Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. (Deluxe) has named former NBC and ESPN marketing executive Brad Soroca its chief marketing officer. Bringing two decades of marketing and brand-building experience in media and technology, he will drive Deluxe’s brand and marketing strategies and identify market insights to inform development of new products and services that address the changing needs of global media creators and providers. Soroca is based in New York.
“Brad’s expertise is in building brands and products at the intersection of content and technology,” said Deluxe CEO John Wallace. “As the marketplace shifts and Deluxe evolves as a global services provider, Brad will keep the pulse of our customers to identify new products and services that meet their evolving and complex needs.”
Soroca has led startups and global media brands in initiatives to drive innovation and change across sports, entertainment, music, news and local media, supported by a range of monetization models including advertising, e-commerce and subscriptions. He is the former COO and CMO of eMusic & Wondering Sound, where he oversaw the cloud platform for downloading and streaming music. As SVP of marketing and research for NBC Local Media, he led the rebrand of 10 local markets, identifying opportunities to grow business through content, marketing, and product innovations; and restructured the NBC Local creative group to produce more content, more frequently by setting up an external production group that could shoot/edit/finish video for any platform. Prior to NBC he drove strategic digital marketing for ESPN.com, where he helped launch ESPN 360, an early OTT platform that would become ESPN3. Soroca began his career in advertising and joins Deluxe most recently from his CEO post at early stage tech startup Arazoo, a cloud-based workflow tool for design professionals.
Soroca said, “With the explosion in demand for content there’s a massive need for more tools, more services, and different types of talent to address the global and complex world of creation and distribution — and technology plays a key role in enabling these businesses as they evolve. With a long and strong history of innovation and an enormous amount of assets, Deluxe is in a rare and opportunistic position to shape the future of the media in this exciting time.”
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More