Coming of Age Leadership
Chris Gilmartin
President
A seasoned marketing professional, Chris has more than 20 years of experience and expertise in performance-based marketing for clients, including FTD, Experian, Quest Diagnostics and Carrington College. Leading a team of online and offline marketing specialists, Chris provides results-driven, advanced marketing strategies for marketers across various industry segments.
Prior to acquiring Coming of Age, Chris successfully founded Lever Interactive and grew the company to one of Chicagoland’s premier online agencies. He is often a featured speaker at Google, and has earned the recognized distinction of becoming a Google Premier Agency Partner.
His career also includes serving as Director of Strategic Accounts at Resolution Media (Omnicom). In this role, he managed a staff of search marketing professionals and served as strategy director for Resolution Media’s premier Fortune 500 clients, including Bank of America, Lowes and Discovery Channel. Chris also helped to launch Resolution Media’s SEO service offering.
Before Resolution Media, Chris worked as eMarketing Manager for Orbitz, a leading online travel agency, and Director of Marketing for Doubleclick. In these roles, he managed multi-million dollar campaigns, in addition to planning and executing all marketing and acquisition initiatives across a variety of media channels.
Chris is a graduate of Western Illinois University, with a Bachelor of Science in Communications.
Carla Peknik
SVP, Client Strategy
Carla’s passion for accountable advertising began with her years of experience in direct marketing. Working for top Agencies such as the Townsend Agency and DraftWorldwide, she honed her tracking, measurement and analytical skills, and emerged as a leader in the development of sound strategic planning based on the creation of actionable data. She believes in using results to ground and guide, without limiting the genius of the creative mind.
Increasing market share for clients such as Reebok, American Medical Association and Bank of America are some of the hallmarks of her career. Using her knowledge of integrated customer relationship planning, she has increased retention rates for multiple clients, such as GTE. Combining the strengths of multiple online and offline mediums, and implementing ongoing testing strategies have allowed her to increase acquisition rates while decreasing their associated costs for clients such as Discover Card. A seasoned marketer, Carla has experience in Print, Direct Mail, Radio, TV, Outdoor, Email, Display, Search and Website development.
By delving into the psychology of aging markets, she has helped clients such as Philips and Humana reach target audiences using communication techniques designed to specifically appeal to people during the Fall and Winter of life.
Carla’s work has been featured in AdAge and DMNews, and she has repeatedly been requested as a panel speaker for the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing.
