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Amber Chenevert, PhD
Managing Director, Strategy & Insights | Culture Studio Lead
VMLY&R

Amber Chenevert’s mix of academic and agency experience gives her a unique perspective on brand strategy that empowers clients to embrace fresh ways to engage consumers and champion industry inclusion. Her global CPG and health technology experience showed her that customer basic needs around the world are quite similar. While her culture acumen allows her to identify nuance that helps marketing message stick. Amber holds B.S. in marketing from Hampton University, and a M.A. in advertising from Syracuse University. She earned her doctorate in advertising from The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in consumer behavior and marketplace diversity. Amber has taught both undergraduate and graduate marketing and advertising courses at The University of Texas at Austin, St. John’s University and New York University. She is also a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. As a brand strategist and the Culture Studio lead at VMLY&R, her goal is to tell human centered stories based on atypical truths. She wants to give more people the opportunity to both tell and be at the center of those stories. A marketplace diversity perspective serves as a guiding light toward her goal. Marketplace diversity considers age, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and physical ability. It also considers the history, systems, and structures that gives insight into how today’s consumers navigate their access to products, services and assert their collective power. Using marketplace diversity as a base, Amber helps brands unearth their disconnect in culture and find their connection to new market opportunities.

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Jessica Kukreti
Managing Director
VMLY&R

Jessica is a passionate qualitative researcher who champions and leads teams in the behavioral sciences. With an eye towards the future of research, she drives an innovative mindset to develop research IP to increase efficiency and empower analysis and insight. Jessica is a veteran in the unconscious and mind science research space for 19 years, where she has decoded language and emotions to unlock growth in nearly every industry and category relevant to marketers today. A driving interest of hers the learning and application of overcoming cognitive bias so teams can truly understand the complex hearts and minds of consumers. She frequently is an invited speaker at national conferences and summits:

The White House, under President Barack Obama: A Research Agenda for the next Decade

The Qualitative Research Consultants Association: Artificial Intelligence Tools to Empower Human Qualitative Researchers

FUSE Design, Culture, Brand Identity & Packaging: Inside the DIY Handmade Revolution

When Jessica is not spending time with her family, she can be found obsessively reading about mountaineering in the Himalayas.

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Carrie Patterson Reed
Executive Director, Research Studio
VMLY&R

Carrie has never really thought of herself as a traditional researcher per se. Rather, she sees her job as thinking about how other people think and bringing that to light in new and interesting ways. She finds it endlessly fascinating to hear stories from consumers about who they want to be, what they say (and don’t), and how they frame ideas that they sometimes didn’t even know they had. Curiosity and empathy are at the heart of her work — always pushing to learn more, get out of our bubbles, and connect the dots — all in an effort to unearth our blindspots and find data-driven stories that unlock new creative opportunities. Carrie heads up the award winning Research Studio at VMLY&R — the group’s mission is to power curiosity across the organization to spark new thinking. She focuses on pushing industry best practices forward with board positions with the Advertising Research Foundation as well as the Design Thinking program at Missouri State. Prior to this, Carrie worked at Olson Zaltman, Digitas, and as a consultant in the Arts. She has worked across small start-ups and large Fortune 500 companies, and across a spectrum of verticals and brands. It keeps her on her toes to always be learning something different and applying it in new ways. She has a graduate degree from Columbia University in Arts Management — with an emphasis on Advertising and Communications, and an undergraduate degree from Christian Brothers University in Psychology and Art. In her spare time, she is an experimental gardener and artist, where the creative process is definitely prized over the sometimes dismal outcomes.

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