Archives

Stephanie Trunzo

Stephanie has 20 years experience, from executive roles at Oracle and IBM to leading her start-up through a public company acquisition. She thrives building aligned, high-performing teams and compelling storytelling platforms.

As GVP of Transformation and Offerings at Oracle, Stephanie leads the continued shift to an offerings model that is both outcome-driven and client-focused, transforming both Oracle and its clients to star in a modern cloud story, grounded in both technology and expert talent. Stephanie leads initiatives across digital and experience disciplines, driving entrepreneurial thinking into disrupting how Oracle Consulting works and how Oracle works with its clients.

At IBM, Stephanie was the Global Head of IBM Cloud Garage, a network of over a dozen innovation hubs purpose-built to meld industry practices, startup culture, and IBM’s expertise. Prior to that, she founded and led her digital transformation start-up through a public acquisition to Globant. As Managing Director, she led Globant’s largest portfolio, and pioneered incubators for AI and cognitive.

While Stephanie is a tech geek across Cloud, AI, and emerging tech, she is also a storyteller with a commitment to usability and design thinking. Stephanie was affectionately dubbed “the prototype” for the Chief Digital Officer role by the CDO Club. She is an active advisor, giving back to non-profits and early start-ups, including TechGirlz, WomenNC, and InsureLife. Her writing can be found in publications like Fast Company, Forbes, and Huffington Post.

Ira Rubenstein

As Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, Ira Rubenstein leads digital consumer experiences and marketing for PBS. In this role, Rubenstein focuses on continuing PBS’ digital evolution through the development, implementation and scaling of world-class digital services and marketing content strategies. He also oversees the business intelligence group and leads comprehensive marketing programs to acquire, retain and engage audiences across platforms for the benefit of member stations.

Rubenstein joined PBS in 2014 as Senior Vice President and General Manager, PBS Digital, and led the expansion of PBS’ general audience and children’s content to mobile devices, over-the-top (OTT) services and other digital platforms. His accomplishments include an updated PBS.org, which yielded dramatic growth in traffic to station websites and online station donations. He spearheaded the development of Passport, a video offering available through member stations that provides donors on-demand access to a rich library of public television programming. He also led the expansion of PBS Digital Studios, PBS’ network of online-original content.

Rubenstein has more than 20 years of experience leading digital entertainment businesses. Prior to PBS, he was Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors for mobile media company MeeMee Media. Rubenstein also served as Executive Vice President, Digital Marketing for 20th Century Fox where he established the Digital Marketing organization and led the team behind ground breaking social and mobile campaigns for Prometheus, Chronicle, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class, and other major motion pictures.

Before joining Fox in 2011, Rubenstein was Executive Vice President of Marvel Entertainment’s Global Digital Media Group. During his tenure, he led strategic global digital initiatives related to websites, digital comics, games, digital video distribution, and launched the award-winning Marvel Digital Comics iPad app.

Rubenstein joined Marvel after more than 12 years at Sony, most recently as Executive Vice President, Content Strategy and Acquisitions. In that position, Rubenstein led the organization’s acquisition of content for all Sony devices and negotiated global content deals with major networks, movie studios, game companies and music labels. While at Sony, he also developed worldwide digital marketing, product and distribution strategy for Sony Pictures, and oversaw the rapid growth of sonypictures.com, which ultimately became a top 10 entertainment site. In addition, he led the establishment of Movielink, a first-of-its-kind online, video on-demand service, and managed the digital growth of the studio’s most important brands, including Wheel of Fortune, JEOPARDY! and Seinfeld.

Rubenstein holds a B.A. in Management Science from the University of California, San Diego and has an M.F.A. from the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America. In addition to awards for his work from Clio, Promax, Key Art, the Webby Awards, and others, Rubenstein has twice appeared on The Hollywood Reporter’s “Digital Power 50” list and has also been featured on the PGA’s “Digital 50” list, which recognizes new media innovators.

Lisa Farris

Lisa Farris is the Chief Digital Officer for the Recording Academy™, overseeing the evolution of the organization’s digital media platforms and supporting its mission through omni-channel strategies and execution. In collaboration with the Recording Academy’s leadership team, Farris is responsible for building upon the foundational elements of the organization that support all music creators, while connecting music audiences and stakeholders across digital platforms.

