Successful Inventing: Preliminary marketing and advertising

Devon Blaine is president, CEO, and founder of The Blaine Group, Inc., named by the Los Angeles Business Journal as the city’s 24^th largest public relations agency and one of the most influential marketers in Southern California. Devon has received multiple recognitions for conducting outstanding public relations campaigns.

Related experience includes overseeing implementation of the two-year-long statewide campaign conducted for the small business lending affiliate of Glendale Federal, the GLENFED Business Lending Service, which received multiple awards from the Public Relations Society of America and the International Association of Business Communicators. 

Devon’s background encompasses oversight responsibility for an international financial, trade and consumer public relations effort for STAAR Surgical Company, which received a PRSA Prism award for best ongoing campaign; national campaigns conducted for the venture debt fund, CalCap Partners, Ventana Growth Fund, LawFund Management Group, Empowered Endings™, MicroNuclear©, Decision Sciences Corporation, SynData Technologies, Greystone Technology, EON Reality, eRadlink, Caraco Pharmaceuticals, R&D Laboratories, the Polk Institute, PBar Medical, and local campaigns implemented for Susan G. Komen Los Angeles County, University of Southern California, and the Cal State University Dominguez Hills Innovation Incubator.

Elizabeth Breedlove is a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant in Eastern North Carolina. She is passionate about helping businesses grow by finding unique ways to tell their stories. Recent projects include SEO-focused blog articles for a major home and business security provider in the Southeast, copywriting for local businesses' websites, copyediting for a non-profit in the tree care industry, crafting email campaigns for enterprise sales teams, and much more. Elizabeth is a monthly contributor to Inventors Digest magazine.

Reid Creager is editor-in-chief of Inventors Digest magazine, which in its 39^th year is the longest-running inventing magazine in the world and is published in cooperation with the USPTO. The second-longest-tenured editor in the magazine's history in seven years, Reid previously was a writer and editor at major newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press and Charlotte Observer for a combined 25 years.

As part of its primary mission of educating inventors, Inventors Digest frequently focuses on the entrepreneurial aspects of marketing and advertising.

Bill Seidel is an expert witness on marketing innovation, he changed home monitoring with the first baby monitor, improved food storage with the marketing of the FoodSaver, and revolutionized the Las Vegas soil industry. He held senior management positions with some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, leading innovators, and bestselling authors. From toys and games to environmental breakthroughs and revolutionary innovations, he has created billions of dollars, developed thousands of products, and licensed hundreds of products.

As adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, and Mentor at UC Davis, he knows what sells in the retail aisles, what works in the corporation, the laboratory, and the classroom. His business is America Invents, a product development, licensing, and marketing company. 

Larry Udell is best known as founder and Chairman of the California Invention Center, created in 1995 at California State University with federal funds. He has taught courses, new ventures, and entrepreneurship for over 40 years at universities throughout the United States and in foreign countries for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). A member of the Licensing Executives Society since 1982, he founded the Silicon Valley Chapter in 2000, which today is the number one chapter in Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) countries.