The Digest: Fairfield County Marketing & Media Pros

Local insights, global trends, new opportunities.

Author

Shawn Kallet
September 22, 2025

Today’s newsletter starts with a personal note. Thank you to everyone who came to our Oktoberfest happy hour last week in Norwalk. This was our fourth event, and easily our best one yet. We expected 20+ people and quickly topped that in the first hour. I’m especially thankful for our sponsor, Total Mortgage Arena, which gave away Bridgeport Islanders opening night tickets. Congrats to Garth Tiedje, Krisanne Fiorita, and Bob Brown for winning tickets!  

We started these monthly happy hours to bring local leaders together for casual networking, catching up with friends, and learning about new opportunities. We’re living through massive disruptions to how we work, live, and communicate with each other. Research shows that a heavy reliance on technology and AI has left Gen Z and Millennials feeling disconnected, while older generations exhibit declining trust levels.

Live events help create meaningful connections that build trust. In the 2025 Freeman Trust Report, 92% of working professionals stated that live events have a positive impact on their perception of brands. IRL community events generate powerful word-of-mouth effects when learning from peers. Research shows that 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know more than any other marketing channel, and 72% of consumers share their good brand experiences with others.

If you came to our event, thank you for helping make it special. We couldn’t do this without your support and feedback. If you haven’t made it to an event yet, we hope you’ll consider joining us next time. Stay tuned to this newsletter and our LinkedIn group for updates. 

Top Stories

Let’s make a deal: YouTube caters to brands and podcasters by making its ads more flexible | Tubefilter | At its annual Made On presentation, YouTube revealed that it paid out $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies between January 2021 and December 2024. With a slew of new products, the Google-owned hub is looking to push those payouts even higher. On the ad side, YouTube is introducing dynamic insertion for branded segments of long-form videos.

Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators | TechCrunch | Google announced on Wednesday that it’s updating the Discover page in its flagship Search app to allow you to follow specific publishers and creators to surface more content from those you like.

Local Spotlight

Mrs&Mr Launches Bold Rebrand and Campaign for Conair Personal Hair Care | MarComm News | Mrs&Mr, the creative, design and branding agency, is launching a redesigned visual identity and advertising campaign for Conair, the leading hair beauty brand that introduced the iconic pistol-grip hair dryer to America in the 1960s.

What If All Media is Marketing? | Doug Shapiro - Substack (Free) | If over the next 5-10 years GenAI reduces the cost of content creation as much as the internet brought down the cost of content distribution, what happens? The short answer: most content won’t be profitable and value will shift to complements.

Upcoming Events

Startup Wesport: Innovator of the Year 2025 Awards | Startup Westport is honoring Mark Shapiro, President and Chief Operating Officer of TKO Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: TKO) and President and Managing Partner of WME Group, as its 2025 Innovator of the Year, and Sweet P Bakery as its Community Impact Innovator Award recipient. The awards ceremony is on October 8th, at 6 p.m. at the Westport Library.

Reputation MADE | Registration is now open for “Reputation MADE,” the third installment in Connecticut’s MADE Leadership Series of conferences, on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at UConn Stamford. The conference will focus on marketing, public relations, and other communications and is geared toward businesses, nonprofits, and public officials, an announcement from the Governor’s Office said.

Local Jobs

Head of CRM | Philip Morris International | Stamford CT

Senior Director, Ad Sales Planning & Pricing | FanDuel Sports Network | Southport, CT

Brand Manager-Splash | Primo Brands | Stamford, CT

Director, Experiential Marketing | OpenTable | Norwalk, CT

Vice President, Digital Marketing Creative | SPECTRUM | Stamford, CT

What’s Next?

This digest is a starting point. The goal is to build a community of senior marketing and media professionals in Fairfield County. If you have news to share, a campaign to highlight, job opportunities, or an event to promote, please email me at [email protected] 

Best,

Shawn

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