Tariq M. Shaukat
Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Caesars Entertainment
Tariq M. Shaukat is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Caesars Entertainment. In this role, Tariq is responsible for driving revenue growth through the development of world class customer relationships and innovative marketing programs. He oversees the company’s Marketing, VIP, and Entertainment functions, overseeing marketing and entertainment strategy, direct marketing, brand advertising, multicultural and international marketing, strategic partnerships, digital marketing, and public relations, as well as our award winning loyalty program, Total Rewards.
Tariq joined Caesars Entertainment in 2012 from McKinsey & Company, where he was a Partner. There, he led the Firms’ loyalty practice and worked with clients across a range of consumer businesses, including travel, entertainment, and financial services, on revenue stimulation, marketing and growth topics. Before McKinsey, he worked in the technology industry, co-founding a social media company, and serving as a director of marketing and business development at Trilogy, an enterprise software company. He was also a Principal at The McKenna Group, a Silicon Valley based firm focused on marketing and growth strategies.
Tariq holds a bachelors and masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, respectively, and a masters degree in Technology and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
David Armano
David serves as managing director for the social-digital practice of one of Edelman’s largest hub offices within the global network. Widely known as both a digital veteran as well as an internationally recognized thought leader and speaker, David leads one of the most talented teams of social strategists, community managers, technologists and creative minds in the industry.
David is considered to be a highly influential voice on the subject of social media for business and has over 75,000 subscribers to his blog and Twitter stream. Prior to Edelman, David was a part of the founding team of social business consultancy Dachis Group, helping launch the business from stealth mode into the marketplace. In his career, David has pioneered digital and social solutions for clients such as HP, eBay, adidas, WW Grainger, the US Dairy industry and has held senior positions with digital outfits such as agency.com and Digitas. He also writes regular industry perspectives for the Harvard Business Review, advises several start-ups and co-founded the “Allhat” event billed by SXSW as being populated by “the most respected voices in digital.” A “design thinker” at heart, David graduated cum laude from the prestigious Pratt Institute with a dual major of visual communications/computer graphics.
Patrick Harrington
Patrick Harrington is the team lead for the targeting group in San Bruno, California. Within targeting, he leads up the modern algorithm development for item level product recommendation and customer segmentation by leveraging large scale convex optimization, machine learning, and information retrieval across the disparate data generated from this large, multi-channel retailer. Patrick joined through the acquisition of the Boulder, Colorado based startup, OneRiot where he developed high-dimensional demographic and interest predictors based on twitter, foursquare, and geo-positioning data. Prior to OneRiot, Patrick spent two years in natural gas and electricity trading at DTE Energy Trading. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is an avid skier.
Michael Jaquet
Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team
Michael Jaquet, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team, has been selling “non-traditional” media since launching his own action sports magazine in 1996. Freeze Magazine was a youth marketing movement in a sport hundreds of years old and success came from events, television, and online extensions where advertisers could see ROI that solely a print magazine couldn’t deliver.
That formula landed him the gig of head of sales and marketing at TransWorld Media, makers of Snowboarding, Skateboading, Surf, Motocross, and BMX magazines. What was largely an endemic business only soon became booming with every major youth marketing brand buying in to the core side of action sports through print, online, events, and home video.
Yearning for another startup challenge, Jaquet joined CSTV (now CBS Sports Network) as director of business development in New York in 2004 and after being bought by CBS two years in to the business plan, moved to head of sales for the cable property. Success there with consistent 35-50% growth year over year earned him the added role of filling the soon to be 50-million home cable network with sponsored programming, branded content, and a few strategic programming partnerships like the PBR (Professional Bull Riders).
With the business maturing under his leadership, Jaquet looked for his next challenge but also a re-connection to his ski town roots having grown up in Sun Valley, Idaho. When the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team came calling, it didn’t take Jaquet long to jump at a dream job that would match his passion for snowsports and his skillset in television, sports marketing, sponsorship sales, and brand building.
In just 6 short months, Jaquet has led the Organization through its first two LIVE televised events in America and returned revenue through sponsorships to levels not seen in 10 years. Jaquet has also initiated a digital strategy led by a groundbreaking deal with YouTube with the Ski Team’s own branded channel and a weekly internet-only news show, SnowGlobe.
