"Transforming Faith to Power"

Jessica Thorpe joined gen.video in 2006 as their first marketing hire. She quickly distinguished herself through exemplary work and by stepping up with strategic ideas and initiatives that caught the attention and pushed the leadership team's thinking. By 2015, she had risen to President and initiated an entire re-imagining of the company’s value proposition, product offerings, and branding. The only thing more impressive than the breadth of her strategic vision was taking on the enormity of the hard work and enormous faith to power through all the challenges associated with change management with limited capital resources. This makes her truly extraordinary, and she combines world-class strategic vision, tactical excellence, and determined consistency. Today, the company has been entirely transformed in line with its vision and is growing faster than ever on top of record revenues but is winning industry awards and has the highest client satisfaction ratings on G2 among enterprise clients for an influencer marketing platform.

Starting a business is hard, and many fail, regardless of gender, so the advice Jessica gives is tied to being a co-founder, not a woman. “The best support I can provide the community of female business owners is to not make it about gender at all, but provide perspective my experiences, how I navigated through challenging situations and the lessons learned along the way,” she says. “My contribution to the greater community of female business owners and career-minded professionals is to stand behind your purpose, passion, and ambitions unapologetically.”

As the story above indicates, just knowing Jessica’s background is inspiring for team members from the day, they join gen.video or encounter her at industry functions. Even more importantly, she wants to see other women and junior employees follow in her footsteps and rise up through the organization. As a mother of three young children, she champions work-life balance even as she encourages team members to focus on adding value to the organization and being personally accountable.

She spends 1:1 time with all members in her chain of command, purposefully arranging skip-level meetings and getting to know people personally and creating opportunities for anyone who indicates that they have the ambition to grow and rise professionally. Well over half of her time daily is spent mentoring, guiding and developing team members. It’s an extraordinary percentage given the breadth of her responsibilities. It would be more efficient for her to delegate with less development or handle some of the tasks personally. Instead, she leverages an infinite pool of faith that investing in people will pay off with a new generation of leaders capable of running the company and bringing credit to gen.video she developed personally.

The steadfast leader has been fortunate to have worked for and learned from some of the smartest, most passionate leaders across the technology and media industries. “Two life lessons that can be applied in your career at any point but are particularly important in leadership roles are advocate for yourself and lose the word sorry from your vocabulary. And if something you did advocate for didn’t pan out, don’t apologize. Learn, dig into why and find the learning that can be applied forward and move on. Some of the best ideas and biggest accomplishments might be right around the corner,” elucidates Jessica, who has been taking the company to new heights with this brilliant ideology.

gen.video is the premier performance-based influencer marketing platform that enables creative video storytelling to drive conversation and inspire eCommerce purchases. They are the only enterprise, all-in-one social media, influencer marketing and product video content platform providing shoppable media and eCommerce analytics under one roof. The company’s data-driven approach allows brand marketers to start exploring different partnership models when working with influencers. Introducing performance-based models is possible in the gen.video platform because they have already worked hard to integrate with global affiliate platforms, opening up one of the most comprehensive retail ecosystems to measure and monetize content at scale.

Being named #1 Highest Satisfaction Influencer Marketing Platform for enterprise on G2 is a significant achievement for gen.video. “Having the praise of some of the largest brands in the world is something that doesn’t come easy. It is a testament to the exceptional talent within the organization and the decade of experience that comes with sitting at the intersection of social media and eCommerce,” says Jessica. WL