Chris Shaw

At his core, Chris is a storyteller who believes creativity moves us forward. His marketing career began at a small California firm that employed IBM mainframe computers to read electrocardiogram data over phone, a radical innovation at the time. Later, Chris would write for a TV game show before rejoining the ad world, writing commercial copy for a software startup. That work earned him his first gold Effie, a prestigious industry award that recognizes the effectiveness of a campaign. Landing a creative director role, Chris then shepherded one of the world’s most iconic brands: Coca-Cola. At the time, Chris and his team used the ubiquitous technology of the day, voicemail, to create what could be called the world’s first social network. In 2005 Chris launched his own agency. Always looking for new ways to tell stories, Central Coast Agency embraced the digital space and was a very early proponent of content marketing. For the next 14 years, Central Coast was agency of record for NTT Communications global social media content marketing. In that world, Chris touched many aspects of NTT’s worldwide business. When NTT Research approached him to lead marketing efforts for a new research facility in the vein of Bell Labs, Chris quickly realized that this opportunity exceeds the realm of advertising. As head of marketing for NTT Research, he is part of something extraordinary. With world class thinkers in the fields of Physics, Encryption and Medicine coming together for the fundamental research which will someday improve and even extend human lives, this is a story Chris is eager to tell.