Bought, rebuilt, and renamed after the outcome.

2013 · The boutique

Filament Communications.

The firm began in 2013 as Filament Communications, a small Milwaukee boutique. Small on headcount, serious on craft, with clients that ranged from the Fortune 500 to the family-owned.

The handoff

A founder leaves for mission work. An owner steps in.

When its founder left the agency world for mission-driven work (she now leads Milwaukee's ACTS Housing), she gave the people closest to the firm the first conversation. After some discussion, Ryan Thompson bought the firm, kept every client, and got to work.

The rebuild

From communications shop to data-driven consultancy.

The name changed first. Clients were heavy in social at the time, and the new name was the outcome itself: being mentioned. Mention Marketing was born, and shortly after, the harder changes followed. Service lines were rebuilt around strategy, analytics, and paid media. The employee and client service model was restructured. The work steered into civic campaigns, big data, and performance media, the places where thinking wins. The question stopped being how to get attention and became something sharper: how do we help a brand become the answer?

The quiet advantage under all of it is the road Ryan took to get here. A marketing and communications degree, then a first job nowhere near marketing: a trading floor at Deutsche Bank in downtown Chicago. Markets move on signals, and data can tell a story before people are ready to say it out loud. That lesson never left. He left the floor to start his first company, came home to be near family, and landed in B2B social media, running social for Fortune 500 travel brands before agency work with large national names. He has seen campaigns from every seat at the table. The trader, the corporation, the buyer, the customer, and now the owner.

Today

The discoverability consultancy.

Today Mention Group is deliberately small: senior thinking, a vetted white-label bench for scale, and one accountable partner. We make brands the answer across AI, search, maps, and reviews, run the paid media that captures the demand, and publish the AI Mention Report so the strategy runs on evidence instead of hunches. Our systems are audited for accessibility, because being findable should include everyone.

The firm has had employees, scaled up, and scaled back down. Today it runs on a vetted network of partners, most with ten to twenty years on projects together and some past twenty, many focused on fundraising and mission-driven work.

And the owner you'd be working with? An Eagle Scout, a father of two, a baseball coach, and an avid bike rider. Preparation, patience, and showing up. Same as the work. Because behind every search, every review, and every AI answer is a person trying to make a decision.