Jaquet now lives in Park City, Utah, with his wife Aimee, two girls Ava and Madeline, and son James.
Stanley Hainsworth, Tether
Chairman and Chief Creative Officer at Tether, Inc.
We Are the Stories We Tell
How do you craft love affairs between brands and individuals? Love that blossoms; love that lasts? By starting at the genuine heart of a brand, with an approach that elevates story over style. Stories that evolve from a series of carefully crafted cumulative experiences that connect us via our shared affinities, desires and convictions. These stories manifest themselves as experiential tapestries, nurturing our sense of collective unity as they empower people to engage with one another, and the brands they love, in more resonant, more human ways.
Previous to founding Tether, Stanley was VP Global Creative of Starbucks where he oversaw all creative aspects of Starbucks – new products, packaging systems, seasonal promotions, brand campaigns, advertising and collateral materials.
Stanley spent twelve years at Nike as a Creative Director working on everything from product launches to Niketowns to the Olympics. After Nike, he moved to Denmark to join the Lego Company as their Global Creative Director. There he directed a total visual overhaul of the Lego brand from top to bottom, including packaging, the web, retail and brand stores.
Stanley is a national board member of AIGA, a featured speaker on Creativity worldwide and the recipient of awards from ID Magazine, Communication Arts, The Library of Congress, Graphis, Type Directors Club, HOW International, HOW Regional, NW Design Awards, PRINT International, AIGA National, AIGA Regional, Rosie’s, POP Times, and Communication Arts Illustration, Retail Interiors (Best International Store and Best Retail Theater) and MAPIC (Best Retail Store).
Barbara DeLollis
Travel reporter, USA TODAY; Hotel Check-In Blogger
Barbara is one of USA TODAY’s veteran travel writers and editor of Hotel Check-In, the influential blog she launched in 2009 that tracks hotel travel. The blog provides readers with the news, trends and features about travel trends, new hotels and renovations, the best hotel bars and restaurants, design and technology innovations, interviews with hotel-world VIPs and much more. The CEOs of multinational hotel companies such as Hilton, Starwood, Hyatt, Carlson and InterContinental Hotels Group have blogged for her. Barbara has been covering travel at USA TODAY since 2002. She is also active on Twitter (16,000 followers ) and Facebook (barbdelollis).
A sought-after speaker, over the last three years she’s spoken or moderated panels at prestigious industry events as Virtuoso Travel Week (2012, 2011), HITEC (2012), New York University Hotel Investment Conference (2012), World Travel & Tourism Council Mexico (2012), Boutique Design New York (2011), Barcelona’s Hospitality Industry World Congress (2012) and HSMAI’s Adrian Awards (2010). In January 2013, she’ll assemble the second annual USA TODAY Hotel CEO Roundtable during the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles.
Christopher Steiner
Co-founder at Aisle50
Author: Automate This, How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
Senior Writer, Forbes Magazine
I am an engineer, a skier, a writer and one of the founders at Aisle50, which is bringing group buying to the grocery world. Aisle50 was part of the summer 2011 batch at Y Combinator.
After working as an engineer for four years, I pursued a career in journalism. My first writing job was as a staff reporter at the Chicago Tribune. I later migrated to Forbes magazine.
My first book: $20 Per Gallon came out in 2009. It’s a thought experiment examining how our world would look with higher and higher gas prices. It was named a best book of the year by the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Some review snippets are here.
My second book, Automate This, How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, will be released by Penguin/Portfolio on Aug. 30, 2012. It chronicles the march of algorithms from the very first hack of Wall Street to their current role as disruptors of the creative class in fields as varied as music, writing, law and medicine.
After writing Automate This and after years of interviewing and documenting motivated people doing innovative things, I caught the entrepreneurial bug, which sent me back toward my engineering roots. I started working, along with my friend Riley Scott, on a web app that would bring group buying to the grocery world. Aisle50 went live in August 2011.
There’s more to the story, which is why I still blog at Forbes.
Ian Swinson
Senior Director of User Experience
Salesforce.com
Ian Swinson is the Senior Director of User Experience at Salesforce.com for the Platform and Analytics design teams. After years as the lead designer on Salesforce.com’s flagship products Ian has recently taken up the challenge of managing and leading the design of the company’s next generation application, site, schema and report building tools.
