I build campaign platforms, not one‑off launches.
Brand campaigns, partnerships, and the operating systems behind them — currently leading a national celebrity campaign platform and an eight‑figure partnership portfolio at Breeze Airways.
Four builds. One thread: take an asset — a contract, an empty social account, an unmonetized airplane, a catalog of authors — and build the system that compounds it.
Brees Certified
Turning a celebrity contract into a campaign platform.
The challenge. A challenger airline signs an NFL Hall of Famer. The default playbook — shoot some spots, run them — produces a launch, not a brand. The assignment: make one talent deal behave like a multi‑year platform.
The insight. The best ideas were already written into the deal. Read as a strategy document, it surfaced themes nobody had built around — community, service, care — and Drew Brees's reputation for genuine niceness wasn't garnish. It was the positioning.
The idea. Brees Certified — a certification of the airline's standard of niceness, fronted by the most credible nice guy in American sports. Each phase extends the story, so every media dollar compounds the same idea.
The execution. Owned end‑to‑end: strategy, briefs, broadcast and social production, agency negotiations, launch calendar, and live in‑market optimization. Live nationally since August 2026.
Building a brand voice from zero
0 → 400K+: a challenger airline learns to speak internet.
The challenge. A new airline nobody had heard of, up against incumbents with fifty‑year head starts and hundred‑million‑dollar budgets. No audience, no voice, no playbook.
The insight. A challenger can't outspend the category, but it can out‑personality it. Airlines talk like corporations; people follow accounts that talk like people.
The build. Owned content and social from early stage through national recognition: the voice, the content systems, the reporting. Grew the audience past 400K across channels, then made it durable with Breeze's first influencer program — vetting, briefs, contracts, recaps.
The handoff. Built the function, handed it to a dedicated team, and moved up to partnerships and monetization. That's the arc working as intended.
The revenue layer
Building monetization infrastructure an airline didn't know it had.
The challenge. An airline is a media company that doesn't know it: captive attention, owned channels, national footprint — and at Breeze, none of it monetized.
The build, in three layers.
- Attribution first The airline's first affiliate program, with tracking that proves partner‑driven bookings — because monetization without measurement is a pitch, not a business.
- Then inventory An ad sales function from zero: rate card, placement inventory across onboard and digital assets, and the pitch that sold it. A net‑new revenue line.
- Then the operating system A partner ownership model, adopted by senior leadership, that gives every account a clear owner — so a portfolio now spanning eight figures across 88 U.S. markets scales without chaos.
In market. The latest proof: Breeze's fifth‑birthday onboard refresh, May 2026 — a custom signature cocktail with Straightaway, Elizabeth Banks' Archer Roose wines, Still G.I.N. by Dre and Snoop, and Peet's Coffee, all landed onboard.
Books, marketed like movies
Building the brand — and the trailer engine — for a startup that put readers in book clubs with the authors themselves.
The challenge. A zero‑awareness startup with a new product — book clubs led by the authors themselves — in a category that markets with jacket covers and pull quotes.
The insight. Publishing launches books like press releases; entertainment launches stories like events. So market books the way studios market films.
The build. An author‑trailer engine: one repeatable cinematic format across dozens of launches, from Gary Vaynerchuk to Saroo Brierley (the memoir behind the film Lion). And the partnerships to match — Belletrist × BookClub with Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss, covered exclusively in The Hollywood Reporter, plus FranklinCovey's 7 Habits catalog brought to the platform.
I'm James Belyeu — a brand and partnerships leader based in Salt Lake City. Fifteen‑plus years of commercial work, from founding and scaling a design‑led retail business to leading national campaigns at Breeze Airways, taught me one repeatable thing: the moment is never the hard part. The machine behind the moment is. I build those machines — campaign platforms, partnership systems, monetization infrastructure — and I hold a high creative bar while doing it.
Off the clock: husband, dad, and training for a marathon.
