Ryan Davidson

My first job in media was in Out-of-Home — a channel I knew almost nothing about when I started. Billboards, transit, cinema, guerrilla, gas station TV, branded pizza boxes — a broad, fragmented landscape that didn't follow the same rules as anything else. Clients often weren't sure what they were buying. The data was messy. The attribution was thin. And yet you had to walk into rooms, build a point of view, and make a case for where the money should go. I was learning on the fly at Zenith on Nestlé, figuring it out as I went — and that turned out to be the best possible foundation. It taught me early how to operate in ambiguity, find real value in noisy environments, and build conviction when certainty isn't available. Skills I've used every day since.

From there: integrated media on Verizon Wireless, then high-stakes enterprise planning across JPMorgan Chase and General Motors — cross-channel strategy, national and local orchestration, and the internal dynamics that shape how large organizations actually make decisions. Then full-service agency leadership at Barkley — and the most volatile stretch any marketer has had to navigate in decades. COVID. Supply chain collapse. George Floyd and the social reckoning that followed. January 6. The uneven return to travel. Every disruption demanded a different kind of response — not just planning, but building systems agile enough to anticipate fast-moving conditions and act decisively when the ground shifted. That experience made one thing clear: the infrastructure behind the work matters as much as the work itself.

Then I crossed the table. The Lipton / Unilever carve-out — managing media in-house across the Lipton and TAZO portfolio, mid-PE transition, owning the P&L and managing the agencies instead of being one — changed how I see everything. Being accountable for the number, not just the plan, clarifies your thinking fast. You understand quickly how hard it is to connect strategy, execution, and measurement in a way that leadership actually trusts. Most systems don't hold up under that kind of pressure.

Independent consulting work on omnichannel marketing and media strategy — including assignments with Odele Beauty and Suave Brands — pushed that thinking further. Helping mid-market teams build investment logic and measurement systems they could actually own and act on. And work at Tatari on TV and CTV strategy for brands including Calm and Thorne pushed me deep into incrementality, attribution, and the gap between what platforms report and what actually moved the business.