducing ramp by 50 percent, improving add-on attach rate by 74 percent and improving sales performance over 50 percent.

Melanie holds a B.A. from Maryville University of Saint Louis and a M.A. from New College of California. She enjoys kayaking, hiking, jewelry making, and has recently renewed her love affair with the guitar.

Stephanie Hooper

Vice President, Account Management

Stephanie Hooper has more than 18 years of advertising, integrated marketing, branding, interactive marketing, direct marketing, and public relations experience on both the Client and Agency sides of the business. She held the position of Vice President of Marketing Communications at Sierra On-Line, as well as senior leadership roles at renowned agencies including Lowe & Partners, EJL, McCann-Erickson, Publicis and Razorfish and Babcock Jenkins.

Stephanie’s expertise spans B2B and B2C marketing in a variety of vertical markets including technology, retail, packaged goods, youth marketing, sports marketing, gaming, travel/hospitality, entertainment, telecom/wireless, financial services, healthcare and manufacturing. While managing the Starbucks account in Seattle, Stephanie led the account team that launched Frappuccino – Starbucks’ most successful product launch to date. While working on the Johnson & Johnson account in New York, she led the strategic partnership with Disney to launch Winnie the Pooh and Pals Bath Time Buddies, which is still noted as one of the most successful launches in J&J history.

Stephanie holds a B.A. in Advertising and Marketing from San Diego State University. She is an avid foodie, wine aficionado, outdoors enthusiast and is a citizen of both the United States and France.

Joel Ficks

Chief Operations Officer/Chief Financial Officer

Joel Ficks is responsible for the operational and financial leadership of Left Brain DGA. Previously he held the positions of CEO, EVP and CFO at Link TV, a media company providing content from around the world. Joel began his career at Deloitte & Touche and for 20 years has consulted and worked for technology, software, new media, manufacturing, service and consumer product companies like Microsoft, Dole Packaged Foods and Citibank. Joel has served as an instructor on entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley, lectured on business models for socially responsible media at Harvard Business School, served as the President and Chairperson of several non-profit boards, and acted as an advisor to several start-ups and social venture investment funds.

He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, a B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and is a licensed CPA. He is an artist and enjoys jogging in the early morning through the trails in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Ken Forbes

Chief Technology Officer

Ken Forbes has more than 20 years of experience in product management, project marketing and design, and business metrics. As Chief Technology Officer, he is focused on developing and deploying enterprise analytics platforms that monitor, measure, and analyze the workflow of mission critical applications, such as marketing automation and CRM. Prior to joining Left Brain, Ken was a SaaS consultant and product manager with Dell, Inc.’s Cloud Business Applications group. Ken was also CEO of AppointYou, Inc., developer of a multi-channel marketing platform enabling consumers to self-schedule and manage their appointments. Previously, he was CTO of Rainmaker Systems, Inc. where he oversaw IT, project management, technical support, client data services and engineering teams. After Rainmaker Systems acquired Metrics Corporation, Ken served as co-founder and CEO. He was also CTO of Blue Pumpkin Software, where he expanded the company’s product strategy from a single call center scheduling product to a suite of workforce optimization applications.

Ken holds an MBA in Quantitative Methods/Finance and a B.S. in Management Science from the University of West Florida, College of Business. In his spare time, Ken enjoys scuba diving and mountain biking.

Julie Kirby

Chief Revenue Officer

Julie Kirby has a unique background that combines both experience in the agency world and a deep understanding of technology-enabled marketing solutions. With over 15 years in sales and marketing, Julie has become a professional market maker and highly successful business development specialist in the B2B and B2C domains. Over the past five years, Julie has narrowed her focus to help clients solve challenges with marketing service solutions, analytics and technologies. With a deep understanding of the variety of marketing disciplines and experience utilizing a mix of social/viral, experiential and traditional marketing strategies, Julie serves as a knowledgeable resource for companies in their quest for sales and marketing excellence.

Julie’s past experience includes National Accounts business development positions at Eloqua, Babcock & Jenkins and Biz360, and she occasionally freelances as a marketing and biz dev consultant for projects, such as building a social media marketing strategy for an established Country Western band. The first five years of her career were spent in the Chicago Public School system as a teacher. Julie holds a Bachelors of Science from Northeastern State University and a Masters from the University of Chicago.

In her spare time Julie enjoys photography, painting, videography and spending time with her pack of dogs.