Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults

Dr. Mara Einstein is a powerhouse marketing critic. After working for a decade in corporate marketing for some of the biggest names in the business (hello, MTV), she left to become an academic. She is a tenured professor and former chair in the department of media studies at Queens College (CUNY). She is a tenured professor and former chair in the department of media studies at Queens College (CUNY).

Mara is regularly quoted in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Wall Street Journal, among many others, and has appeared on HuffPost Live, The Brian Lehrer Show, NPR’s Marketplace (multiple times) and popular podcasts, such as The Majority Report with Sam Seder. She has also written for Advertising Age, Harvard Business Review, Newsday, and Fastcoexist, and given talks from Brazil to the UK on topics from marketing religion to social media influencers.

Mara serves as the inaugural chair of the research and academic group of The Impact Guild, which empowers people to use media, technology, and pop culture for social good and healthy democracies. She has served as an expert for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), was named one of 100 Significant Women in Native Advertising by the Native Advertising Association, and is an Emmy-voting member of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Locally, she is on the board of the Kew Gardens Civic Association, fighting against building new jails and for the MTA to support local businesses.

Dr. Einstein (and, yes, she is distantly related) holds a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University, an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.