Rex Hammock, our company’s founder and CEO for 30 years, passed away last Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025. Family and friends will celebrate Rex’s life Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, at 2:30 p.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville. Over the past few days, many Hammock Inc. team members, clients, alums, and friends have shared special memories of Rex with each other. If you have a memory of Rex to share, please let us know at jlavey@hammock.com.
Here’s more about one of content marketing’s true pioneers:
Harvey Rex Hammock, a visionary entrepreneur and beloved husband, father, and grandfather, passed away peacefully on February 12, 2025, in Nashville, TN, surrounded by his family after a battle with Alzheimer’s. Born on March 29, 1954, in Dothan, AL, to his parents Rev. William Raymond Hammock, Sr. and Mary Frances Wilks Hammock, Rex was the youngest of three brothers.
Rex was a born leader and a pioneer in the field of publishing, media and technology. He attended Samford University in Birmingham, AL, graduating in 1976 and went on to receive a Masters of Divinity from Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. In the early 1980s, he worked as a Congressional aide on Capitol Hill before moving to Nashville in 1984 to work for Buntin Advertising and ultimately run Buntin PR.
Rex’s legacy lives on through Hammock Inc., the company he founded in 1991 and led for over 30 years. As a thought leader in the content marketing industry, he created a positive company culture at Hammock that values teamwork, engagement, communication, and collaboration. He cheered his employees on in professional and personal achievements, celebrated marriages and growing families, and made them laugh more times than they can count. Rex’s impact on the industry was recognized by Forbes, who called him a “leading voice in content marketing.” He was a contrarian who challenged assumptions about the industry and believed in the power of content to help customers accomplish their goals.
He loved to mentor young entrepreneurs in Nashville and beyond, and he had a passion for harnessing technology to help small business owners achieve their goals. In 2000, he founded a second startup, SmallBusiness.com, which grew into a community of small business owners to develop and share ideas and visions.
Rex was a National Advisor for American Business Media, a member of the Downtown Nashville Rotary, served on the boards of the Tennessee Repertory Theater and Walk Bike Nashville, and was a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church, and Belle Meade Country Club.
Rex was also a pioneer and early advocate for expanding bike and greenway access across Nashville. He knew every bike lane in town and loved giving visitors tours and rode his bike to the office almost every day of his life. One of his greatest biking achievements was biking the Natchez Trace in 2019.
An early supporter of the Tennessee Titans who never missed a game, Rex was a fiercely loyal local sports fan. He loved any Vanderbilt sports team and would even support other non-Nashville teams, as long as there was a Nashville connection.
Rex met the love of his life, Ann Knight, in college, and they married soon after. They were together for 48 years and lived in the same house in Nashville for 33 of those years. He was beyond proud of his children, Ann Parker Hammock Weeden (Douglas) and Forrest Knight Hammock (Katie), and adored his granddaughters, Parker, Frances, Caroline, and Walker.
Rex was predeceased by his father, mother, and brother Roy Wilks Hammock. He is survived by his wife, Ann Knight Hammock, children, grandchildren, brother William Raymond Hammock, jr. (Sandra), and nieces and nephews. Rex’s passion for helping small business owners across the country and his dedication to the Nashville community will be long remembered. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him.
A Celebration of Life service will be held in Rex’s memory on Friday, February 21, 2025, at Westminster Presbyterian Church at 2:30pm.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Rex’s memory to any of the following organizations:
• Westminster Presbyterian Church, 3900 West End Avenue, Nashville, TN 37205
• Abe’s Garden, 115 Woodmont Boulevard, Nashville, TN 37205
• Alive Hospice, 1718 Patterson Street, Nashville, TN 27203
• Walk Bike Nashville, 1 South 7th Street, Nashville, TN 37206
By Megan Hamby, Editorial Director
At Hammock, we like to think of ourselves as a 31-year-old startup organization. Although we have a long history of serving clients and delivering powerful content marketing solutions, we strive to be “disruptors” in the industry—changing the ways organizations think about content.
This philosophy comes from Hammock’s founder, Rex Hammock, who announced his retirement from Hammock on April 6, 2022. More than 30 years ago, Rex saw an opportunity for brands to go direct to customers—initially with print magazines. When he started Hammock Inc. in 1991, it was a custom publishing agency, utilizing the then novel technology of desktop publishing to create creative media that was every bit as good as what was on the newsstands. Today, Hammock Inc. is a unique agency that creates content to be deployed across a diverse media landscape—and we owe that reputation to Rex’s strategic vision and leadership over the past 31 years.
