Susan Gates
CEO, Founding Partner
About Susan
As CEO and Founding Partner of Redbird, Susan plays a key role guiding the company’s vision and values while overseeing the strategic and creative output of the agency. She works together with her leadership team on the proper care and feeding of all Redbirds and clients. She gets to know each client well, and works to ensure, ongoing, that every piece of creative work fuels each brand’s business growth in the most powerful and long-lasting ways.
Past Experience
Susan has deep cross-discipline expertise within the editorial, marketing, and financial aspects of the media business. After working in New York at Newsweek, Smithsonian, and New York Magazine, she moved to Los Angeles, where she was Founding Publisher of Buzz, the award-winning monthly magazine. She has played primary roles in launching and repositioning numerous media brands including Traveler, Spy, and Yoga Journal, and has provided strategic expertise to Harvard Business School Publishing, National Geographic, The New York Times, and American Media Inc.
At Redbird, Susan has guided full brand repositionings and cross-platform content initiatives for a wide range of companies across a variety of categories from Kaiser Permanente, to Microsoft, JP Morgan, the University of Arizona, and the Annenberg Foundation. Susan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Colorado and holds an MS in journalism from Columbia University in New York.
