Jessica Scanlon
Founder · Hot Dog Marketing
📍 Round Rock, TX
Episode: Jessica Scanlon on Business, Branding, and Breaking the Mold
About Jessica
Jessica Scanlon started Hot Dog Marketing in 2008 with a name her then-boyfriend called stupid and a conviction that she’d rather work for a company she’d actually enjoy. The name came from her Dachshunds. She registered the DBA anyway. Seventeen years later, the agency is thriving.
Hot Dog Marketing isn’t a quirky sideshow. They do serious work with government contractors, public entities, and professional service providers who need full-stack marketing without hiring a full-time team. She left corporate America in 2012 and never looked back. When she joined the Round Rock Chamber board in 2019 there were five women on a board of forty. The landscape looks very different now.
In the age of AI, she didn’t panic. She took a business strategies with AI course from MIT and built a roadmap. Her team shifted from manual content execution to strategic storytelling — video-first, multimodal, human. She says we’re moving out of lead generation and into memory generation. She’s already building for that shift.
In Their Own Words
I said, ‘I don’t know. It kind of sounds like the kind of company I’d like to work for someday.’ And that’s what I ended up registering — and here we are.
— Jessica Scanlon, Founder, Hot Dog Marketing
We’re moving into not a lead generation era, but a memory generation era.
— Jessica Scanlon, Founder, Hot Dog Marketing
The women have gone off and we do trips together and we work on boards together. To know that you can call on somebody and come to some sort of solution — that’s rare.
— Jessica Scanlon, Founder, Hot Dog Marketing
Their Best Advice
Good brand, good creative, good messaging. You’ve got to really think about your value proposition. And you can’t be around execution anymore — because execution is getting easier. Understand your brand inside and out. That’s what cuts through.
— Jessica Scanlon
Connect with Jessica