It's Brooke Laman Vines' job to know what you watch and read, even if you don't admit to watching TV all that much.
"I quiz people constantly," says Vines, the head of her own four-person media shop. "Pretty much everybody says they don't watch TV, and pretty much everybody has a reality-show guilty pleasure."
After stints as an ad coordinator at Arkansas Business Publishing Group and as the media director at Mangan Holcomb Partners, Vines hung out her shingle more than six years ago, partnering with ad shop Eric Rob & Isaac.
Placing ads is an alchemy of analysis and psychology, to match a message with where people are in their lives, whether that be through traditional or emerging media. "I read a lot of headlines about media," she says, joking. "By the time you get to the bottom of the story, it's changed, so you don't want to read too far down."
Her serious philanthropic endeavors — she has served as the CARTI Festival After Dark chair and co-chair of the CARTI Festival of Trees and MS Society Dinner of Champions — belie her weakness for comedies. Vines admits to loving cartoons — "King of the Hill," "Family Guy" — and sitcoms such as "Modern Family." And, she says, unsurprisingly, "I'm addicted to 'Mad Men.'"
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