For a collaborative environment to produce meaningful results, it needs to move with common purpose toward a shared goal.

Discipline is how we lay this path; empathy ensures that we don’t stray from it. Empathy fosters an earnest dedication to making life easier for clients, better for consumers, and happier for team members.

What We Are

We are a flat organization. Minimizing individual ego and institutional hierarchy bolsters accountability and innovation across our company.

Without ego and hierarchy creating unnecessary barriers, we are better able to channel our people’s passions and ideas into the brands and projects they care about, which ultimately benefits our team members, the work, our clients and their consumers.

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Leadership

Mike Beach

Chief Executive Officer

Mark Cardwell

Chief Technology Officer

Brian Erickson

Chief Strategy Officer, Partner

Monica Reccoppa

Chief Financial Officer

Matt Hansen

VP Lead Strategist

Doug Schommer

ECD, Art Direction

Annett Napoli

Director of Project Management

Stephen Harman

Lead Developer

Mike Beach

Chief Executive Officer

Brian Erickson

Chief Strategy Officer, Partner

Matt Hansen

VP Lead Strategist

Annett Napoli

Director of Project Management

Mark Cardwell

Chief Technology Officer

Monica Reccoppa

Chief Financial Officer

Doug Schommer

ECD, Art Direction

Stephen Harman

Lead Developer

Mike Beach

Chief Executive Officer

Mike Beach is an award-winning creative strategist and co-founder of Cardwell Beach. He earned accolades at Cannes and won Effie Awards for his work on E*TRADE, which included several of the infamous E*TRADE baby TV ads and viral videos. In addition, he created dozens of print ads, product TV spots, marquees, and digital materials which helped position E*TRADE as the most groundbreaking brand in the financial services industry. He has led integrated campaigns for iconic brands including Pringles, Captain Morgan, The NFL and The Ad Council. His multi-disciplinary expertise spans concept development, creative direction, branding, and sales enablement. Mike has a love of the outdoors and extreme sports from kitesurfing to motocross to snowboarding.

Mark Cardwell

Chief Technology Officer

Mark Cardwell has demonstrated an uncommon level of talent in the digital realm and has proven himself as a pioneer. By the age of fourteen he was designing and developing websites. By eighteen, he was running his own e-commerce site when Nestle hired him to run their global intranet sites. He then spent several years developing trailblazing digital and integrated work for clients including: E*TRADE, TED, Def Jam and Eli Lilly as interactive designer and interactive art director for Fearless Concepts and Grey New York. Mark’s dedication to excellence drove him to co-found Cardwell Beach as its in-house Web guru and innovator. He is drawn to quality design and is an electric guitar enthusiast.

Brian Erickson

Chief Strategy Officer, Partner

Brian Erickson has been the head of business advisory and a partner at Cardwell Beach since 2010. Brian leads the sales and marketing teams and is responsible for developing the Cardwell Beach brand; he also cultivates strategic relationships with business partners. He has an extensive background in B2B marketing, having worked on campaigns for Philips, Speedtest.net, Samsung, and Facility Solutions Group. Before Cardwell Beach Brian co-founded Kicknote, a tech startup aggregating real-time information on over 15,000 musicians, which was acquired in 2010. Brian is an avid reader of psychology and shares Mark’s knowledge of guitars.

Monica Reccoppa

Chief Financial Officer

Monica Reccoppa’s financial and business acumen serves as an invaluable resource to Cardwell Beach clients. Earning a degree in Economics from Brown University, Monica went on to attain leadership positions with global players, from Supervisory Treasurer at JP Morgan to Operations Control/Assistant Vice President at Barclays. Monica’s entrepreneurial spirit led her to develop the MCR Personal Financial Organizer, a fiscal management tool supporting a range of clients including an entire team of corporate HR executives, a million dollar dental practice, and individual executives. In addition to serving as Finance Manager of Cardwell Beach, she is the proud mother of three: an eight year old daughter and four year old twins.

Matt Hansen

VP, Lead Strategist

As the Lead Strategist at Cardwell Beach, Matt is pivotal in guiding our creative teams to success. He expertly balances brand and client needs with pushing the boundaries of quality and strategic depth. Matt’s transition from an accomplished copywriter to a strategist is marked by his diverse experience, having written for major media like Tribune Publishing and innovative startups in various sectors.
Previously, Matt’s knack for narrative and detail was evident in his contributions to internal content and client projects, as well as in authoring a nationally-published book on senior care. Today, he combines this rich experience with strategic insight to ensure that every Cardwell Beach project not only aligns with our goals but sets new industry standards.

Doug Schommer

ECD, Art Direction

Doug Schommer leads creative projects for a variety of clients in retail, healthcare, B2B and education. Working with clients to reinvigorate their brand presence through art direction on a range of web, branding, print, experiential and video projects, Doug can be counted on to produce imaginative, on-point concepts and distill them into highly effective designs.

