At thirteen, Corey duBrowa found a record that was too short to be an album and too substantial to be a single. It was an Oingo Boingo EP, waiting in the original Licorice Pizza shop in Long Beach, California. The format occupied a pleasing middle ground: compact, slightly unruly, free of the grand expectations attached to an LP. He bought it. Then he kept looking.
The purchase became a collection, the collection became expertise, and the expertise eventually became a book. Along the way, duBrowa also built another life, one conducted in conference rooms rather than record bins. He handled employee communications at Nike, rose through agencies, guided Starbucks through the Howard Schultz years, served as chief communications officer at Salesforce, and led communications and public affairs for Google and Alphabet. In 2023, he left Google to run BCW. A year later, after WPP combined BCW and Hill & Knowlton, he became CEO of Burson.
It is tempting to treat these careers as contrasting halves: buttoned-up executive by day, record obsessive by night. The more interesting truth is that they use the same muscle. A critic listens for the thing beneath the obvious thing. A communications counselor should do the same. Both must distinguish signal from volume, sincerity from performance, and an interesting surprise from a merely noisy one.
A critic learns to be specific
DuBrowa studied journalism at the University of Oregon, where he also minored in political science. His attachments there proved durable. He served two terms as president of the alumni association, became a foundation trustee, helped support the journalism school and established a scholarship for first-generation advertising and public-relations students in memory of his father. The campus also furnished one of the better details in his biography: he met his future wife through the journalism school’s peer-advising program.
His music writing ran beside his professional ascent for more than two decades. The tally passed 1,000 bylines, with work appearing in Rolling Stone, GQ, MAGNET, Paste, No Depression, Village Voice and Seattle Weekly. Reviewing records after a corporate day is an unusual form of leisure. It also enforces a useful discipline. “Good” is not a review. The writer has to hear structure, texture and intent, then explain the judgment clearly enough that a reader can test it.
That habit helps explain duBrowa’s affection for the EP. In 2024, he and music journalist Steve Gorman edited An Ideal for Living: A Celebration of the E.P., a tour through 200 releases across seven decades. DuBrowa calls the form “the musical Goldilocks” - neither too much nor too little. An EP can catch an artist between identities, before the sound hardens into doctrine. Its low stakes create room for experiment. Its brevity leaves weak songs nowhere to hide.
“Songs on EPs don’t have anywhere to hide because of the format’s brevity.”Corey duBrowa on the discipline of the short form
There is a leadership lesson hiding in the liner notes. Constraints are clarifying. Size is not the same thing as quality. An organization, like a record, is better when every part can justify its place.
The counselor takes the chief executive’s chair
The corporate path began inside Nike in the 1990s, then moved through Ketchum and nearly a decade at Waggener Edstrom. From there came seven years leading global communications at Starbucks, followed by a shorter turn as Salesforce’s chief communications officer. In 2018, duBrowa joined Google and Alphabet, reporting to Sundar Pichai and overseeing communications during a period when the company’s products, workplace and public power were under relentless examination.
These jobs put him beside three very different public chief executives: Howard Schultz, Marc Benioff and Pichai. The work required more than polishing sentences. A serious counselor has to know when the proposed message is unsupported by the company’s behavior, when silence creates its own story, and when the room is answering the wrong question. The craft starts before anyone opens a blank document.
Taking the top job at BCW in August 2023 changed the nature of that advice. DuBrowa was no longer merely helping a chief executive think. He was the chief executive, responsible for the balance sheet, the operating rhythm and the consequences that remain after the room clears. He has since written that communication skill and CEO skill are not interchangeable. Financial fluency had to be learned deliberately. So did the patience to let a leadership team sit with a difficult decision long enough to support the outcome, even when agreement remained out of reach.
The timing supplied a formidable practical exam. In January 2024, WPP announced that BCW and Hill & Knowlton would combine under the Burson name. The agency launched that July. Thousands of employees had to understand a new structure, a revived identity and the logic behind both. DuBrowa resisted framing the combination as a trophy of bigness. His stated interest was capability: joining complementary businesses to build and protect clients’ reputations across more disciplines and markets.
The size of the global “reputation economy” described by Burson’s 2026 research - an attempt to turn a soft corporate idea into an asset leaders can examine.
Reputation before the emergency
Burson’s current proposition begins with a complaint about the way companies have traditionally handled reputation. Too often, it arrives at the end of a process, when a decision has been made and a communications team is asked to explain it. Or it appears under flashing lights, after an event has already become a crisis. DuBrowa’s blunter formulation is that reputation is not something to bolt on at the last minute.
The agency’s Reputation Capital work tries to give the subject sharper edges. Its model uses eight levers, including leadership, innovation, products and services, workplace culture, citizenship and financial performance. Burson’s research argues that reputation explains a portion of unexpected shareholder returns, producing a global pool of value measured in trillions. The precise model matters, but so does the ambition behind it: if boards say reputation is important, it should survive contact with a spreadsheet.
The wider argument is about timing and authority. In 2026, duBrowa warned that communications leaders fail when they wait to be briefed instead of joining the decision. That distinction separates a provider from a peer. The peer brings public consequences into the room early, while choices are still choices. It is less glamorous than crisis theater and considerably more useful.
Artificial intelligence enters this work as both subject and instrument. DuBrowa has argued for pairing cognitive tools, which can surface patterns and predict reactions, with the human creativity required to decide what those patterns mean. The formulation avoids the usual contest between machine speed and human judgment. A model can reveal a weak signal. Someone still has to recognize why it matters.
The executive and the critic share a task: notice the gap between what is claimed and what can actually be heard.
Keep the feedback loop open
DuBrowa’s public persona contains an agreeable amount of fandom. He wears a Seattle Seahawks cap on a business podcast and confesses envy at missing a parade. He writes affectionately about old Nike colleagues and a fantasy-football league that has lasted three decades. His recollections of Long Beach summers include bicycles, sandlot games, skateboards and the streetlights that told children when to go home. These details make sense beside the record collection. He is a keeper of continuities.
They also complicate the stereotype of the communications chief as a professional smoother of edges. Criticism, done honestly, depends on retaining an edge. So does useful counsel. One of duBrowa’s most personal lessons from becoming CEO concerns the late executive coach Reggie Butler, whose gift was telling him an unwelcome truth in a way he would eventually hear. The point is not merely to invite candor. It is to become the kind of leader for whom candor is not punished on arrival.
That may be the thread connecting the thirteen-year-old in the record shop to the executive in New York. Curiosity begins as appetite, but it matures into method. Keep looking. Listen past the hook. Do not confuse scale with distinction. Notice the odd little format that other people walk by.
Burson’s future will be judged through ordinary measures: clients, work, talent, growth and the difficult economics of a global agency. DuBrowa’s reputation thesis will face the test he has set for every other claim - whether it can be demonstrated in behavior and value, rather than admired as language. The critic in him should appreciate the standard. A review arrives when the record is played, not when the sleeve promises brilliance.