About Mildred Mae
Mildred Mae is a brand strategy practice for senior marketing leaders, founder-CEOs, and agency CSOs who want sharper, multi-dimensional thinking.
Built by Elisabeth Bromberg — a neurodivergent senior brand marketer with 17+ years of category-defining work behind her, an AI-amplified working method documented publicly, and an M-shaped, integrated approach that connects multiple deep areas of expertise.
Lateral by nature. ◆ Human-first by principle. ◆ AI-amplified by design. ◆ Multi-disciplinary by training.
the namesake
Mildred Mae is named for Elisabeth’s two grandmothers.
Florence Mildred Bromberg (née Levine)
elisabeth's paternal grandmother
Florence Mildred was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1920 and emigrated to Brooklyn at nine months old. She married Louis Bromberg in 1941; he called her Eishet Chayil — Woman of Valor. She taught gifted children at PS 164 in Queens for the rest of her working life. She also once won approximately $20,000 at a Cannes casino. Whether as a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, or a friend, she spent her life enriching the lives of those around her. She passed away in 1999.
Both of them were sharp. Both were warm. Both were more than any single trait could capture.
The practice carries both.
The standard I’m trying to meet is theirs.
elisabeth's maternal grandmother
Gloria Mae Hahneman (née Smith)
Gloria Mae was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1925. She met Kenneth Hahneman during World War II when he was docked there with the U.S. Navy. She crossed the world to the United States to be with him. Gloria worked as an Assistant to the President of Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas and poured her whole heart into supporting others, especially her children, and raised a family of readers. She passed away in 1980, far too young.
The practitioner
Elisabeth Miriam Bromberg
Founder, Chief Strategist
17+ years of category-defining work: The Coca-Cola Company, Estée Lauder, T-Mobile, L’Oréal (Kiehl’s Since 1851), GSK, Mondelez, Nespresso, Mattel, and others.
Miriam is my middle name: The throughline that runs through Mildred and Mae.
Cannes ◆ Clio ◆ Webby
The mascot
Midge the Pidge
Midge is the reminder that the most multifaceted things are often the ones people walk past.
Pigeons are urban pattern-recognizers everyone underestimates. They navigate by structures most people don't notice. They see in ranges of color most humans can't. Their feathers refract light into different colors depending on the angle you look from — multifaceted, in plain sight.
I’m enchanted by their symbolism, and these clever birds have also been a prominent part of my life, from a little girl growing up in London to the past 2+ decades in NYC. In the apartment where I started Mildred Mae, I often wake up to the sound of pigeon coos and mourning dove calls, as they like to roost on my bedroom window sill. They are iconic and quirky residents of the places I call home.
The M-Shape is how I work and think: Deep in multiple places, connected laterally.
I'm a strategist who reads signals like a semiotician, builds systems like an operator, and interrogates a premise like a journalist. I fuse cultural intelligence, behavioral data, editorial craft, and operational reality — translating a point of view into something a creative team can concept against and a 40+ market team can actually run, then keeping it honest enough to survive being argued with.
tl;dr: I’m best at finding the connection no one else has surfaced, and then making it something a team can use.
The approach