Karen Vega is the Senior Director of Creative Strategy & Cultural Intelligence at Viacom Velocity— Viacom’s branded content studio. Karen heads up a social foresights intelligence team at Velocity. In this role, Vega and her team develop insights to solve business challenges by leveraging cultural, audience and social data & insights to inspire creativity, connect brands to culture, and to measure branded content effectiveness.
With over 11 years of experience in social media strategy and paid media in the consumer marketing and entertainment space, Karen has led award-winning social campaigns for brands like Wyndam Worldwide, The Daytime Emmy® Awards, Taco Bell, and Pepsi. Most recently Karen and her team were awarded an AdWeek Arc Award, a Clio, and a Shorty award for Beats by Dre branded content campaign on MTV. She is a regular guest speaker at social media webinars and conferences including Crimson Hexagon/Brandwatch Now You Know Conference, PR News Social Measurement, Tubular Labs industry events, and internal Viacom panels. Karen’s early dive into the entertainment industry stemmed from holding positions at both Billboard Magazine leading coordination of B2B entertainment and business event as well as Iheartmedia, where she worked on the aggregation of editorial and music content from over 800+ radio stations in the US into a music platform that is known today as - Iheartradio.com.
Karen is a bi-lingual native of Bogota Colombia and holds a B.A. in Communications Studies with a concentration in PR and a minor in Spanish Studies. She resides in Frank Sinatra’s hometown of Hoboken, N.J. with her husband and her 8.5month old Jace who keeps her on her toes on a daily basis.
