Chief Grown-Up
GrownUpMarketing.com
Jerry has been at the leading edge for his entire 40+ year career. He may be the only executive in the digital arena to have created a new brand of soda pop (Mello Yello for The Coca-Cola Company) and he was the first person to conceptualize (and execute) a coffee-by-mail business (Gevalia Kaffe for Kraft Foods), and he helped transform a nascent online entertainment company into a powerful digital marketing services company that became so attractive that Yahoo! purchased it (Yoyodyne).
His credentials include being a Senior Vice President at Young & Rubicam, Wunderman and Burson Marsteller; making him one of the very few executives with significant experience in general advertising, direct marketing and public relations. He ran sales and marketing for a division of BMG Music and spent 9 years running marketing for Yahoo’s multi-billion dollar media sales organization world-wide. His creation of the Yahoo! Summit Series and the world-wide Yahoo! Big Idea Chair creative award program were both uniquely successful and long-lived.
Jerry became convinced that the enormous baby boomer market was under appreciated and under exploited. He joined a media start-up, Grandparents.com, as CEO, where he helped create a new media marketplace, establish a new brand and build reputation and awareness in the media industry.
He has now formed a marketing consultancy, GrownUpMarketing, to help companies tell their stories to the advertising and marketing communities. His clients include LinkedIn, Ace Metrix, the VCU Brandcenter, Zillow, Survey Monkey and others.
Jerry has served on the Board of Directors of the Direct Marketing Association, the Board of Directors of the New York Ad Club and the Dean’s Advisory Board at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Virginia Commonwealth University BrandCenter.
Jerry has been married to Catherine for more than 37 years and they are the empty nesting parents of two 20 something daughters and one very energetic brindle boxer.
Read all Jerry’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Rants & Raves from the Heart of Advertising.
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