Getting mentioned is the point of marketing.

Mention began in 2013 as Filament Communications, a small, female-founded communications firm in Wauwatosa.

I joined the company in 2018, began leading its daily operations, and purchased it in 2021. I renamed it Mention Marketing because getting mentioned was always the point: appearing in search results, earning recommendations, joining important conversations, and being remembered when an opportunity arose.

As discovery continued to change, our work expanded across search, reputation, content, digital media, accessibility, and AI visibility.

Today, that work lives under Mention Group.

We are less interested in selling predetermined services than in solving the actual problem.

During the COVID-19 response, we worked closely with local governments and a partner communications agency on urgent public-information campaigns. Some projects moved from concept to publication within hours.

The work helped our agency partner earn platinum industry recognition and reinforced something we still believe:

Communication is not decoration. It helps people understand what is happening, decide what to do, and move forward with confidence.

That problem-solving instinct extends beyond client work.

When Canadian wildfire smoke pushed Milwaukee’s air quality into dangerous territory in July 2026, existing weather tools provided numbers but not enough practical context. I wanted to understand what was happening, how it affected the air people were breathing, and what families should do next.

So I built SmokeDar, a free tool that brings multiple air-quality and smoke sources together in one accessible, easy-to-understand place.

WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR station, featured the project in “Milwaukee man creates app to track air quality following wildfire smoke.”

That is how we approach our work:

Understand the problem. Find the right signals. Make the complicated understandable. Build something useful.

Mention Group is deliberately small.

Clients work directly with me as their primary strategist and point of accountability. For each engagement, I bring together a focused team of experienced designers, writers, developers, analysts, and media professionals selected for the work at hand.

Many are people I have worked with for more than a decade, including Meredith, Kayla, and Evan.

There is no inflated account team, mystery handoff, or junior employee standing between you and the strategy. You get senior thinking, trusted execution, and one person responsible for keeping everything connected.

We generally work for a transparent fee agreed upon in advance. We do not need to take a percentage of your advertising budget or impose a Mention house style on every organization we touch.

Our job is not to make your organization look like ours.

Our job is to make it more clearly, credibly, and effectively itself.

We help organizations become more discoverable across search engines, AI answers, maps, reviews, websites, content, media, and digital channels.

But visibility is not simply about appearing in more places.

It is about understanding what customers, search engines, and AI systems already believe about you.

Where are you appearing? Where are you absent? What does Google understand? What are AI platforms saying? Which sources shape those answers? Do your reviews and website support the reputation you want?

That is why our work begins with evidence.

We also publish the AI Mention Report, an ongoing examination of the sources and signals influencing AI-generated answers.

Guessing is getting expensive.

Mention Group operates under 3BL, LLC, a reference to the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit, in that order.

We are especially drawn to organizations that improve their communities, solve meaningful problems, and serve people well.

Those organizations are not always the loudest. Often, they are too busy doing good work to make sure that work gets noticed.

That is where we fit.

Accessibility is also part of how we think about websites, communications, technology, and customer experience. Being discoverable only matters when people can access and use what they find.

The old internet often rewarded whoever published the most or shouted the loudest.

The next version will increasingly reward organizations that are clear, credible, useful, accessible, and easy for both people and machines to recommend.

That is good news for organizations doing serious work.

And it is the future Mention Group is built for.

The person behind the work

A bit about the person you’d be working with: an Eagle Scout, a father of two, a baseball coach, and someone who is happiest on a bike. He has lived abroad, which has a way of showing you how differently the world can work, and he came home believing the best work happens close to the people it’s for. He cares about doing right by clients and their customers, even when that means saying no. There is nothing flashy here. We drive regular trucks and cars, own one house apiece, and would rather be great at the work than look expensive doing it. Because behind every search, every review, and every AI answer is a person trying to make a decision.

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn  ·  Subscribe to The Dispatch