At Salesforce.com Ian, and his team, look at current and emerging design and technology trends with the goal of making enterprise software as easy to use as consumer web sites. With Chatter, Salesforce.com is celebrating the successful integration of social and mobile design into their suite of business applications. As the future of work is redefined the next phase is to empower and extend all businesses and users through ubiquitous computing.
Ian is a graduate of McGill University’s Film and Communications program and has spent the last 20 years solving design problems at startups, design studios and enterprise software companies — and riding his bike a lot.
Chris Heuer
Specialist Leader, Social Business, Deloitte Digital
Chris is a leading holistic business strategist and creative technologist who leads our digital engagement strategy service offering within Deloitte’s Social Business practice. Across the industry he is widely regarded as one of the leading voices on Social Business, Engagement and how brands can deliver exceptional customer experiences through digital channels. His work on “The Engagement Curve” answers the proverbial question on the ROI of Social Media and goes further to provide organizations with strategic planning tools that enable them to realize the full value of becoming a Social Business by embracing Engagement as a core operating principle.
Chris currently advises several high-profile Deloitte clients on navigating organizational transformation to better embed digital strategy at their core. This is something he has been doing for almost two decades with global consumer and B2B brands across multiple industries, as well as government and not for profit organizations. Under his direction as the leader of the Adoption activities around the launch of Deloitte’s Enterprise Social Network, the firm was recognized as one of the largest, fastest growing and most successful ESN deployments in the world.
As the Chairman, CEO and Creative Director of Guru Communications, an early interactive agency he founded in 1994, he helped build hundreds of websites contributing business strategy, technology insights, creative storytelling and a holistic vision. For many of the websites, he also served as a UI Designer, Information Architect, Copywriter, Interaction Designer, Software Architect and occasionally, even as a Graphic Designer. He was and remains obsessed with crafting digital experiences that transcended the limitations of the computer screen. It was this deep passion for his craft that earned the agency numerous awards and other recognition for its work. His experience with Guru and his need for more talented designers lead to Chris creating the first Web Design and Interactive Marketing classes at Miami Ad School in 1996.
As Chief of eBusiness at the United State Mint, Chris lead the government agency from zero to $1.6MM per week in online sales and developed their first opt-in email marketing campaign which lead to a then single day record of $2.6MM in sales. His team was also recognized widely for its award winning H.I.P. Pocket Change program.
While consulting for Palm Computing, Chris worked with the eBusiness group to develop a solutions marketing platform for the Palm economy, personally developing an advanced content management system designed to deliver personalized communications based on user archetypes/roles/interests. He successfully coordinated the integration of numerous marketing and partner groups from across the organization into this platform, pioneering a single-sign on experience for customers/partners.
More recently, Chris formed Social Media Club in March, 2006 to advance best practices in Social Media engagement. It is now in 300+ cities around the world and serves as the industry’s leading non-profit professional association. His work on developing the “Social Media Press Release” with Public Relations thought leaders from around the world is often cited as being perhaps the most transformative on the PR industry. He continues to be passionate about reforming education through the use of social technologies in the classroom and beyond, helping ensure that college students are better prepared as they transition into the workforce. As a result of his unique position as a thought leader in the social media and social business space, he has developed a global perspective around the global evolution of market facing strategy and its impact on all aspects of an organization’s operations.
As a partner/founder of The Conversation Group in 2007, he guided the development of one of the first social media agencies in the world helping startups and large brands understand and leverage social media as a part of their marketing and communications mix. Prior to joining Deloitte, Chris launched AdHocnium in 2009 as one of the first ‘networked agency’ models, bringing together a notable list of experts, authors and thought leaders to support global organizations as they embraced social technologies.
He has a broad array of skills including, Holistic Business Strategy, social media, collaboration design, adoption program management, community management, conversational marketing programs, video/podcast production, online advocacy, UX, IA, CMS Design, digital product design, web site development, online marketing campaigns, ecommerce, email marketing, CPC/CPA advertising, Facebook marketing, influencer relations, search engine marketing, affiliate programs, location based marketing, online contests, blogger outreach, and real time marketing among others.
He loves to snowboard, calling Lake Tahoe his ‘future home’ spending most winter seasons on the North Shore for the past 12 years since moving to Silicon Valley. You’re likely to find him at Squaw this season where he has a season pass.
