Marian Salzman

Profile

“Loquacious and personable, Salzman is an attractive blonde with attractive smarts….While she quails at being thought of as some sort of Xena of zeitgeist, a sexy sociologist probing at our inner workings, the Connecticut resident has undoubtedly placed a finger on the country’s collective pulse.” —American Way (2009)

The Guardian (2007) wrote that she “radiates enough energy, one suspects, to power a small town and looks as if she has just stepped off the set of Sex and the City.” She has been credited with popularizing pop-culture buzzwords from wigger to singleton to metrosexual. She lives and breathes social media, and she knows what’s coming next. (Though she’s been known to show up for work with her pajamas still on under her clothes to give herself time to get it all done.)

She’s Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America. She took over in August 2009, bringing laserlike focus to the agency’s social media and grassroots campaigning—a homecoming, as she had previously spent five years as chief strategic officer of Euro RSCG Worldwide.

 

Biography

Before returning to Euro, she was CMO at global PR giant Porter Novelli. She drove Porter’s brand positioning and executed thought leadership, reputation management and social media programs, including the creation of Porter’s pop-up agency Jack + Bill, which in one year won PRWeek’s PR Innovation of the Year, the industry’s innovation SABRE and the top Bulldog award.

Named one of the world’s top five trendspotters, she has managed other trendspotters around the globe for more than 15 years. She has been CMO at JWT Worldwide, worldwide director of TBWA’s Department of the Future, and director of consumer insights and emerging media at Chiat\Day. With Jay Chiat, she co-founded Cyberdialogue, the world’s first online market research company, in 1992.

In addition to her closely watched and widely reported-on annual trends forecast, Marian has contributed regular trends columns to Forbes.com’s CMO Network and CNBC.com and written for industry leaders Adweek (U.S.) and Marketing Week (U.K.). She has blogged at pnintelligentdialogue.com and currently blogs at the Huffington Post, eurorscgpr.com and eurorscgsocial.com, and for the World Future Society.

She is a member of the mentoring board of Brown University’s Women in Business. She created Tweet to ReMIND (tweettoremind.org), a community-based effort to raise money and awareness for the Bob Woodruff Family Foundation, on whose board she used to serve. Marian is currently a member of the Agency Management Committee of the Council of Public Relations Firms and the board of directors of the World Future Society.

Marian graduated from Brown University with top honors and studied sociology at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

 

List of Publications

Marian Salzman is author or co-author of more than a dozen nonfiction books on topics ranging from cultural shifts to current affairs to the youth market and the commercial workplace. Her latest published work, co-authored with long-term collaborator Ira Matathia, is Next Now: Trends for the Future, a look at trends affecting everyday life in the U.S. and beyond. Marian is now working on a book about the brain; it will talk not only about her "new brain" since a craniotomy to remove a tumor in 2007 but also about braininess, today's “smart is sexy” trend, our desperation to stay brainy longer, how technology is rewiring our brains and the creative spirit. She is regularly sought out for her opinion on cultural trends and most recently has had those insights published everywhere from The Economist, BMI's Voyager and The Independent to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Tribune.