Mara Einstein

Dr. Mara Einstein is a powerhouse marketing critic who pulls no punches. After working for a decade in corporate marketing for some of the biggest names in the business, she left for academia.

That transition was motivated by a desire to pull back the curtain on consumerism’s dark side with the goal to 1) persuade companies to do better and 2) give people tools to increase their power in the marketplace.

She has written books on branding religion (Brands of Faith), cause marketing (Compassion, Inc.), and deceptive marketing practices. This last book was Black Ops Advertising, which The New York Times called “well-researched and accomplished” and The Guardian agreed, saying “Einstein’s explanations of all this – from internet news organisations to TV product placement and even dating sites – are thoroughly researched, elegantly explained and often alarming, even for readers familiar with most of the above facts in the abstract.”

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, and popular podcasts, such as The Majority Report with Sam Seder.

She has written for Advertising Age, Salon, Harvard Business Review, Newsday, and Fastcoexist, and given talks from New York to San Francisco, from Brazil to the UK. 

Dr. Einstein (and, yes, she is distantly related) has a BFA in theater from Boston University, an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University. She is a tenured professor, and former chair, of media studies at Queens College (CUNY).