Eight years ago, MK Woltz was the only Danone media person in Colorado. Today she leads retail media strategy across the entire enterprise portfolio.
In between, she built something rare.
MK joined Danone after a decade at Integer, right as the White Wave acquisition closed. She was the first person on the ground in the new Colorado office. No team. No playbook. Just a mandate to build an in-house media practice from scratch. She did it. Then she scaled it.
Now she runs paid media strategy, planning, and buying across Danone's beverages and plant-based business unit. Oikos. Silk. Activia. International Delight. Evian. And in her most recent promotion, she owns retail media strategy across the national media team and shopper marketing organization.
What stands out in conversation is how rare her vantage point actually is. Most brand marketers treat agency partners as vendors. MK treats them as business partners with real skin in the game, and gives them visibility into performance even when the news is bad. Most brand marketers stay in their swim lane. MK actively breaks down the walls between sales, supply chain, shopper marketing, and national media so that when a retailer pitches a multi-million-dollar retail media buy, her team can pressure-test it against real category performance.
Her perspective on AI is just as sharp. She isn't chasing novelty. She wants to offload the logistical work so her team can think more critically, contextualize data across disparate systems, and stop preparing for the work instead of doing it.
The full conversation is worth a listen.