Brian D. Aitken is a media entrepreneur who founded Topple, the world’s most inclusive and diverse advertising network that embraces equal access for brands to advertise any legal product or service while using those advertising funds to help finance independent media and journalism. 

Before launching Topple, Aitken managed nearly $6 billion in advertising budgets for companies like 20th Century FOX, E*Trade, BBC America, and Quest Diagnostics as the Vice President of Paid Social at Assembly and the Head of Paid Media & Analytics and Managing Director, NYC at JPL. Aitken attended Rutgers University where he pursued his passion for science, health, and nature by pursuing a degree in Environmental Policy, Institutions, and Behaviors. Aitken then attended the NYU Stern School of Business where he earned a Statement of Professional Achievement and was later the Manchester Business Schools first Global MBA candidate who had not received a baccalaureate degree.

As a media technologist and entrepreneur, Aitken has been involved with MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), where he was an early guest at MIT’s Conference on Digital Experimentation and the first several Platform Strategy Summits. Aitken was inspired to take what he learned about the emerging platform economy and apply it to his subject area expertise of free-markets and digital advertising. 

For his professional work in media and advertising, Aitken has been recognized by the Webby’s, Shorty Awards, and multiple Digiday award categories on behalf of companies like Adobe and The Hershey Company.

Earlier in his life, Aitken was awarded scholarships to attend Liberty University and Advanced Austrian Economics at the Foundation for Economic Education, was awarded a Bastiat Scholarship at CATO University, and was honored as the Sam Adam’s Alliance 2011 Reformer of the Year. Around that same time, Aitken helped a New Jersey college student defend his first-amendment right to display a political sign in his bedroom window outside of election season. The township dismissed their case against the young student and repealed their unconstitutional law. His work in criminal justice reform paved the way for more than two dozen American citizens to be pardoned or released from unjust incarceration in the State of New Jersey including Shaneen Allen, Steffon Josey Davis, Guy Ackerman, Meg Fellenbaum, and U.S. Marine Sergeant Hisashi Pompey. 

Aitken was a top fundraiser for the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride–a non-profit motorcycle event which supports men’s health initiatives through the Movember Foundation–in 2017, 2018, and 2019. 

Ads for our Future was founded by Aitken to amplify solutions for human liberty, clean energy independence, and economic progress with digital advertising. 

Aitken has a son and two daughters with his wife in Telluride, CO. His proudest accomplishment is teaching his four year old son, who lives with epilepsy, to ski his first black diamond on March 31, 2023.