Justin Sonnenreich

Tag: UNC

  • The Ecosystem Behind MarkitAds: Launch Chapel Hill and 1789

    When agency websites say “award-winning,” ask which award. Here’s our honest version: MarkitAds grew up inside the UNC Chapel Hill entrepreneurship ecosystem — Launch Chapel Hill, the venture accelerator, and 1789 / Innovate Carolina, the university’s founder community.

    What that actually gave us: structured mentorship from operators who’d done it before; deadline pressure with demo days attached; a bench of advisors (including from the University of Wisconsin network) who still answer my calls; and the campus-insider view of how universities think — which became a real asset when UNC itself became a client.

    For student founders: your university’s accelerator is the cheapest leverage you’ll ever get. Take every office hour. It’s a large part of why a bedroom company survived to become a real one.

  • A Semester at Waseda: What Tokyo Taught Me About Markets

    In 2023 I spent a semester at Waseda University in Tokyo, away from UNC and away from the American default settings of how business works.

    What stuck wasn’t the classroom. It was watching distribution executed at a level Americans don’t believe exists: konbini supply chains that restock three times a day; vending machines profitable in places no US operator would service; retail staff treating a ¥150 purchase with the ceremony of a luxury sale. Japan runs on the compounding of small, reliable, verified interactions — trust as infrastructure.

    That’s the standard I brought back to our campus operations: the table is clean, the pitch is honest, the operator shows up on time, every signup is real. Reliability at small scale is what permission to scale looks like. (Also: the best marketing conversation I had that semester was with a vending-machine restocker. Talk to operators.)

  • Inside the UNC Chapel Hill Campaign: 4–5 Intro Calls per Student, per Week

    Most of our campus work is brands trying to reach students. This one was the other direction: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — my own school — using MarkitAds‘ outreach system, MarkitOutreach, to connect its people with the outside world.

    The setup

    MarkitOutreach is our done-for-you outreach engine: list building, personalization, sending infrastructure, reply handling and booking, run as a managed service. For the UNC engagement, the goal was consistent, qualified introductory conversations — the kind that turn into partnerships, placements and pipeline — without the students doing the grinding themselves.

    The result

    4–5 introductory calls per participating student, per week, sustained across the engagement — a pipeline most professionals would be happy with, generated for students. The full write-up lives on the MarkitAds site: markitads.com/our-work/unc.

    Why this case matters more than its size

    First: the client is a university — the institution whose trust every campus marketer claims to deserve. Working for UNC, inside the rules, is a different credential than working around a campus. Second: it proves the general thesis I keep coming back to — students are an undervalued channel in both directions. Brands undervalue reaching them; institutions undervalue what systematic outreach can do for them.

    And it’s the reason our campus activation work (the pilot) starts from respect for the campus: we ran outreach for a university before we ever asked one to tolerate us.

    Sources & mentions