Chip Smith - CMO, Jewelry Television
When Chip Smith joined Jewelry Television in 2020, digital accounted for about 30% of its revenue. He says it’s now 55%. That shift, for a business built on broadcast shopping, came through a marketing mix model, a JTV Rewards loyalty program that lifted retention, an affiliate program he says added $19 million in performance-based revenue, and a relaunch of the Judith Ripka brand that doubled its return on ad spend. He also launched the Jedora jewelry marketplace nationwide. The resume behind it is unusually broad: Ryder truck rentals, Johnson Controls, eight years at Monster.com running a $200 million global media budget, the Waste Management Phoenix Open, and CMO of Sears Home Services. A University of Tennessee graduate, he finally came home to Knoxville by way of Malibu Boats in 2019. As a summer intern in 1985 he picked a site for a gas station. It’s still there.
Alicia Longworth - Deputy AD & CMO, Tennessee Athletics
John Wilkerson, the longtime radio voice of Tennessee baseball, spent years calling games from what Alicia Longworth cheerfully describes as a closet. He has a proper booth now, part of the Lindsey Nelson Stadium renovation she helped shepherd, which added nearly 2,000 seats while keeping what she calls its “hornet’s nest” atmosphere. That’s a small window into a large job. Since November 2024 she has been deputy athletics director and chief marketing officer, overseeing ticketing, fan experience, broadcasting, licensing, concessions, and creative across every Tennessee venue. She brought outbound ticket sales in-house, and Neyland Stadium has sold out its season tickets four years running. She helped land sponsorships with Food City, Pilot, and First Horizon, and the 2026 Tennessee x adidas launch. Before Knoxville came eleven years at Florida, where she helped launch the Gators’ Jordan Brand partnership. She started out running the mascot program at Virginia Tech.
Ron Feinbaum - Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer, PYA
Ron Feinbaum calls PYA one of the best-kept secrets in Knoxville, and his job is to change that. The accounting and healthcare consulting firm hired him as CMO in 2024 and added business development to his title in July 2026. It’s a sharp turn from consumer media, where he spent more than two decades at Scripps Networks Interactive. He turned its interactive business from losses to profit, helped acquire Allrecipes, and then built licensing for HGTV and Food Network from nothing. He says those licensing programs reached more than $700 million in retail sales across stores including Lowe’s, Kohl’s, and Sherwin-Williams. He also ran the HGTV Dream Home giveaway, building roughly eight homes a year with more than 60 sponsor products each. After five years as a partner at the consultancy Boldsquare, he came to PYA. He serves as a commissioner of the Knoxville Utilities Board.
Charlotte Havely - VP Marketing, Knoxville TVA Employees Credit Union
Five younger employees at Knoxville TVA Employees Credit Union had the same complaint: they wanted to use the credit union’s savings certificates but couldn’t afford the minimum deposit. The credit union answered with Set It & Forget It, a certificate that opens with $25 a month, and Charlotte Havely’s team took it to market. They timed the launch for August, when East Tennessee goes back to school, and promoted it on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to reach younger savers. By the end of 2024 it had 341 accounts holding about $400,000, and the data held a surprise: the average account holder was 40. Havely has led marketing at the $4.6 billion credit union since 2018, a period in which it made community service a formal performance measure for the first time and set a goal of 10,000 employee volunteer hours in a year. Her explanation was simple: this is the Volunteer State.
Angie Burke Droz - VP Marketing, TriMech
Salons, dairies, banks, environmental software, 3D printers. Angie Burke Droz has marketed all of them, and she has a reputation for keeping the ship afloat in the middle of it. She started in corporate communications at Rural/Metro, worked as a senior account executive at Asen Advertising, and spent five years running marketing communications and corporate events for Environmental Systems Corporation, all while running her own fractional CMO consultancy on the side for more than sixteen years. TriMech hired her as vice president of marketing in 2011, and she has now spent fifteen years building a full marketing department for the engineering technology company, which has grown to more than 400 employees. Her work has established TriMech as a leading partner for Dassault Systèmes, SOLIDWORKS, and Stratasys, selling 3D design software, printing, and training to engineers who are not easy to impress.
