Mark Naples

Managing Partner

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Mark started WIT Strategy in October 2002 after having been CMO, Director of Investor Relations, and Privacy Officer for 24/7 Real Media. This is the second iteration of WIT Strategy, which he’d originally started in 1994 with a focus on Senate Commerce Committee and FTC issues while he was acting as Director of Public Affairs for the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR), the successor organization of the US Commission on Civil Rights.

 

While at CCCR, he spearheaded the campaign to change business perceptions on the stick of affirmative action to the carrot of workplace diversity.  20+ years before people began talking about DEI, he pressed the Clinton White House into promoting the advantages of workplace diversity and placed leaders from FORTUNE 500 companies and major universities whom he’d identified and inculcated on national broadcast news programs and the covers of national news magazines such as Inc. and Forbes.

The passage of the Telecom Reform Act in 1996, which he’d lobbied for on behalf of the MFJ/Baby Bells, effectively paved the way for the commercial web.  Mark soon became managing editor of AOL.com. By 2000, he was CMO at Real Media and he testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on web privacy matters in 2001.

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Since founding WIT Strategy in 2003, he has led strategic efforts on behalf of more than 500 companies ranging from startups to publicly traded multinationals, including dozens of corporate and product launches, complete company re-positioning campaigns, and more successful crisis suppression than anyone else in the business.  He was one of the authors of the self-regulatory principles that became the backbone of the DAA self-regulatory program in 2010.

A longtime contributor to MediaPost and board member for the iMedia Summits, and a proud board member of the TD Foundation and Puentes De Salud, Mark holds a BA in Religion from Haverford College, where his undergraduate thesis was a marketing deconstruction of the New Testament.