Handy Dandy Formal Bio on Blagica Bottigliero

You can also download a one pager here

Blagica (blah-gee-tsa) is an Emmy award winning entrepreneur, speaker and digital advocate.  With a career spanning 25 years, she’s been on the forefront of the ever changing world wide web.

Blagica began her career at Giant Step, one of the first digital agencies in Chicago.  While at Giant Step, Blagica assisted brands like Maytag, Energizer and Purina with their web activities. From there, she went to a brand new site looking to disrupt the travel category.  That company was Orbitz, where Blagica joined pre-launch and was one of the first members of its in-house eMarketing team. After a dot com break studying French in Lyon, Blagica came back to the U.S. and joined one of the top lead generation and couponing companies, CoolSavings. While at CoolSavings, Blagica caught the entrepreneurial bug.

For three years, Blagica balanced consulting projects and speaking engagements while testing her chops with two of her own self-funded startups. In addition to these activities, Blagica was a member of the NBC5 Street Team, where she was awarded an Emmy for her New Media work.  Blagica also spent time with the Chicago 2016 Olympic Bid Team, teaching them the principles of social media and digital marketing.

Blagica came back to the corporate space as the Vice President of Strategy for Edelman Digital.  Here she led digital strategy for large brands such as Quaker, Kraft, Kimberly-Clark and True Value.  After Edelman Digital, Blagica’s love of technology came calling. She joined Motorola Mobility (Google) as the Global Director of Social Media. Her work with Motorola was recognized by Crain’s Chicago Business as one of the top 10 Chicagoland companies ‘doing social media right’. Her time at Motorola Mobility included consumer activations at the Super Bowl, CES and sxsw.

In the last few years, Blagica’s taken her entrepreneurial background, coupled with her deep knowledge of the web and applied it to two key posts.

First, as the Co-Founder of Bottles Nation, Blagica created one of the first virtual tasting event platforms in the country. Alongside her Sommelier and Co-Founding husband, Bottles Nation went on to host over 2,000 events. The first 1,000 of those in 10 months, resulting in millions in revenue. Bottles Nation is completely bootstrapped.

Most recently, Blagica was the Director of Affiliate Marketing for JEB Commerce, a performance marketing agency. There, she revamped the offering of the agency, adding in more capabilities around Public Relations, Influencer Marketing and Social Media best practices. At JEB Commerce, Blagica was responsible for the agency’s thought leadership, while serving as a mentor and trainer to the rest of the team.

​