A 20-year industry veteran, Jaclyn Ruelle combines a lightning-in-a-bottle PR mind and spark plug personality to deliver work that transcends culture and moves beyond the expected. From her agency roles to her current position at Papa Johns, Jaclyn has always approached marketing with a strategic, integrated approach that puts cultural relevancy and brand talk value at the center.
Since her early days leading athlete PR at The Meridian Group for the STIHL TIMBERSPORTS Series with ESPN and partnering with the world’s leading outdoor sports brands GORE-TEX and Yakima, Jaclyn’s preternatural instinct for what drives culture combined with her tenacious work ethic have remained the forces behind her propulsive career. Keeping one key goal central to all her work – to help brands transcend the world of ads and become part of the cultural zeitgeist – Jaclyn’s agile, integrated marketing approach has resulted in viral campaigns, including American Greetings’ “World Toughest Job” and JetBlue’s “FlyBabies” campaigns during her nine years at MullenLowe. With her prolific hustle and passion for innovative storytelling, she also built the Martin Agency’s groundbreaking Culture Impact Lab, an earned media practice fusing together PR, social, communications strategy and creative media expertise. Forging this first-of-its-kind practice, Jaclyn led the Martin Agency to revitalize their pipeline, increase the pitch win rate from 20% to 90% and produce award-winning work, including DoorDash’s “Open for Delivery” and UPS’ “Be Unstoppable” campaigns.
Today, Jaclyn is pioneering a new, innovative approach to marketing at the iconic Papa Johns. Determined to deepen customer understanding of the brand’s legendary BETTER INGREDIENTS. BETTER PIZZA. brand promise, Jaclyn is focused on harnessing everyone’s innate love for and the cultural-centricity of pizza to highlight Papa Johns key differentiators of quality and ingredients. Since joining in the fall of 2022, she has already led the brand’s successful launches of Oreo Cookie Papa Bites – the top-selling launch of a side or dessert in Papa Johns history – Heart-Shaped Pizza, Crispy Parm Pizza, Doritos Papadia – which delivered over 7B impressions and represented the brand’s biggest consumer launch ever – and Garlic Epic Stuffed Crust. Leveraging cultural conversation, she’s engineered breakthrough opportunities during saturated moments in time – like an agile partnership with Mama Kelce during the Super Bowl – and driven brand lift through social content that celebrates Papa Johns expert pizza makers and fresh ingredients.
Throughout her career, Jaclyn’s drive and earned-first storytelling have delivered award-winning for her brands and agencies, including winning four Cannes Lions, multiple Effies, PR Week and US Global Awards, Global Sabres and PRSA Silver Anvils. Since 2015 alone, Jaclyn has:
- Been named a Provoke Innovator 25 (2015)
- Earned a spot on Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 (2015)
- Led MullenLowe to earn the Provoke Global Creative PR Agency of the Year (2018, 2019)
- Named to Adweek’s Creative 100 List (2019)
- Earned Digiday awards for Buffalo Wild Wings (2019, Best Creative Campaign) and Land O’Lakes (2019, Best Social Good Campaign)
- Earned DoorDash a spot on Forbes’ Top 5 Most Impactful Advertisers (2019)
- Led Martin Agency to earn a spot on AdAge’s A-List Agencies (2020)
- Earned OREO an ADC Silver Cube (2020)
- Led Martin Agency to become Adweek’s Agency of the Year (2020, 2021)
- Earned Buffalo Wild Wings the North American Gold Sabre (2020)
- Earned a CampaignUS Female Frontier Award (2022)
Jaclyn’s inspiring hustle is also evident outside the office. In her off-hours, Jaclyn serves as an executive board member for the Fore Hadley Foundation – an organization dedicated to the fight against congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) – working with the board to raise funds for medical research opportunities and producing the annual charitable golf tournament. She also gives back to the marketing and communications communities, serving as a speaker at SXSW (2019 and 2023), ARF Audience and Science, AMA Hampton Roads Chapter and Boston University’s College of Communication. Jaclyn has also judged numerous industry awards, including New York Advertising Festival (2020), One Show (2019), Cannes Young Lions (2018) and Sabres (2017). She is a member of the National PR Council.