Leadership

Melonie Gallegos

Founder, CEO & Lead Marketing Strategist

Melonie has worked with big brands for over a decade and a half to create integrated digital marketing programs powered by customer centric methodologies. Prior to founding Fandom Marketing®, she led strategy in top-tier digital agencies and was an in-house marketer for a diverse mix of companies ranging from manufacturing, wholesale, publishing, health & fitness, to B2B Internet technology. Over the years, her brand portfolio has grown to include Carl Zeiss Vision, Bumble Bee Seafoods, Sport Chalet, WD-40, 2000 Flushes, Taylor Swift’s Wonderstruck, Webster Bank, NetApp, Qualcomm, and TurboTax. Her aptitude for user-centered design led to co-founding 5 Start Plugins to provide WordPress solutions by marketers for marketers. As an early advocate for establishing industry social media best practices, she was the 2013 president of Social Media Club San Diego. These days Melonie’s passion is destigmatization of legal cannabis. She founded The Cannabiz Agency in 2018, a marijuana marketing agency and web design shop. Followed by the launch of TCA Images, modern cannabis stock images for positive marijuana branding. Pick up tips from her marketing strategies on Brands With Fans Blog and cannabis marketing strategies. CannabizDigital.com is our new California cannabis business publication. Visit her full bio at meloniegallegos.com for speaking engagements and guest contributor features.

Rob Marlbrough

Technology Director

Rob, aka “DowntownRob”, is a technology and marketing pro who is the go-to person everyone knows about for WordPress, technical web development, and IT for hosting. A San Diego Magazine Top Tech Exec Award nominee, SDX (American Advertising Federation, San Diego chapter) board member, and featured speaker at Wordcamp San Diego multiple times – Rob is a key figure in the web development community. He has been doing this a long time! While he will never admit his real age in marketing years, we know he has been doing this 20+ because his hosting company Web Wizards was launched in 1997. It was since rebranded to Press Wizards^® Inc. providing optimized WordPress website hosting to thousands of customers. And yes, marijuana website hosting is offered! He co-founded Fandom Marketing, a social digital marketing agency, and 5 Star Plugins, a premium WordPress plugins built in the United States, with Melonie Gallegos. He also developed Minglestream tweetwall SaaS in 2011. His prior 15 year career in Software Engineering and IT management in-house was most recently with Nik Software (acquired by Google), creators of Apple’s 2011 iPad App of the Year, Snapseed. He was a past board member of AIGA San Diego as Marketing Strategist, and the Event Director on the board of Social Media Club San Diego. You can grab Rob’s WordPress website tips on our blog Brands With Fans.