Marketing, PR & Breaking the Mold

Lessons from Andrea Brimmer. Chief Marketing and PR Officer, Ally Financial Inc.

Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025, 5:30 pm
Location: Longacre House
Address: 24705 Farmington Rd., Farmington Hills, MI or Attend Virtually.
RSVP: Purchase tickets through this link.
Registration Deadline: April 1, 2025

Join us for a captivating conversation with Andrea Brimmer, the Chief Marketing & PR Officer at Ally, as she shares her career journey and her success at Ally Financial Inc. in redefining the financial services landscape with bold campaigns and consumer-focused messaging.

This is an extraordinary opportunity to:

Gain career wisdom from one of Forbes’ most influential CMOs and a 2024 Hall of Fame inductee.
Explore how Ally integrates marketing and PR to engage audiences in meaningful ways.
Learn about their bold decision to support women’s athletics.
Get practical advice for advancing in communications and marketing fields.
Hear personal reflections on what Andrea might have done differently on her journey to the top.

Moderated by Emmy Award-winning journalist Paula Tutman, who is also founder of North on Woodward, a company offering team building and communication workshops.

This event promises inspiration and actionable insights for women across corporate communications, advertising, journalism, marketing, PR, and sales. Don’t miss this unique chance to engage, connect, and learn from a true industry trailblazer.

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Meet Andrea Brimmer, Chief Marketing and PR Officer at Ally:

Andrea Brimmer is the chief marketing and PR officer of Ally Financial and is responsible for leading all aspects of the company’s integrated marketing and brand transformation, driving unprecedented growth and disruptive consumer engagement. 

Brimmer joined the company in 2006 and spearheaded the creation and launch of the Ally brand in 2009. Since becoming CMO in 2015, she has unified the brand under the company’s “Do It Right” mantra, and at her direction, Ally has established itself as a “different” kind of financial services company, dedicated to solving customer pain points that traditional institutions ignored. 

Brimmer is widely recognized as one of the country’s most innovative and effective marketing leaders. She has appeared on the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMO list five times, earning her a spot in the 2024 Forbes CMO Hall of Fame. Her many other honors include 2024 She Runs It Women of the Year, 2023 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50, 2023 Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and the 2020 Adweek Brand Genius award. She holds several board positions with organizations including eHealth, Ad Council, Effie Worldwide, American Advertising Federation, Mobile Marketing Association and Women’s Sports Foundation. Brimmer also serves on multiple advisory boards at Michigan State University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree and played varsity soccer for four years.

Meet the Moderator, Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Paula Tutman:

Multi-Emmy winning and multi-Emmy nominated broadcast journalist, Paula Tutman spent more than 42 years in front of the camera as a broadcast news reporter and was inducted into the Michigan Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2024. A Peace Corps brat who grew up in Africa, she has spent the last 32 years living in and falling in love with Detroit and her adopted “soul’s home”, the State of Michigan. Paula has vast experience in numerous reporting genres. She spent 8 years as a police reporter in Louisville, Kentucky and Baltimore, Maryland.

A charter reporter for WDIV Detroit’s First-at-4 news broadcast as a specialty correspondent with a focus on interesting and relevant topics with a deep regard for stories that have elements of human interest and social justice, Tutman was part of the structuring team for the new program in 2014.
Paula is dedicated to the craft and responsibility of professional journalism. Of the 11 interns she has mentored and trained, all successfully pursued and achieved employment in the broadcast industry.

Paula is also a serial Creator-Preneur. “I don’t believe we are the sum total of our jobs,” Paula states. “Women are master multi-
taskers and I intend to follow every thread my talent takes me for the sheer joy of stretching who I am and what I can create”. She is the innovator of Bra-Less Bra, Instant Cleavage Sculpting SolutionTM—a bra alternative that literally supports all women fighting gravity. Steadfastly believing in manufacturing a product in the U.S.A., Bra-Less Bra entered the marketplace October of 2021. Her company Zuke-iT is both WBE and MBE certified and employees a 100% all female Team. Paula teaches a Master Your Message Communication Course© to organizations and corporations. The course under the umbrella of her company North On Woodward, is an intensive workshop that teaches an advanced communication model designed to shift
office-place communication culture into high gear to team-strengthen in order to work better, sell better, be better and improve productivity and quality service in all areas of business and healthcare.

During the Covid shut-down, Paula taught herself sculpting. Her work caught the eye of several gallery owners and she is currently
preparing for several art shows for the fall of 2024 as a debut artist. She has a deep love for the arts and has been a member of numerous boards that benefit children and the arts. She is a charter board member of Motor City Lyric Opera and a past board member of Detroit PAL, Variety Childrens Charity and Detroit Music Hall for the Arts, as well as founder and chair emeritus of Children’s ToothFairy Foundation, a 501c3 which provided free dental care and oral health education to more than 1000 underserved and under-insured children in Michigan.

A published author, her first novel series DEADLINE! won recognition from the International Thriller Writers organization, The Virginia Book Festival and the Hollywood Book Festival. A prolific writer and self-taught screenplay writer, her first project, The Turnaround Girl, caught the attention of Professor Richard Walter, Chair of the UCLA graduate screenwriting program who became her private tutor and mentor. She currently has numerous pilots and screenplays written and in various stages of development in the entertainment industry.

As a farm girl originally from the Chesapeake Bay region, if Mother Nature made it, she enjoys it. Paula has collected adventure points competitive sailing, horseback riding, flying (not riding, flying) an F-16 fighter jet, crashing a motorcycle, performing in an opera, and opening the circus as a clown. She’s witnessed the great polar bear migration in the Canadian sub-Arctic and photographed Bushmen in Senegal. An avid flower-freak, she raises orchids which she believes are nature’s most sensuous blooms. She gardens to produce vegetables for her favorite food bank and loses herself in clay ceramics she affectionately calls Ugly Ceramics.

In 2009 she took on her most extreme adventure underneath a crop of overgrown Evergreens at the tidal basin of an Alaskan glacier by getting married for the last time. She splits her time between rural Ontario and Suburban Detroit with her husband and stepdaughters.