Doug has been putting his creative vision and conceptual thinking to work at leading advertising agencies across the country for more than 16 years, and has been the creative force behind numerous award-winning campaigns for an assortment of major brands, including E*Trade, Frontier Airlines, Pringles, Maalox, Captain Morgan, Crown Royal and Virginia Tourism.

Doug is an avid Harley Davidson rider, once refused repetitive calls from Tina Fey and often ponders on what appeared over Edison’s head when he invented the lightbulb.

Annett Napoli

Director of Project Management

Annett helps clients execute marketing strategies quickly and efficiently. Prior to joining Cardwell Beach, Annett worked in operations analysis and management at Barclays Capital, Trinity Funds, and the Galleon Group. She has also worked in hedge fund management and accounting at Vertical Group, Blue Edge Advisors, and CC Global Advisors.

Annett is an MBA graduate of the New York Institute of Technology and studied at New York University and the University of Greifswald in Germany.

Outside the office, Annett enjoys crafts of all kinds, from making greeting cards and decorations to jewelry and embroidery.

Stephen Harman

Lead Developer

Stephen harnesses his diverse talents in front-end development to create stunning and effective designs for clients at Cardwell Beach. Prior to joining the Cardwell Beach team, Stephen worked as a front-end developer and entrepreneur, mastering skills including jQuery, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, Graphic Design, Magento, WordPress, PHP, and various PHP and JavaScript libraries.

Mike Lichter

Advisor

Mike Lichter started out as a painter, became a writer, and then blended this artistry into a career as a masterful marketer. Before joining Cardwell Beach, Mike developed numerous global campaigns with tremendous reach. He introduced Captain Morgan to international markets, and he was the creative force behind the 2007 Stand Up/Speak Out global campaign for The United Nations, which broke the Guinness World Record for the most people to literally stand against poverty: 43,716,440 people in 127 countries. Additional accomplishments include creating an NFL TV spot showcased in Super Bowl XVVI and directing and animating a Creativity Top 10 music video. Mike’s art exhibitions in Baltimore, Chicago, Tel Aviv and Vienna reflect his talent and passion.

How we live our philosophy

Below are the principles we live by every day so that our philosophy fulfills its promise.

Collaboration

Strategy is not a department

In our organization, cross-functional teams work together from the very beginning. We see strategy as a philosophy—not a department—that is woven into the process.

Diligence

The quest for perfection
is never-ending

Using new learning, emerging insights, and data-driven knowledge, we consistently optimize the work—via segmentation adjustment and performance enhancement—in pursuit of better results.

Empathy

A consumer-centric
approach is paramount

Our goal is to improve the lives of consumers. Success for any marketing strategy, creative idea, or brand depends on an adherence to this simple objective

Accountability

Through stable measurement
and reporting, we own our actions

We empower marketing departments and brand teams with market knowledge and change management expertise so as to better align processes with client needs.

Adaptability

Change is a constant

We empower marketing departments and brand teams with market knowledge and change management expertise so as to better align processes with client needs.

Collaboration

Strategy is not a department

In our organization, cross-functional teams work together from the very beginning. We see strategy as a philosophy—not a department—that is woven into the process.

Diligence

The quest for perfection
is never-ending

Using new learning, emerging insights, and data-driven knowledge, we consistently optimize the work—via segmentation adjustment and performance enhancement—in pursuit of better results.

Empathy

A consumer-centric
approach is paramount

Our goal is to improve the lives of consumers. Success for any marketing strategy, creative idea, or brand depends on an adherence to this simple objective

Accountability

Through stable measurement
and reporting, we own our actions

We empower marketing departments and brand teams with market knowledge and change management expertise so as to better align processes with client needs.

Adaptability

Change is a constant

We empower marketing departments and brand teams with market knowledge and change management expertise so as to better align processes with client needs.

Culture

No Egos

We are a flat organization where ideas are valid no matter where they originate. Minimizing ego and hierarchy encourages an atmosphere in which team members not only listen to ideas outside their immediate purview but take an active interest in implementing them, which benefits clients, consumers, and colleagues alike.

Skin in the game

We work with businesses we believe in. But we know belief isn’t enough. That’s why we invest in our clients’ success through our own bottom line. Incentive-based pricing provides our clients with the security of a results-driven marketing program while ensuring our team shares both risk and reward.

Working Parents

There are many smart, self-motivated people who are as invested in their children as they are in their career. So we don’t ask them to choose between the two. Team members with children are encouraged to work from home as much as they want.

Don’t have children? Don’t worry. We are structured to nurture the careers of every talented, self-motivated marketer who enjoys working remotely.

Our Origin

Our intention was humble: build a company whose people create ideas of value, and a company that values people who create ideas.
This desire arose from our time in the trenches of the advertising industry’s largest conglomerates, where ideas were lauded as invaluable but the people who created them were treated as disposable. We simply wanted to do good work and be good — conscientious clients, supportive of each other.

The project is ongoing. If you wish to share in its evolution…