John Winsor

John Winsor is a leading strategic marketing and product innovation thinker known for his work in collaboration, co-creation and crowd-sourcing. He is the CEO of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first creative advertising agency built on crowd-sourcing principles and, in 2011, a business named to Advertising Age’s “Agency A-List 10 to Watch” list and Mashable’s Top 5 Digital Agencies, and is the Chief Innovation Officer at Havas.

Before founding Victors & Spoils, Winsor was Vice President and Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, helping the company become the most awarded advertising agency in the world in 2008 and 2009. He brought his co-creation philosophy to the agency that formed the underpinning of the agency’s strategy practice that fueled work such as, Dominos, “Transparency,” Best Buy’s “Twelpforce” and Microsoft’s “I’m a PC.”

Prior to CPB, he founded his own company, Radar Communications, in 1998 – with Nike as its first client – and sold it to CP+B in 2007. At Radar, Winsor used co-creation, strategy and academic-based market intelligence tools to help some of the country's most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities.

Winsor was a journalist before founding Radar, building a magazine publishing company devoted to sports that included mountain biking, in-line skating and extreme skiing. In 1990, he acquired the rights to publish a thenstruggling magazine, Women's Sports & Fitness. Within three years, he turned that magazine around and launched several other highly profitable titles and events, including The Gravity Games. He sold the business to Conde Nast in 1998.

Winsor is a frequent industry speaker and respected author. Titles he has written include “Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business,” “Spark: Be more Innovative through Co-Creation,” “Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves” (with Alex Bogusky) and “Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-Creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation.” Baked In, a bestseller, was named an award winner in the marketing category for the 2009 800-CEO-Read Business Book Awards.

Throughout his career Winsor has been deeply involved in the start-up and technology communities. He was a founding investor in Nau, the sustainable clothing company and has been on the board of directors of Black Diamond Equipment and Lijit Technologies.

Outside of work he pursues his passions of climbing, skiing and surfing. Among his accomplishments, he set the world record for the ascent and round-trip of Kilimanjaro.

Winsor earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College and an MBA from the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.