In September 2023, INMA awarded 30 young professionals around the world with its fourth “30 Under 30” award as part of its Young Professionals Initiative. This is the 13th in a series of 30 features about the impressive rising media stars who are shaping our industry. 

Although she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism, Ann Marie Metzendorf’s innate creativity and interest in human behaviour led her into marketing. Now, she is responsible for the creative and marketing strategy of launching The Wall Street Journal’s podcasts, documentaries, and video series. 

As audio and video become more ingrained in the news media industry, Ann Marie is excited about what she can accomplish:

“I would love to be leading projects that experiment with augmented reality, expansion into TikTok and new audio spaces,” she said. “It is the future of our business.”

That forward-looking mindset has proven valuable to the WSJ.

When Ann Marie detected the migration of video viewership from the publisher’s platform to YouTube, she created a YouTube campaign that resulted in a huge spike in subscribers and added millions of views to the WSJ Video Series.

“Media companies need to learn how to quickly navigate new platforms and create their own channels of communication, and it takes new ways of thinking to do this,” she explained.

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