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John Winsor  

Innovative Branding and Marketing Expert and Best-Selling Author

John Winsor is a leading strategic marketing and product innovation thinker known for his work in open innovation, collaboration, co-creation, crowdsourcing and marketing. He is the CEO and founder of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first creative advertising agency built on crowdsourcing principles a business that Harvard Business School has covered in a case study and The New York Times Sunday Magazine wrote about in a cover story.

Before founding Victors & Spoils, Winsor was vice president and executive director of strategy and innovation at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, helping the company become Creativity magazine’s Agency of the Decade.

Prior to CP+B, he founded his own company, Radar Communications, in 1998 and sold it to CP+B in 2007. At Radar, Winsor used co-creation, strategy and academic-based market intelligence tools to help some of the country’s most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities.

Winsor was a journalist before founding Radar, building a magazine publishing company devoted to sports that included mountain biking, in-line skating and extreme skiing. In 1990, he acquired the rights to publish a then-struggling magazine, Women's Sports & Fitness. Within three years, he turned that magazine around and launched several other highly profitable titles and events, including The Gravity Games. He sold the business to Condé Nast in 1998.

Winsor is a frequent industry speaker and respected author. He is also frequent writer for The Harvard Business Review, The Guardian and several marketing journals.

His books include: Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers Is Essential to Winning in Business; Spark: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation; Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves (with Alex Bogusky) and Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-Creation Is Replacing Top-Down Innovation. Baked In, a best seller, was named an award winner in the marketing category for the 2009 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards.

He was recently featured in the book Pioneers of Digital, a showcase of success stories from leaders in advertising, marketing, search and social media, which credited him with turning his “…wealth of communication and digital experience…into a crowdsourcing (ad)venture.”

Throughout his career, Winsor has been deeply involved in the start-up and technology communities. He was a founding investor in Nau, the sustainable clothing company, and has been on the board of directors of Black Diamond Equipment and Lijit Technologies.

Outside of work he pursues his passions of climbing, skiing, cycling and surfing. Among his accomplishments, he set the world record for the ascent and round-trip of Kilimanjaro.

Winsor earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College and an MBA from the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.

Speech Topics

How Collaboration Grows Your Business

Co-creation, crowdsourcing and collaboration have evolved from niche innovations to the future of business. Companies can no longer act in isolation from their environment. Fueled by digital tools, people demand access to brands, making it imperative for brands to place collaboration with consumers at their core. In the future, collaboration will touch every aspect of the business cycle, from production to consumption.

In this session, you’ll learn:

  1. How co-creation, crowdsourcing and collaboration have evolved in the last decade.

  2. How collaborative production and consumption can help businesses be more social.

  3. How to effectively apply crowdsourcing principles to your brand.

Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves

In today’s world—in the same amount of time it takes to create an advertising campaign—it’s now possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product. A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself.

Can your organization create a product like this?

There are some amazing examples of companies and products in which marketing and product design are being connected, and in the future, there will be many more examples. There is power unleashed when product and marketing spring from the same well of inspiration, fueled by the same stories and beliefs.

In this session, you will learn:

  1. How the most valuable brands, from Apple to Nike, bake their marketing into their product.

  2. How to create the right structures and incentives that align marketing and product design.

  3. How to accelerate your sales by not only aligning your product and marketing messages but also your relationship with customers and potential customers.

Brand Out/Consumer In

For decades now, marketing was dominated by a single philosophy: Brand Out. Having a conversation with consumers was hard and expensive. The means of communication were so difficult that outsiders—mostly agencies—had to be hired to make sure that all of the resources were marshaled in the right place at the right time to product the perfect message, usually a television spot, that ran on television for millions of dollars. The scarcity of choices meant that you had one shot. You had to do something defining. Something iconic.

Those days are gone.

Now instead of Brand Out, marketing is all about Consumer In. Anyone can shoot a video on their smartphone and change culture to their advantage. Now there are millions of producers creating messages on millions of channels, for almost no money at all.

And, the best part is you can harness this abundance to your advantage.

In this session, you will learn:

  1. The tools available for flipping your marketing from Brand Out to Consumer In.

  2. How Victors & Spoils goes about tipping culture to a brand’s advantage.

  3. Examples of what works and doesn’t from projects with leading marketers, including Patagonia, Harley-Davidson and Coca-Cola.

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