VITAMIN W Media is building a diverse group of advisors to help us in our mission
Paula Gignac, a recent inductee into the Canadian Marketing Hall Of Legends, past President of IAB Canada, and former Vice President of Rogers Women’s Group of Websites -- is recognized throughout the industry as an award-winning author of Digital marketing programs for clients as diverse as AirMiles, GlaxoSmithKline, Ford, Parmalat, Proctor + Gamble, Hershey, and more.
A mentor extraordinaire, she has more than 16 years of experience in Digital; is the “go-to” expert and thought-leader on Interactive marketing and advertising trends in Canada; and, was the creator and chief instructor of IAB Canada’s industry-leading Intensive, One-Day Course in Interactive Marketing + Online Advertising for eight ground-breaking years. Gignac followed this accomplishment by creating similarly-successful One-Day Courses in Social Media, Paid Search, SEO and Mobile Marketing, and is acknowledged as a global leader in education about all things Digital.
Originally trained as a Wildlife Biologist specializing in “optimal foraging”, Gignac’s perspective on Interactive is about as yin-yang as it gets… Add in her turns as a writer and an award-winning artist, and you understand why a legacy of creativity, innovation and excellence permeates Gignac’s entire career.
Susan McPherson is a senior vice president at Fenton, the nation's leading public interest communications firm. At Fenton, she focuses on corporate responsibility programs for the firm's clientele and regularly writes and speaks on sustainability communications and the value of public/private partnerships. She has more than 20 years experience in marketing, public relations, CSR communications and business development. Prior to joining Fenton, McPherson was vice president, CSR services at PR Newswire, a leading provider of electronic news distribution, media targeting, and measurement and multimedia services. In this role, she was responsible for creating a series of product offerings for companies to better communicate their CSR activities with stakeholders in addition to generating new business for the newswire from CSR professionals. She also assisted in development of the firm's first bureaus in China (Beijing and Shanghai) and the launch of MediaSense, a media measurement tool. Prior to her career at PR Newswire, she worked in both the editorial and marketing departments of USA Today.
McPherson holds a B.A in history from the State University of New York at Albany and conducted graduate studies at Boston University's College of Communications with a focus on broadcast journalism. She serves on the board of Bpeace, an organization dedicated to assisting women in regions of conflict and post-conflict start businesses. Her primary board responsibility is running the NGO's annual largest fundraising event, which has raised over $500,000 during the last three years. She also is a member of Echoing Green's Social Investment Council, Social Media Week's New York Advisory Council and the New York Leadership team for 85Broads. Additionally, she serves as an adviser to Plant A Fish (a new nonprofit created by Fabien Cousteau) and The OpEd Project. Prior to moving to New York in 2003, McPherson lived in Seattle, where she was actively involved in FareStart, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing job and life-skills training to the disadvantaged.
Marie C. Wilson has been an advocate of women’s leadership for more than 30 years, Marie Wilson is founder and President of The White House Project, creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work ® Day and author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (Viking 2004). In 1998, Wilson founded The White House Project in order to build a richly diverse, genuinely representative democracy.
Since its inception, The White House Project has been a pioneer in advancing women’s leadership in every sphere—political and social, cultural and economic. Under Wilson’s stewardship, innovative research and programming initiatives have been hallmarks of The White House Project. Highlights of the last decade include groundbreaking research, including the publication of “The White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership”, the launch of SheSource.org, a database with over 330 women experts, two national leadership summits, and “Vote, Run, Lead,” a training program that has given more than 9,000 women the tools they need to run for office.
An innovator and change-maker, Wilson’s ultimate goal is to transform American culture so that the number of women leaders in all sectors achieves a critical mass. Wilson has been profiled in The New York Times “Public Lives” column, and has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, National Public Radio and other national programs. Currently, she is working on a book.
Bob Young is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, a premiere international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 300,000 recently-published titles and more than 15,000 new creators from 80 different countries joining each week. In 2002, he founded Lulu.com and in 1993, Young co-founded Fortune 500 Company Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the open-source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology.
He was named one of the "Top 50 Agenda-Setters in the Technology Industry in 2006" and was nominated as one of Business Week's "Top Entrepreneurs" in 1999.” Before founding Red Hat, Young spent 20 years at the helm of two computer-leasing companies that he founded. His book, "Under the Radar", chronicles how Red Hat's open source strategy successfully won wide industry acceptance in a market previously dominated by proprietary binary-only systems. Young has also imparted the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial experiences by contributing to, "You've GOT to Read This Book!" and "Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul."
In 2000, Young co-founded the Center for Public Domain, a non-profit foundation created to bolster healthy conversation of intellectual property, patent and copyright law, and the management of the public domain for the common good. Grant recipients included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Future of Music Coalition.