What do you do after a career making and shaping some of the most innovative and distinctive digital agencies in the world - companies like Razorfish and Digitas? If you're Colin Kinsella, you take on the task of transforming one of the biggest traditional media services agencies into the best of all media worlds: traditional, digital, content, analytics and practices yet to be defined.

Like many of his peers, Jonathan Nelson began 2015 by making a pilgrimage to media industry mecca CES. Unlike most of his peers, he never "walked the floor" at the multitude of exhibition halls to gaze at all the bright, shiny objects on display, and he never put a foot inside one of the keynotes, panels or conference sessions. He was there to do what he's been doing for more than a quarter of a century: network, build relationships and cut deals to engineer the future of media and marketing. CES was just a convenient place to do that, and …

Before he became one of the digital world's most in-demand gurus, Razorfish North American creative lead Sam Cannon wrote about music on the Internet. While he found it fulfilling creatively - and received acclaim for his early integration of clips and other digital assets - the financial realities of the existing publishing model soon dawned upon him.

As some struggle amid the morphing and mounting complexity of digital and social media, Pete Blackshaw seems to maintain Zen-like perspective while harnessing their power in the service of the 2,000-plus global and local brands of Nestl S.A., the world's largest food company ($100.1 billion in 2014 sales, operating in 197 countries).

Pursuit of excellence is (to tweak a buzz phrase) brewed into the DNA of Heineken, whose founder crafted the original super premium beer.

Followers of MediaPost's campaign-based awards programs over the past couple of decades no doubt noticed one Boston agency in particular taking a disproportionate number of wins: Hill Holliday. After nearly 15 years at the agency, the person behind those wins, Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell, decided to leave - sort of.

Campbell Soup Co. is in the midst of reinventing itself as a global food company. It's acquiring new-wave companies like Bolthouse Farms, Plum Organics and Garden Fresh Gourmet, launching scores of new products, and updating the soup category by removing artificial ingredients and launching new varieties.

There are any number of origin stories in which individuals happen into the realm of advertising/media by sheer chance. Pierre Lipton's is not one of them.

Scott Lindenbaum, Deutsch's SVP, digital planning director, begins a conversation about his evolution into one of the digital world's preeminent media minds with a broad, innocuous statement. "It's been a series of very different experiences that landed me here," he says, much as many other media execs do when asked about their own paths.