Valerie Fanelli - VP Marketing, Hughes Federal Credit Union
Valerie Fanelli spent nine years as marketing manager at Finley Distributing, launching products and activating national sports partnerships locally for Molson Coors, Constellation Brands, and Heineken USA. Sports sponsorship sales for Arizona Athletics followed at IMG, then integrated marketing and live events at iHeartMedia. As director of sales and marketing at La Paloma Country Club she grew membership sales 28%, total club revenue 65%, and golf initiation fees 150%, while cutting member attrition in half and earning a Troon Impact Award. After a stint as director of sales at Topgolf, Hughes Federal Credit Union hired her as brand and creative marketing manager in 2024 and named her vice president of marketing in January 2026. Her work there has won Diamond Awards for a complete campaign and for social media and short-form video. She also chairs communications for Angel Charity for Children.
Randy Pearsall - VP Marketing, Berwick Insurance Group
Randy Pearsall managed more than 30 people and ran over 900 promotions a year as an activation manager for the MillerCoors division of TEAM Enterprises, building personalized marketing plans for more than 100 Tucson bars and restaurants. In 2009 his market’s Miller Lite sales rose 250% and Blue Moon 45%. He worked as an enrollment advisor at Apollo Group, then sold orthopedic implants for Biomet in West Virginia, training surgical staff on instruments during complex procedures. Berwick Insurance Group hired him as vice president of marketing in 2012, and he has held the role for fourteen years. Berwick is a national independent marketing organization that recruits and supports agents selling senior insurance products, and his job is attracting and keeping the agents it depends on.
Johnny Cruz - Chief Communications & Marketing Officer, University of Arizona
Johnny Cruz taught at the JL Zwane Centre in Guguletu, South Africa, before starting his communications career at Make-A-Wish America, where he ran national campaigns in English and Spanish. He came to the University of Arizona in 2005 as director of media relations and rose to assistant vice president of communications, serving as its chief communications officer. World Vision then made him national director of public relations, handling disaster relief communications, advocacy, and celebrity engagement for the humanitarian organization. UC Riverside hired him in 2018 as chief communications officer and later named him chief communications and marketing officer. He also served there as acting chief of staff to the chancellor and twice as interim vice chancellor for advancement and president of the UC Riverside Foundation. The American Marketing Association named him a finalist for Higher Education Marketer of the Year in 2023. He returned to Arizona in September 2025 to lead communications and marketing for the university.
Lee McLaughlin - SVP Marketing, Visit Tucson
Lee McLaughlin started as a designer at Many Hats Advertising and became its creative director. Visit Tucson hired him as a senior graphic designer in 2013, and the promotions came steadily from there: creative director in 2014, senior director of marketing in 2017, vice president of marketing in 2019, and senior vice president of marketing in July 2026. Thirteen years at the tourism bureau have given him a rare path to the top marketing seat, one built from the visual side of the work. His job now covers the full brand for a destination that sells desert landscapes, food, and outdoor recreation to visitors from around the world.
Rob Mattina - VP Marketing, Tucson Roadrunners
Rob Mattina spent ten years as vice president of marketing for the Detroit Red Wings. He grew the team from five full-time staff to twenty, relaunched the Hockeytown apparel brand with a redesigned logo that lifted merchandise sales 27%, and created a school assembly program that introduced hockey to more than 50,000 children and, he says, generated more than $2.6 million in ticket sales. Earlier he spent seven years at Draftfcb Interactive building some of the largest grassroots marketing programs in the country, and five at RJ Reynolds running event marketing and brand marketing, where the Camel No. 9 line extension reached the highest initial share of any extension in brand history. After roles at iMBranded and the Arizona Coyotes, he became vice president of marketing for the Tucson Roadrunners, the Coyotes’ former AHL affiliate, in August 2024.
Frankie Lemer - CMO & Creative Director, i3 Media Solutions
Frankie Lemer has run marketing and creative direction at i3 Media Solutions in Tucson since 2002, building web, social, print, and experiential work for clients for 24 years. For nearly eight of those years she also served as director of account services at SimpleView, leading teams that supported tourism organizations and visitor-facing businesses around the world. Earlier, she owned Saguaro Artisans, a cooperative gallery of local artists, handling everything from consignment agreements to exhibition programming. More recently she has taken the same skills into dog care, leading marketing for Working for Wags under the title Chief Canine Officer and helping run a member-based indoor dog park. Customer experience is the thread across all of it.
Hasan Hamdani - CMO, RemoGPT
Hasan Hamdani spent eight years as an export marketing specialist for a textile manufacturer in West Java, Indonesia. Tucson came next. At The Rustik Collective, a group of lifestyle brands including a barbershop, a salon, and product lines, he leads design and marketing, building a unified visual identity, packaging, and campaigns across the portfolio. He also spent a year handling branding and digital content for Estate Services of Arizona. RemoGPT named him chief marketing officer in April 2025, where he leads brand, positioning, product marketing, and creative direction for a suite of AI tools built for real estate agents and mortgage lenders. His work focuses on making complex technology feel simple to the people who use it.
Courtney Leon - VP Marketing, Rancho Sahuarita
Courtney Leon joined Rancho Sahuarita as communications manager in 2012, straight out of the University of Arizona, where her coursework included market research on transplant services for the university’s academic medical center. Fourteen years later, she leads marketing for the master-planned community south of Tucson, now home to more than 20,000 residents. Her path ran through communications, then seven and a half years as marketing manager, two as marketing director, and since January 2024 vice president of marketing. The role covers both selling the development and communicating with the people who already live there: events, clubs, classes, commercial tenants, and land offerings. Her stated interest is the psychology behind how people decide where to live.
Dane Smith - CMO, Agency Rocket
Dane Smith started as a construction estimator in Tucson, then spent more than three decades building sales organizations in financial services. He was a regional vice president at Primerica with more than 100 producers, then helped recruit 4,031 independent agents in a single year as vice president of agency development at TravelMax International. As national sales director at Freedom Equity Group he managed more than 200 agents across four states and tripled indexed life and annuity production in three years. He led mortgage branches, and has run MarketingResults365, his own fundraising and marketing services firm, since 2002. He founded Wealth United in 2019 and scaled it nationally on Agency Rocket’s platform. Agency Rocket named him chief marketing officer in September 2025, where he leads marketing for the software it sells to financial and insurance professionals.
Joe Evans - Owner & CMO, Lab Coat Marketing
Joe Evans tended bar at Applebee’s while learning paid search. Automatit, a Tucson digital agency, hired him in 2016 as a paid search strategist, promoted him to lead marketing strategist, and then to director of marketing. In 2021 he founded Lab Coat Marketing in Tucson, which serves small businesses. The name reflects how he works: he follows astrophysics and astronomy closely, and he builds marketing the way scientists build theories, testing hypotheses against data rather than throwing ideas at the wall. His stated mission is helping small business owners compete with large corporations by building marketing around what their customers actually need.
Many Hats
Tucson’s marketers rarely do one thing. A credit union VP keeps a real estate referral license. A creative director runs an agency, an art gallery, and a dog care brand across one career. A design lead serves two companies at once. Even the institutional leaders here got their range elsewhere, in bars, operating rooms, Indonesian textile mills, and South African classrooms. In a market this size, versatility is how a career grows, and the people on this list have built theirs by saying yes to more than one kind of work.