Launching Topstep's first national brand campaign during the Winter Olympics & Super Bowl.

When I joined Topstep in August 2025, the CEO wanted to sponsor the 2026 Winter Olympics feature their brand partner Olympic gold medalist and Topstep trader Alex Ferreira. Rather than pursue an expensive, official Olympics sponsorship with little chance of ROI, I proposed a fundamentally different strategy: build Topstep's first measurable, full-funnel brand campaign around Alex while simultaneously transforming the marketing foundation needed to support growth.

Over 15 weeks, I led the company's rebrand, redesigned the website, built its first modern marketing organization and measurement framework, launched its first integrated national campaign spanning the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl, and created the infrastructure required to turn brand awareness into measurable revenue.

The challenge was that Topstep wasn't ready for one, but the CEO/founder wanted us to be.

The company had no marketing team, never run paid media, had no lifecycle marketing, no attribution model, no SEO/GEO optimizations, an outdated website, no consistent brand identity, and no way to measure whether marketing was working.

Launching a large awareness campaign into that environment would have been expensive customer acquisition with little ability to convert or retain users.

With only 15 weeks before creative deadlines for NBC and Olympic Rule 40 approvals, the objective shifted from "launch a campaign" to "build an entire growth engine."

Instead of purchasing a multi-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship, I recommended leveraging Alex Ferreira as the centerpiece of a highly targeted media strategy.

Drawing from my experience leading Zoom's Olympic campaign, I negotiated regional Olympic media buys with NBC that focused on Topstep's highest-value markets rather than national inventory.

Because the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl aired on NBC during the same weekend, I negotiated additional Super Bowl pre-game digital inventory at no cost and remained flexible enough to capitalize on significantly discounted regional inventory during the game that became available shortly before kickoff.

One of those opportunities resulted in a premium Miami placement immediately following halftime, purchased at roughly 75% below market rates — which became one of the campaign's highest-performing media placements.

Before increasing awareness, we focused on improving the customer journey.

Working closely with Product, we redesigned onboarding around three priorities:

• Simplify first-time user activation through a more guided experience inspired by Duolingo's onboarding philosophy.
• Create an educational Trading Camp to reduce friction for new traders.
• Deliver a consistent brand experience across advertising, website, lifecycle marketing, and product.

Only after those improvements were underway did we begin scaling awareness.

One commercial couldn't tell the entire story. Instead, I developed a two-film creative platform.

The first used Alex Ferreira's Olympic journey in the snowscape mountains to establish the emotional brand story.

The second focused on explaining Topstep's product in a completely different visual world — abstract city environments and trading-inspired visual metaphors that made an otherwise complex financial product understandable in 30 seconds.

To unify the campaign, I developed a simple positioning line that extended across every touchpoint:

Traditional agencies estimated a production budget of roughly $4 million. Way out of budget.

Instead, I assembled a lean creative model that blended traditional production with emerging AI-powered creative workflows (ElevenLabs included), allowing us to produce premium-quality work for roughly one-third of the expected cost.

The campaign was developed in partnership with Scholar, a creative agency I had previously worked with at Zoom.