On graduating from Cambridge University, Rita began her career in advertising. She joined Saatchi & Saatchi in 1986 and worked with a wide range of the agencys highest profile clients including British Airways, Procter & Gamble, 3i, Campbells Foods, Visa International, PowerGen, Schweppes and BT. She set up the agencys ground-breaking Green Unit, and co-founded The Futures Group, which looked at the impact of new technology and the new millennium on people, brands and businesses. Rita was promoted to Director of Strategy at Saatchis in 1992, and to Vice-Chairman in 1995.

In 1997, she was invited to join Interbrand, the worlds leading brand consultancy and pioneer of Brand Valuation, as Chief Executive in London; in January 2002 she became Chairman. In her time at Interbrand, she has introduced a range of new services, including internal brand management, digital branding, brand equity tracking and brand futures. Interbrand also publishes the definitive, widely quoted annual league table of the worlds 100 most valuable brands, and clients have included most of the worlds leading businesses and just about every type of organisation and sector, whether large, small or not for profit.

Rita also features regularly on a wide variety of TV and radio programmes on business, brand, marketing and communication issues, including CNN, the Money Programme, BBC Breakfast, Channel 4 News, BBC World Service, the Today programme and Radio Five Live. She is also in great demand as a speaker at conferences around the world on subjects as diverse as innovation, leadership, corporate reputation, communicating sustainability and nation branding amongst many others. She has been a columnist for The Observer, Marketing Week and Retail Week and a reviewer for Management Today and the Financial Times. Her writing has included Interbrands book The Future of Brands, the APGS How to Plan Advertising and most recently The Economist book Brands and Branding .

She has worked with Jonathon Porritt for many years on environmental and sustainability issues, most recently as a member of the Governments Sustainable Development Commission and the Sustainable Consumption Roundtable. She also sits on the Advisory Board of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Brand Management, and on the Business Advisory Board for the Duke of Edinburghs Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, a member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain, the Marketing Society, the Market Research Society, the Account Planning Group and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. She has chaired several industry committees, including the Code of Advertising Practice to Children.

Rita joined the board of Dixons Group plc (now DSG international plc) as a non executive director in September 2003 and became non-executive chairman of Populus, the opinion pollster to The Times, in 2004. Her most recent non-executive directorship is with EMAP plc

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