
Digital Marketing Expert
I have been working in digital media since digital has been around, from the earliest CD-ROM reference products in 1990 and earliest web services in 1993 to marketing leadership roles in online education, e-commerce and the Chicago startup scene.
Here I am in New Delhi, where I was invited to speak on digital marketing for higher education at the 2014 DigiWise Summit, hosted by The Hindustan Times and Google India.

Itzy Ritzy
I currently head up e-commerce for Itzy Ritzy, a growing producer of innovative and stylish products for new parents and their children. I have led digital initiatives around collaborations with reality TV stars Chelsea and Cole DeBoer and social influencer Brittani Boren Leach, and I have overseen all digital marketing, site management, SEO, analytics and the e-commerce and marketing technology stack.
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SAFE + FAIR

Right At School

The Oak Park Education Foundation

George M. Pullman Foundation

Partners in Reproductive Health

Art Works for Change

Shiftgig

Language Stars
At Language Stars, I oversaw the expansion of digital marketing through the development of campaign landing pages, a new web site with class registration capabilities, and campaigns with Groupon and other daily deal sites. The result was a 50% reduction in inquiry costs and a 10% increase in overall revenue at the height of a recession. I also led marketing for their expansion into a second metro area, Washington DC.

Traditional Marketing
Although most of my career has been spent in digital marketing, I have also done considerable work in traditional marketing, including print advertising, radio, outdoor display and direct mail. This “passport” direct mail piece from Language Stars invited parents to consider their kids as future achievers, with stamps inside for languages instead of destinations.

University of Illinois Global Campus
In 2007 I was recruited to head up marketing for an ambitious online initiative at the University of Illinois, modeled on for-profit universities but with the quality of a top state school system. I oversaw the development of marketing strategies for five degree programs and several certificate programs, bringing in 28,000 student inquiries and 1,000 students.

Edify Marketing / MidPointers
Edify Marketing was my early-stage startup built to serve higher education clients looking to attract online students. The main service was a degree portal called MidPointers, which catered to mid-life career changers.

Monster.com
When they were still the leading job web site, Monster.com hired me to breathe new life into MonsterLearning, which connected degree-seekers with for-profit and traditional universities. The initial revision of the service saw six-fold increases in first-page Google results within three months. Following this initial success, I oversaw the integration of a strategic acquisition in the degree portal space, which Monster’s CEO later called the fastest ROI of any acquisition in the company’s history.

Email Marketing
I have overseen and personally sent more than a billion marketing emails in my career. (I like to joke that I am both proud and ashamed of that number.) In several of my roles over the past 13 years, I have also been responsible for identifying, selecting and implementing email marketing, marketing automation and CRM systems. These samples are from Language Stars and The ADMCi, an education initiative focused on user experience design.

Cardean University
Cardean University, a division of UNext, was an early online university offering one of the first fully online MBA programs, developed in partnership with the University of Chicago, Stanford and other top business schools, and backed by investors Larry Ellison and Michael Milken. I managed digital marketing, including the public “front door” of the university, as well as numerous microsites developed for corporate partners such as General Motors, Shell Oil and Hyatt Hotels.

The Earliest Web-Based Reference Services
I served as project manager for Britannica Online, the first web-based encyclopedia, developed in 1993-94. I oversaw all scheduling and planning for Britannica’s digital reference products throughout much of the 1990s, working with in-house editorial, art, cartography, indexers, programmers and a west coast advanced technology group.

Britannica CD
Britannica CD was a two-CD-ROM product—too big to fit on a single disc before the advent of DVDs—and containing special features including a customizable timeline of world history, an interactive atlas and articles from great contributors such as Albert Einstein.

Children's Educational Products
In the mid-1990s, Britannica developed children’s educational products as a partnership with VTech and designers who had worked at Sesame Worshop. In Inventions to Mention, Rusty the Dog had to chase his inventor’s intercontinental frisbee, and he advanced by selecting the correct inventor at each challenge.

The Earliest CD-ROMs
I served as editorial manager of the earliest CD-ROM reference products for Compton’s Encyclopedia, Britannica’s young adult brand. I helped develop timelines of U.S. and world history, oversaw geographic and historical updates during the unification of Germany and the breakup of the U.S.S.R, and managed a topical outline of all encyclopedia entries.