Redefining digital brand building

During a sports summit held in his first year at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Mark Shorey (MBA ‘17) volunteered as a student ambassador. After working as an agency creative strategist, he was interested in a potential career in sports.

He was assigned to support one of the main summit speakers, Noel Nash, who then was vice president of ESPN Stats and Information. He spent two days with Nash, asking him questions about the industry, how analytics fed into his overall work, and how storytelling could influence data and analytics.

“It was one of those things I always loved and had in the back of my brain,” Shorey says of combining the creative and sport business worlds.

“And now, funny enough, it’s going to be my job.”

Shorey recently accepted a role as senior director, brand and social, at DraftKings. And, he says, his time at UNC Kenan-Flagler inspired his ambitious and award-winning work ever since.

After graduating from Bentley University in 2010, Shorey accepted a job at MullenLowe, a creative services agency in Boston. His experiences exposed him to different verticals as well as senior leadership at various companies. He was particularly interested in the intersection of media and creative strategy.

“Then it was the wild west of social and digital,” Shorey says. “We needed to re-train our teams to not think in 30-second TV ad spots anymore, but in how people were ingesting communication.”

While there, he researched industry colleagues and senior executives, asking himself, “What do these people have in common?” The common denominator was that most had attended a top 20 MBA program. So Shorey decided to apply to business school.

He wanted to stay on the East Coast and, as a newlywed, choose a school and a town his wife would also enjoy. He accepted his UNC Kenan-Flagler admission to the Full-Time MBA Program before even visiting Chapel Hill. “It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” Shorey says.

At UNC Kenan-Flagler, his classmates had varying backgrounds. One of his now-best friends had worked at IBM for years. Others had been consultants or worked in the financial sector.

“It was a really cool experience, because it simultaneously helped me realize where I provided value in a broader context, but it also humbled me to realize there’s a lot of people that think about things that I don’t think about,” Shorey says.

Shorey had typically been the first or the loudest vocal contributor in work meetings. But at UNC Kenan-Flagler, he challenged himself to never speak first in a meeting, class setting or group project.

“It was one of the best things I ever did, because it forced me to take in other people’s thoughts before I interjected mine,” Shorey says. “It helped me create that balance of, here’s where I can add value and also learn from other people.”

In Professor Chris Bingham’s strategy class, Shorey realized how excited he was to solve broader business problems. He had thought he’d enter the tech sector after graduating, but Coca-Cola was one of the course case studies, and during their recruiting visit, Shorey reconsidered his tech focus, accepting an internship at Coke.

Professor Claudia Kubowicz Malhotra hosted a variety of guest speakers in her course on brand management and consumer behavior who were leaders in their field. “She was one of the professors who did an amazing job of trying to bridge the gap between the core things you need to learn but also how something is being executed in the real world at a cutting-edge level,” Shorey says.

Shorey interned at Coca-Cola in Atlanta the summer after his first year and received a full-time job offer at the start of his second year at UNC Kenan-Flagler.  “It was one of the proudest moments in my career, getting that offer, because it’s essentially a two-and-a-half to three-month job interview with some of the smartest marketing executives in the world,” Shorey says.

He worked on Powerade, Sprite and asset partnerships, including FIFA, the NCAA and the NBA.

But when the pandemic hit, Shorey and his wife wanted to live closer to family in the northeast. They packed their SUV, drove north with their young daughter, and worked remotely. When Coca-Cola mandated a return to office, Shorey looked for other work opportunities in the Boston area.

Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP), which has one of the largest direct-to-consumer CPG businesses in the U.S. was launching their smart brewer platform.

“Direct-to-consumer was something I had never worked on, so I was really excited about it,” Shorey says.

When KDP’s chief marketing officer decided to institute social media marketing, a broader enterprise capability, Shorey was embedded within a larger team where he was responsible for social strategy, content and community management across all KDP brands.

“His view, which I totally agree with, was that modern brands are built in social, and we need to be treating it as how we can develop marketing fit for purpose, not retrofitting marketing for social,” Shorey says. “I’ve absolutely loved it, and I’ve gotten to do some really cool, reactive, cultural marketing projects.”

One particular highlight was the Dr. Pepper viral moment of 2025. “That was probably the biggest thing that’s ever happened in my career,” Shorey says. “It was very gratifying to be part of the team that identified the opportunity and executed on it in an extremely short period of time.”

Shorey and his team had seen Romeo Bingham’s TikTok with their original jingle about Dr. Pepper, which had gone viral. Within hours, they commented on Bingham’s post directly, licensed the jingle and turned it into a successful TV spot that aired during the 2026 college football national championship.

“I’m extremely proud of how it was a direct correlation to our social strategy at Dr. Pepper, which is always about fandom,” Shorey says. “This was the highest elevation of that strategy in a way that really propelled the brand forward and gave this fan, Romeo Bingham, who did something great for us, a lot of benefit, reputation and credibility.”

It boosted Shorey’s career profile as well: Ad Age named him one of their 40 Under 40 in 2025.

Now, Shorey will bring that creativity, innovation and ambition to DraftKings at a time when sports betting has exploded in popularity and footprint.

Working in the sports betting industry is a fitting next step, considering his intention when he arrived at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

“I went to UNC Kenan-Flagler trying to bet on myself, knowing that it would probably open doors, a blue chip to put on my resume that would change my career trajectory and that was exactly what UNC provided for me,” Shorey says.