Daina
Middleton

Speaker Profile

An expert in the digital marketing space and marketing professional with more than 20 years in the industry, Daina Middleton recently joined Twitter to run Business Marketing globally. Before that she was the global CEO of Performics, one of the largest search and performance media agencies delivering performance-marketing solutions clients in over 30 countries around the world.

Daina recognised that marketing and consumerism were undergoing a transformational change nearly a decade ago, and as a marketer, was struggling to use outdated tools, processes and language. It was then that she began to pursue a new method for marketers. She is known for thought leadership in the Participation Economy – creating a new 'marketing lexicon including 'the Nurturist” – and has developed a ground-breaking fresh approach to marketing called 'The Participation Way'. She published a book about the topic in 2012 called Marketing in the Participation Age: A Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share, Take Part, Connect and Engage.

Participant marketing shifts the philosophy about how brands and people connect, focusing on action instead of persuasion. Through her many years of client experience and partnering with marketing professionals around the globe, she is determined to redefine marketing to focus on performance, something important to all businesses in today's competitive market landscape.

Prior to her tenure in the agency world, Daina spent 16 years working at Hewlett-Packard in key marketing positions. At the time of her departure she was the director of advertising for HP's $28 billion global Imaging and Printing Group, managing both digital and traditional mediums.

Throughout her career, Daina has been a regular speaker and advocate for working women. She recently began researching Pioneer women in a quest to learn more about why equality thrived on the Western frontier. In that quest, she discovered a number of untold stories of remarkable women who held incredible leadership roles and, in those stories, valuable insights applicable today as work-life and family-life are increasingly intertwined. She is currently writing a second book titled #GracewithGrit, utilising historical narratives to describe how men and women can embrace their differences in communications and leadership styles to succeed in our complex world.

Daina serves as a director on the boards of Healthwise,, the Teton Valley Community Foundation and Marin Software. She is a member of the ad:tech Board of Advisors and a regular international speaker with appearances at Social Media Week, ad:tech, WOMMA, Google, 3% Conference, VideoNuze, and iMedia to name a few. She was named one of Mobile Marketer's Mobile Women to Watch, and in 2013 received the Gold Stevie® Award in the Executive of the Year - Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations category, in the 10th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

She loves the outdoors, cross-country skiing and horses and chooses to live where the values of the West are still alive and well outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.