Roberto Ruiz

Senior Vice President, Strategy & Insights Group

Focus Areas: Hispanic Consumer Insights with a focus on CPG, Retail, Telecommunications, Shopper Marketing, Consumer Electronics; Creative Best Practices; Acculturation

Previous Speaking Engagements: Hispanic Consumer 360, SRS Multicultural Marketing Conference, Direct Marketing Association, American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), Diageo Multicultural Marketing

Bio:

Roberto Ruiz is Senior Vice President of Strategy & Insights Group at Univision, the leading media company serving Hispanic America. The Business Development Group is a dedicated consulting team of veterans from media, marketing and agency backgrounds who help marketers develop and execute their strategies to drive sales with Hispanics. A cornerstone of their approach is helping companies evolve from treating Hispanic as a niche, to deploying a “total market strategy,” where Hispanic is integrated into all phases of the business planning process.

Mr. Ruiz is a Hispanic Marketing expert, with over 18 years of experience in senior management positions at client, agency and media. Roberto combines classic marketing training with an engineering background and an MBA. Throughout his career Roberto has worked on several industries including financial services, interactive, advertising, consulting, startups and packaged goods.

Mr. Ruiz’s career in marketing and advertising started in Venezuela, where he worked in the consumer packaged goods sector at Pillsbury, Gillette and Mavesa.  A bug for the creative took him to lead the strategic planning group at one of the top ad agencies in the country, where he also fell in love with the international marketing side of the business.

In 1993, he moved to the US to work on his MBA and started a career at MCI where he held management positions in direct response, telemarketing and international marketing, targeting Hispanic consumers in the US and Latin America. After MCI, Mr. Ruiz held the senior marketing position at MoneyGram, where he led the Mexico and Latin America money transfer business. In 1998 he joined Prodigy Internet and led the team that launched the first fully bilingual Internet Service Provider targeting Hispanics in the US.

In 2000, he became a founding partner at The Vidal Partnership. He was one of four partners that took the business from a mid-size agency to a powerhouse recognized twice by Ad Age as agency of the year. At Vidal, Mr. Ruiz worked on accounts such as DirecTV, Century21 Real Estate, MasterCard, Diageo, and Cingular Wireless.  In 2004 Roberto left Vidal Partnership to start Consumer Contacts, a boutique consulting firm specializing in Hispanic marketing.

Mr. Ruiz is actively engaged in speaking at trade conferences, including the Association of American advertising Agencies, The Direct Marketing Association, the SRS Multicultural Marketing conferences.  Roberto lives in Leonia, NJ, is married to Mercedes and they have two kids. He is an avid golfer, a pilot and an aviation fanatic.