Ryan Robertson is a marketing innovator as well as a lover of music and entertainment. He currently serves as the head of multicultural marketing at Diageo, a global leader in the alcohol industry.
Robertson has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an MBA from Xavier University. He has more than 14 years of experience driving meaningful connections with consumers and building brands at Procter & Gamble, Alberto Culver (now Unilever), LG Electronics and Coca-Cola. He previously worked as the brand director for Ciroc Ultra-Premium Vodka, where he managed its strategic partnership with music industry mogul Sean Combs. He was recognized in Ad Age’s 2019 “40 Under 40” class of top professionals shaping the marketing, media and advertising industries and as one of the “Top 100 Under 50 Emerging Leaders” by Diversity MBA magazine.
Rolling out spoke with Robertson about his innovative approach to marketing.
How do you define innovation in your personal and professional life?
Innovation takes different forms. At the core, I think innovation is simply about solving problems. And the beauty of it is, there’s no one right answer. The solutions are just as varied as the problems themselves. It’s all about finding new ways of accessing, approaching or thinking about things. A lot of times, people only view innovation as the big breakthrough and disruptive ideas, but it can also be simple solutions that make everyday things easier for us. And that’s both beautiful and inspiring. We can’t escape it. It’s all around us daily.
How have digital and social media changed how you build and market brands?
Digital and social media have forced us marketers to truly consider the objective of every piece of content [and] creative that we deploy. Like most things, there is no “one size fits all” model for digital. Given the varying platforms and digital [and] social capabilities, we have to be very purposeful on the desired outcome or action that we want consumers to take and understand [and] decide [which] specific digital or social tactics best enable that action.
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