Rex was a pioneer in the content marketing industry. Prior to founding Hammock, he was the founder/partner of a public relations subsidiary of one of the largest regional advertising agencies in the South, a congressional speechwriter and a press secretary. In 1999, he co-founded the national trade association that today is called the Custom Content Council. That same year, he started SmallBusiness.com, a site dedicated to helping small-business owners and managers get the right information for important decisions. Rex was a trailblazer in blogging—in 2004, he became the first person to blog a meeting with a president, when he met with President George W. Bush.
Most importantly, Rex created a positive company culture at Hammock—one that values teamwork, engagement, communication and collaboration. In an industry where people change jobs every few years, Hammock’s employees have stayed on board—with some celebrating 25th anniversaries. He has cheered his employees on in professional and personal achievements, celebrated marriages and growing families, and made us laugh more times than we can count.
On April 6, 2022, Rex and John Lavey, incoming CEO, announced the completion of a management buyout. The transaction is part of a long-term succession plan that Rex and John developed together over many years—and it allows Hammock Inc. to continue successfully executing their strategic vision, aligning it with the market’s need for effective and innovative content marketing solutions. Although Rex will no longer be driving Hammock, his legacy lives on in the way we approach content marketing and deliver the highest-quality service to our clients.
This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here. To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.
By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO
If your company slowed or stopped sharing content with clients since the pandemic started, have you begun to reemerge? Or are you struggling to figure out what conversations to have with your clients right now?
If so, you aren’t alone.
“Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch” was a classic advertising slogan of the Don Draper era. Featuring a smiling model with a black eye, the grammatically incorrect Tareyton print ads ran from 1963 until the early 1980s. (Cigarette advertising on TV ended in 1971.) On its surface, the slogan was a clever way to encourage loyalty to the Tareyton brand. Yet beneath the surface, it was an insidious and not-so-subtle rallying cry for smokers to ignore the evidence linking smoking to cancer that started mounting in earnest with the 1964 Surgeon General’s report.
In the 55 years since the report was issued, the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen from 42% in 1964 to 14% today. But nearly 34 million Americans still smoke, apparently willing to fight to the death than switch.
By Rex Hammock, CEO
If you google “the lost art of storytelling,” you’ll find link after link of people longing for a bygone time when there were great storytellers. “We’ve lost the ability to tell stories well,” they lament. We lost it in a time and place called the good ol’ days, they mourn.
In reality, we are living in a golden age of storytelling. Never have there been more stories, more ways to tell stories, more outlets for sharing stories or more fans of storytelling.
By Rex Hammock, CEO
The term “campaign” is used in many ways, in various contexts.
A political campaign is the process candidates must successfully follow to be elected to a public office. A military campaign is a series of battles that are part of a larger war. An advertising campaign is a coordinated series of advertisements, typically using several media channels, that are tied together with a complementary style and personality. Each type of campaign reflects a recurring commitment, discipline and multi-pronged approach to success.
By Steve Sullivan
Deciding on partners to help your business is a tough job. We must all decide: Is this function core to our business, or can we benefit from outside help?
By: John Lavey | Hammock President/COO
The dramatic shift from print to digital media, one of the big marketing stories in our lifetimes, happened to coincide with the Great Recession that lasted from 2007 to 2009.
Marketers were more careful with dollars coming out of the Recession and for good reason. There were fewer of those dollars. Cheaper was appealing. And what better way for wary marketers to spend their dollars then on areas where they would be able to see the impact of their spend.
Forbes Magazine recently recognized Hammock’s founder, Rex Hammock, as a leading voice in the field of content marketing. In an article published in late October, Rex described how Hammock uses content to build brand loyalty and tell stories to create long-term relationships with customers.
Rex discusses the challenges of defining content marketing, explains the best way to use content and pulls no punches in calling out good and bad uses of content marketing. The industry pioneer also shares the most effective customer-marketing components that have been the secret to Hammock’s success over the past 27 years.
To read more of Rex’s expert observations on content marketing, find the full article here.
Last week we showed you five amazing photo finishes—to inspire you to meet your year-end content marketing deadlines with style and flair—and show you how collaborating with Hammock can help you cross the finish line in an award-winning fashion.
Today’s inspiration comes from the realm of basketball—the buzzer beater. You probably have a favorite—that last-second dunk or half-court shot drained right as the shot clock expires and the buzzer sounds. It’s that fraction of a second when a long-shot contender knocks off a No. 1 seed and grabs the championship. A “buzzer-beating” finish is pure excitement—but it takes a smart, talented, hard-working team to set up those winning shots.