2025
Virtual Coaches
Sandi Preston
Chief Strategy Officer
Translation -- Division of United Masters
Brooklyn
Sandi Preston contributes her Chicago-bred work ethic and journalist-trained storytelling sensibilities to her day-to-day role as Chief Strategy Officer at Translation. A 15-year veteran at the company, Sandi is responsible for running the strategic engine of the agency – partnering with enterprise leadership and guiding interdepartmental teams towards work that is award worthy, award winning, and culturally seismic at its best.
Sandi Preston is a lateral thinker with an innate ability to see and communicate the big picture. She has nearly 20 years of strategy experience that has led to her current position of Chief Strategy Officer of Translation, a role in which she maintains and drives the power of strategic thought leadership to continually inspire the people and product of the company. She develops and optimizes cultural capital for brands across consumer categories by leading with a distinct point of view that helps teams find the slant in every truth, and effectively deliver against it.
A 15-year veteran of Translation, Sandi has been fully indoctrinated in (and in many ways helped shape) the company mission — helping ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. As with any good doctrine, Sandi ensures that the beliefs her team, and therein the company, abide by are always responsive to the world we live in. Her goal as a leader has always been for her team to remain students of culture as much as they are stewards of it – demonstrating a deep passion for what is happening in the world of music, sports, technology, and entertainment, and more importantly, a deeper curiosity as to why.
As Chief Strategy Officer, Sandi Preston oversees the strategic blueprint of every account at Translation. There’s virtually no creative product that leaves our doors that she has not inspired, informed, or helped mold in some way. However, under Sandi’s leadership, the product of the company is not singularly creative work. With Sandi’s guidance, we build and leverage cultural intelligence as both a tool and a product in itself — helping inform and measure the work we do while also offering a unique capability for brand partners to invest in that makes them, too, good students and stewards of culture.
While insight and strategy development have been the hallmark of Sandi’s work throughout her career, how she shows up in her role has been shaped and continuously influenced by a lifelong joy of storytelling, coupled with a desire to help others find and hold a clear gazing point. Whether taking lead in a conference room or instructing a class in her Brooklyn-based, independent yoga studio, there’s a single mantra that guides what Sandi always aims to offer in any space she enters: clarity above all.
A 15-year veteran of Translation, Sandi has been fully indoctrinated in (and in many ways helped shape) the company mission — helping ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. As with any good doctrine, Sandi ensures that the beliefs her team, and therein the company, abide by are always responsive to the world we live in. Her goal as a leader has always been for her team to remain students of culture as much as they are stewards of it – demonstrating a deep passion for what is happening in the world of music, sports, technology, and entertainment, and more importantly, a deeper curiosity as to why.
As Chief Strategy Officer, Sandi Preston oversees the strategic blueprint of every account at Translation. There’s virtually no creative product that leaves our doors that she has not inspired, informed, or helped mold in some way. However, under Sandi’s leadership, the product of the company is not singularly creative work. With Sandi’s guidance, we build and leverage cultural intelligence as both a tool and a product in itself — helping inform and measure the work we do while also offering a unique capability for brand partners to invest in that makes them, too, good students and stewards of culture.
While insight and strategy development have been the hallmark of Sandi’s work throughout her career, how she shows up in her role has been shaped and continuously influenced by a lifelong joy of storytelling, coupled with a desire to help others find and hold a clear gazing point. Whether taking lead in a conference room or instructing a class in her Brooklyn-based, independent yoga studio, there’s a single mantra that guides what Sandi always aims to offer in any space she enters: clarity above all.
The most profound achievements for Sandi during her tenure as Chief Strategy Officer have not been a list of accolades and awards, but rather, how she extends herself to touch the people and product of the business well within, and outside of, the walls of Translation.
Inside the company, she has served as executive sponsor of the “Culture Committee,” working closely with the People team to develop and execute programs and activities in support of employee professional growth and advancement of their Minors, or personal passions. She also helps oversee and manage “The Come Up,” the company’s summer internship program, ensuring young talent experience a consistent and nurturing learning environment that promotes the exposure, teamwork, and self-awareness necessary for a successful entry into the creative industry.
Outside of Translation, Sandi has served as an Effie’s judge. She is currently a member of the Creative Review Committee with the AdCouncil. And, she has connected with the next generation of storytellers as a panelist for AdColor Futures, MAIP, and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Notably, she is a mentor with Women Who Create — an organization near and dear to her heart as it represents a community of creative women of color, dedicated to lifting each other up.
Looking across her work as a strategist, Sandi is most proud of how she and her team are leading the way of humanizing audiences that have too long been overlooked, or marginalized as simply a “diversity” box to check. As seen on audience-centric work she’s led the past year for the likes of Eli Lilly and Disney, as well as work Sandi has overseen and contributed directly to for AT&T, Beats, Meta, NBA, SiriusXM, State Farm, Kaiser Permanente, Tic Tac, and WhatsApp -- her core drive is clarity of insight that helps engineer meaningful cultural outcomes. Sandi views consumers as people and communities with deep, textured layers that must be respectfully peered into in order to earn their attention at the very least, and at the very best, earn a share of mind that becomes reflected in their choices, conversations, and experiences.
Inside the company, she has served as executive sponsor of the “Culture Committee,” working closely with the People team to develop and execute programs and activities in support of employee professional growth and advancement of their Minors, or personal passions. She also helps oversee and manage “The Come Up,” the company’s summer internship program, ensuring young talent experience a consistent and nurturing learning environment that promotes the exposure, teamwork, and self-awareness necessary for a successful entry into the creative industry.
Outside of Translation, Sandi has served as an Effie’s judge. She is currently a member of the Creative Review Committee with the AdCouncil. And, she has connected with the next generation of storytellers as a panelist for AdColor Futures, MAIP, and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Notably, she is a mentor with Women Who Create — an organization near and dear to her heart as it represents a community of creative women of color, dedicated to lifting each other up.
Looking across her work as a strategist, Sandi is most proud of how she and her team are leading the way of humanizing audiences that have too long been overlooked, or marginalized as simply a “diversity” box to check. As seen on audience-centric work she’s led the past year for the likes of Eli Lilly and Disney, as well as work Sandi has overseen and contributed directly to for AT&T, Beats, Meta, NBA, SiriusXM, State Farm, Kaiser Permanente, Tic Tac, and WhatsApp -- her core drive is clarity of insight that helps engineer meaningful cultural outcomes. Sandi views consumers as people and communities with deep, textured layers that must be respectfully peered into in order to earn their attention at the very least, and at the very best, earn a share of mind that becomes reflected in their choices, conversations, and experiences.