In her role, she is tasked with transforming and innovating digital experiences, while keeping the Recording Academy attuned to the changing media landscape. Farris leads the Digital Media team responsible for audience growth, product strategy and development, content strategy, production distribution, and data analytics. Under Farris’s leadership, the Digital Media team forges relationships with technology partners to further drive innovation and improve experiences across all digital touchpoints.

Prior to joining the Recording Academy, Farris served as chief digital & brand officer for MetricVision; co-founder of Get This, a technology that leveraged audio recognition to shop video entertainment; chief marketing officer for Move, Inc.; senior vice president of strategic marketing at Universal Music Group’s eLabs; and vice president of strategic marketing & new media at MCA Records.

Lisa currently serves as a mentor for entrepreneurship students at Loyola Marymount University and advises a summer financial literacy program there that is taught by the University’s students to high school pupils.

Bruno Kurtic

Bruno leads product strategy and development for Sumo Logic, pioneering machine-learning technology to address growing volumes of machine data across enterprise networks. He joined Sumo Logic from SenSage, where he served as Vice President of Product Management, developing technology, go-to-market strategy and product roadmaps for data warehousing, GRC, SIEM and log management solutions. Before joining SenSage, Bruno developed and implemented growth strategies for large high-tech clients at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), including a $7 billion R&D organization. He spent six years at webMethods, where he was a Product Group Director for two product lines, started the west coast engineering team and played a key role in the acquisition of Active Software Inc. Bruno also served at Andersen Consulting’s Center for Strategic Technology in Palo Alto and founded a software company that developed handwriting and voice recognition software. Bruno holds an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and B.A. in Quantitative Methods and Computer Science from University of St. Thomas.

Mike Edmonds

Mike is the Managing Director and VP of Product at Moonshot by Pactera, a digital product studio based in Chicago. Mike leads a team of product managers, experience designers, empathy researchers, and software engineers helping brands use design thinking and lean innovation to discover, design, and scale lovable products based on emerging technologies. Mike is also an Adjunct Professor of Digital Product Management at Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute and DePaul’s School of Computing and Digital Media.

Marc Blaskey

Marc Blaskey is the Senior Vice President Account at Wunderman Thompson

With more than 16 years of experience in consumer technology and integrated digital marketing across Europe, China and America, Marc has built and led agency teams to design and deliver world-class digital customer experiences for brands such as: Apple, Dyson and Land Rover.

Marc also loves to bake and play the drums. Rarely together.

Destry Sulkes, MD, MBA

Destry Sulkes, MD, is Chief Experience Officer at WPP’s Wunderman Thompson Health, where he leads efforts to uncover human truths around health, then delivering the best experiences. The backbone of this model includes 360 degree views of clinicians and patients as ‘people’, not just healthcare participants. He helped design and now stewards the health intelligence engine which is grounded in behavioral economic principles. The engine provides continuous guidance on holistic creative and media strategies that humanize and personalize customer engagements with client brands.

Prior to WPP, Dr. Sulkes built long-term value in a series of start-ups serving life science companies that invest in innovative uses of data, analytics and communications to improve healthcare quality. With an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth, and a joint MD/MBA degree from Tufts, he helped Zeiss launch the OCT device globally, led two medical communication groups through rapid growth and acquisition, guided strategy for WebMD/Medscape, and co-founded a healthcare analytics company, Prognos.ai. In a voluntary capacity, he also serves as Past President of the Board of Directors at the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Healthcare Professions.

Atif Rafiq

Atif was the first chief digital officer in the Fortune 100.

He possesses significant experience with culture change, organizing a company around customers, recruitment of new tech-savvy talent, and business model evolution. His most recent roles have included CDO & Global CIO of Volvo Cars and Global CDO of McDonald’s.

Atif has been at the center of Internet and digital disruption for over 20 years, building on 15 years experience in pure play tech companies such as Amazon, Yahoo! and AOL during their primes. Atif has also been the Founder / CEO of a Silicon Valley start-up.

Atif has been on all sides of industry disruption from the garage to the C-suite.

He’s both disrupted as a new technology entrant into various spaces, and helped reposition large incumbent companies for the next generation of customers. He provides strong vision for new consumer experiences / products with relentless customer focus and high business discipline around execution.

In May, he will start at President, Commercial & Growth for MGM Resorts, a Fortune 300 company in the hospitality / entertainment sector. This is a newly created role with significant ownership for the company’s P&L, growth plans, strategy and customer offering.