Jon Iwata

Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications
IBM

Jon Iwata took over as head of IBM’s corporate communications department in 2002 and quickly emerged as a prototype for the public relations professional of the future: a strategic thinker with a thorough understanding of how brands and reputations are built in the social media age and a trusted advisor to management. Iwata is responsible for a converged marketing and communications function at IBM, including the company’s Smarter Planet branding and thought leadership initiative. His responsibilities now include the marketing of IBM’s product and services portfolio, digital commerce, market intelligence, and communication, as well as it citizenship initiatives. He is recognized as a pioneer in the use of new communications technologies, and IBM was an early adopter of social media to reach external audiences and internally to bring together people and give them more input into the decision-making process. He is a member of IBM’s operating team, responsible for day-to-day marketplace execution, and its client experience team, which focuses on making distinctive client experience systemic across the company. He also is vice chairman of the IBM International Foundation.