Kristin Rakoczy - VP Marketing & Investor Relations, Konexial
Kristin Rakoczy’s first job was selling at Blackberry Farm, the luxury resort in the Smokies. Hospitality stayed with her. At Provision Healthcare she started as a hospitality coordinator for cancer patients, then led the patient experience program, then managed marketing and public relations. In 2018 she moved into logistics technology as Konexial’s director of marketing, and became vice president of marketing and investor relations in 2021. Konexial sells a single platform for dispatch, telematics, freight fraud prevention, and asset tracking to carriers, shippers, and brokers, and in May 2025 she relaunched its website to help buyers make sense of a fast-expanding product line. Her remit also covers the company’s investor communications, an unusual pairing for a marketing leader. She holds a marketing and international business degree from Samford University.
Jim Evans - VP Marketing & Air Service Development, Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority
Persuading an airline to add a route is one of the hardest sales in marketing, and Jim Evans has been making it for most of his career. He started in 1981 as a city sales manager for Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, Norfolk, and Philadelphia, then spent nine years as a district sales manager for US Airways. He ran his own aviation marketing consultancy, then spent eight years recruiting air service for the Newport News/Williamsburg airport. The Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority hired him in 2007, and nineteen years later he still leads marketing and air service development for McGhee Tyson. The role connects airline recruitment with advertising, economic development, and tourism marketing. More than four decades in commercial aviation sit behind it, along with an aviation management degree from Auburn and certification from the American Association of Airport Executives.
Nancy Howard - VP Marketing, Provision Healthcare
Nancy Howard spent more than seven years selling meetings at the Hyatt Regency Knoxville, then led sales and marketing as president of Visit Knoxville, where she helped plan the city’s current convention center. A decade later she was building something very different: the patient experience program at the Provision Center for Proton Therapy, which treats cancer with a form of targeted radiation. She later led the Provision CARES Foundation as president for ten years. Since 2016 she has been vice president of marketing for Provision Healthcare, covering its proton centers, its ProNova Solutions device manufacturing business, diagnostic imaging, and clinical research. When the National Association for Proton Therapy’s 2020 conference couldn’t meet in person, she was its chair, and she moved it online. Few marketers have sold a city’s hotels and a cancer treatment with the same hospitality instincts.
Katie Powell - VP Marketing & Communications, HES Facilities Management
In the 2005 holiday season, Katie Powell coordinated 105 events in 22 days at Club LeConte. Before that she sold catering at the Knoxville Marriott, where she won its Spirit to Serve customer service award twelve times, and led community relations for United Way of Sevier County, winning a state media award for a campaign video. Event skills turned into a career in facilities services. She spent ten years running the education division’s marketing department at GCA Services Group, managing proposals for a business serving more than 320 schools and universities, then led education marketing and events at ABM. HES Facilities Management, a Knoxville company that cleans and maintains schools, hired her in 2020 and promoted her twice, to vice president of marketing and communications in August 2024. She also leads marketing for The Clean-Tech Company.
Tracy Watkins Young - VP Marketing, Functional Pathways
Tracy Watkins Young spent 22 years at TeamHealth, leading marketing while the company grew from $400 million to more than $4 billion in revenue. She led a team of 20, built the industry’s first inside sales call center for generating leads, and took on its client retention program, raising marketing-originated leads 48% and proposals 70% over three years. American Physician Partners then made her senior vice president of business development, marketing, and communications in Nashville. She has also run her own fractional CMO practice, TYoung Communications, since 2015, advising healthcare brands. Functional Pathways, a Knoxville rehabilitation therapy company, named her vice president of marketing in June 2025, leading brand awareness for new service lines and markets. She started out coordinating real estate licensing classes, a job she held through high school and college to pay her tuition.
The Volunteer State
Charlotte Havely put it plainly: this is the Volunteer State, and service is built into how people here work. You can see it across this list. Hotel sales desks trained three of these marketers in hospitality. A credit union measures community hours. An airport executive spends decades persuading airlines to serve the region. A cancer center’s marketing chief started by building its patient experience. Knoxville’s marketing leaders tend to treat customers as neighbors, and several of them came home after successful careers elsewhere to do exactly that.