Theresa Swiggum celebrates ten years at Collective Measures
Theresa, a Media Director at CM, is a strategic powerhouse with 13+ years in marketing and a sharp focus on B2B lead generation. For the past ten years at Collective Measures, she’s helped brands across industries — from healthcare and finance to ag, tech, and energy — break through to high-stakes audiences. Her cross-vertical expertise brings a unique, big-picture lens to the nuanced world of media strategy.
To celebrate the last ten years with Theresa, we sat down to reminisce about her tenure at Collective Measures.
Q: What made you decide to apply to Collective Measures ten years ago?
A: I’d heard of Nina Hale while working at a smaller agency, hoping to find more of a mid-sized shop. Soon, a media director at NH contacted me via LinkedIn for an open role in display media, a department of one! The more I researched the company, the more I realized it was going to be a perfect fit in terms of my background and the type of agency I was looking for.
Q: Tell us about your first day.
A: The things I remember about this day are so arbitrary. 1) We were so small that the media director walked me around and introduced me to each and every employee. The smile was frozen to my face as I said “nice to meet you!” about 50 times. 2) My Dad was having major surgery that day (he’s now ok!). So I was a bit distracted, but luckily my duties weren’t much more than setting up my email, taking a personality assessment, getting my ID picture taken, and reading through the company handbook. 3) My now friend and colleague Katie Tweedy was gearing up for AdFed’s 32 Under 32 awards that night, for which she was nominated. If you know her, you will not be surprised in the least to learn she won later that night! 4) I had the stark realization that I had to switch from Outlook to Gmail. I did not go down without a fight!
Q: How has the agency’s connections strategy team, or our approach to that work, changed over the years?
A: When I started, there were 4–5 media directors, but there was no “team” per se. They were considered part of all teams. A couple years in, the media strategy team was formed, and I joined shortly after when I was promoted to media supervisor. At the time, almost everyone on the team had a background in performance media. I was coming from the display (now brand media) team, which with my awareness-media background, I helped build from the ground up. Over the years, I’m glad to say we moved toward more full-funnel strategy, and changed our name to the integrated media team, then eventually to connections strategy. With each evolution, we’ve become more holistic in our approach, incorporating strategies across media, content, SEO, and advanced analytics. I’m most excited about the research tools we’ve onboarded in the last few years to deepen our clients’ marketplace insights (audience, competition, industry trends, etc.).
Q: What is your greatest achievement during your time at Collective Measures?
A: I’m quite proud of the work we’ve done for a long-term healthcare client over the years, a client I’ve had since my first year at the agency. Our work has always been cohesive, with a holistic view across content, measurement, and media. We have had to get creative with measurement, given regulations around healthcare marketing, and have done some very early customer journey mapping. We took over their traditional media during my first year as a media strategist, so I had to learn traditional while also learning performance media and managing the display team. The next year, we did some really exciting work that won us a finalist position for an industry award! We included memorable out-of-home executions like train wraps and an airport takeover, and came up with the perfect blend of linear and “programmatic TV,” a very new concept at the time. But I’m also quite proud of the work that came after, when we edited plans down to balance impact and efficiency, and dug more into their key audiences and competitive findings.
Q: What do you envision the next ten years at Collective Measures looking like?
A: We will likely lean more into audience exploration, using research to build out personas and content insights. I see us continuing to evolve our service offerings, like we’re doing today with retail media and TV. I’m also working with a team to strengthen our B2B strategies to ensure a tailored approach to each vertical — I’m very excited to see how this grows over the next few years. What I like about working at CM is the ease with which we take on new challenges — we don’t shy away from the unknown, meaning endless possibilities.
Thank you, Theresa! We are honored to have you as a pillar of our collective.
