About Leo Morejon

My story starts before social media existed.

I started as a kid hacking AOL, running a site that traded "progz," little hacking scripts. Part of it was figuring out how things worked, but more than that it was about community: the people I met there and the stuff we built together.

That pulled me into a career. I got my start at JWT (J. Walter Thompson), one of the biggest ad agencies in the world, in the MySpace days, when brands weren't sure what to do with social media. I found the job on Craigslist. Yes, that Craigslist.

Then I moved to 360i, a digital agency Ad Age ranked No. 2 in the country on its 2013 Agency A-List. I helped build its 30-person global social team, working on Oreo, Coca-Cola, Hot Wheels and Trident. I ran Oreo's social media for three years and grew its fans to more than 30 million. Two moments from that run:

• 2011: Oreo set the first Guinness World Record ever achieved through social media (most Facebook likes in 24 hours).
• 2013: The lights went out at the Super Bowl, and within minutes my team posted "You can still dunk in the dark." The Oreo Blackout Tweet won a Cannes Lion.

That tweet showed brands a new way to operate: present, fast, human, in the moment. It's now called real-time marketing, and back then we were building it from scratch.

Those things happened because I understood how people actually behaved on these platforms, not just how the platforms worked. That's still the job.

After the agency years, I moved into MarTech, the software companies use to run marketing. I became VP of Client Strategy at Sysomos (now Meltwater), a company whose software tracks what people say about brands online:

• I started a profitable agency inside the company and ran strategy for 100+ clients, including Estée Lauder, Subway and Clinique.
• I led the sales engineering team, the people who show buyers how the software actually works.
• I ran the software rollout across Mondelez (Oreo's parent company): 50 countries, 30+ brands, 10 languages.

Then I started my own agency, Build & Inspire, and worked as an interim CMO for AI and software companies.

Along the way I taught digital marketing and MarTech as an adjunct professor at Iowa State University and West Virginia University, because the best way to understand something is to have to explain it to someone who knows nothing.

Today I lead social media and influencer marketing at a Fortune 500 company. I built social teams for two of its brands from scratch. On the side I build AI tools, like JingleMyBrand.com, an AI jingle generator I made in a weekend, and I consult with companies on putting AI to work.

Whether it's AI enablement, brand building, or figuring out what a new platform is actually good for, the question is always the same: what does this do for people?