In-House Excellence Awards
Grand Jury

ALEKA SANSOM

Executive Creative Director
Vanguard

BIO

Aleka Sansom is a transformational brand and creative leader with more than 20 years of experience helping iconic brands define, reinvent, and scale to deepen customer loyalty and drive business growth. She is known for building high-performing creative organizations and elevating the role of brand, content, and storytelling inside complex enterprises. 

Currently, Aleka serves as Executive Creative Director and Head of RED@Vanguard, Vanguard’s first-ever in-house agency, which she built and has led for the past six years. In this role, she shapes and defines the Vanguard voice for its direct investor audience, establishing the creative vision, operating model, and multidisciplinary team responsible for delivering impactful brand, marketing, and content experiences at scale. Under her leadership, RED has become a strategic growth engine, driving clarity, consistency, speed, and deeper emotional connection with Vanguard’s investors. Most recently, Aleka is leading the transformation of marketing’s content ecosystem through agentic AI, reimagining how content is planned, created, optimized, and scaled by pairing human creativity with intelligent systems and feedback loops. 

Prior to Vanguard, Aleka spent 11 years at Dell Technologies in Austin, where she led all global creative and content development for Dell’s Consumer, Gaming, and Small Business segments. She helped create Dell’s first corporate brand architecture, evolved its global visual identity and voice, and transformed customer marketing to help the brand reclaim leadership in both the market and customer sentiment. 

Earlier in her career, Aleka led brand advertising at AOL and built her creative foundation through agency leadership roles. 

Q&A with Aleka Sansom

Provide one word that defines "In-House Excellence" in 2026.

Orchestrated. Because excellence now comes from how talent, technology, data, and speed work together, not from any single output. 

What is one trend in creative operations or in-housing you are watching most closely? 

The shift from production engines to intelligent content systems, where agentic AI, modular assets, and human judgment work in continuous feedback loops to scale quality, not just volume. 

In one sentence—what is the single most important element that moves an entry from "Good" to "Grand Prix"? 

When the work solves a real business and human problem in a way that feels both inevitable and unexpected. 

What is the #1 mistake teams should avoid when telling their campaign’s "story" in a submission? 

Leading with activity instead of insight and making the judges work too hard to understand why the idea mattered. 

Why is it critical for in-house agencies to have their own dedicated stage for recognition? 

Because in‑house teams solve different problems, under different constraints, at a different level of proximity to the business, and excellence deserves to be judged in context. 

How have your expectations of great marketing evolved—and how does that shape how you evaluate work today? 

Great marketing now has to earn attention and prove impact. I look for work that is creatively bold, strategically clear, and demonstrably connected to real business outcomes. 

When you review the “breakthrough insight” behind a campaign, what tells you it’s truly meaningful? 

It makes the solution feel obvious in hindsight while still being surprising in execution. 

Why do awards programs like the In‑House Excellence Awards matter to the industry? 

They validate a modern model of creativity, one where proximity to the business, speed, and strategic depth are recognized as competitive advantages. 

Get to know the 2026 In-House Excellence Grand Jurors.