The reporter who learned to sell running
Greg White started out chasing stories in a newsroom. Fifteen years later he is helping On, the Swiss running company, find the right words for American runners. The path there ran through Portland, Tokyo, Amsterdam and a stack of famous brands.
There is a version of this career that never leaves the newsroom. Greg White trained as a journalist, earned a master's at Columbia, and took an editing job at Business Insider. He could have spent the next fifteen years reporting other people's stories. Instead he crossed the floor into advertising, where the job is roughly the opposite: not finding the story that already exists, but building one a brand can stand behind.
Today White works at On, the Swiss company whose cushioned running shoes have gone from a niche favorite to a fixture on city sidewalks and start lines. He leads brand strategy for the Americas out of Portland, Oregon. It is a role that sits at the seam between what a product does and what people feel about it, and White got there by taking a long, geographically scattered route.
01 / The pivotFrom asking questions to answering them
White's education reads like someone still deciding what to be. He studied economics, political science and history at Boston College, then finished a BSc in international relations and history at the London School of Economics. From there he went to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism for a master's. On paper it looks scattered. Up close it is one long training in a single skill: figuring out why people care about the things they care about.
Journalism was the first place he put that skill to work, editing at Business Insider around 2010 when digital newsrooms were rewriting how stories moved online. But the pull toward strategy came fast. By 2011 he was a digital strategist at TPG, part of the Omnicom network, and the direction of his career had quietly flipped. He would spend the next decade not reporting on brands but helping them decide what to say.
The two jobs are closer than they look. A reporter spends the day interviewing people, reading the room, and sorting what matters from what only seems to. A digital strategist does much the same before writing a single line of a campaign, sitting with data, culture and gut feeling until a clear point of view falls out. White had spent years learning to listen for the real story. Advertising simply asked him to use that ear on behalf of a client rather than a byline.
02 / The agency yearsPortland, Tokyo, Amsterdam
In 2012, White joined Wieden + Kennedy, the independent agency known for building Nike's voice over four decades. He started in Portland as an interactive strategist, then did something most people talk about and few do: he moved. First to Tokyo as a senior digital strategist, then to Amsterdam as head of comms and digital strategy. Three offices, three cultures, three ways of reading an audience, all inside one company.
Along the way he worked on brands that need no introduction - Nike, Instagram, Corona. Each one teaches a different lesson. Nike is about scale and belief. Instagram is about culture moving in real time. Corona is about mood and place. A strategist who has touched all three has a wide vocabulary to draw on, and that range is exactly what a growing brand looks for.
The moves themselves mattered as much as the accounts. Working in Tokyo forces a strategist to unlearn assumptions about what a message means once it leaves an American context. Amsterdam, a hub for pan-European work, does the same at a regional scale. By the time White returned to the United States, he had watched the same craft flex across radically different audiences. Out of that came a working theory of how brands travel across borders, which happens to be the exact problem a Swiss company selling into America has to solve.
The passport · where the work happened
In 2017 White came back to the United States to join 72andSunny in Los Angeles as director of communications strategy. The agency, part of the same broad advertising world he had been circling, gave him a front-row seat to how American culture and consumer brands feed each other. He stayed there through 2021.
03 / The move to OnSelling a Swiss idea to American runners
In 2022, White moved brand-side. He joined On, the company two former athletes and an entrepreneur founded in Zurich, built around a cushioning system the brand calls CloudTec. On had already grown from a curiosity into a real force in sportswear, expanding from running into apparel, tennis and everyday sneakers, and pulling in cultural figures along the way.
The company's marketing has leaned into that cultural weight, with names like Roger Federer and Zendaya fronting campaigns. But celebrity gets you attention, not loyalty. The harder work is deciding what the brand actually stands for in each market, and how a Swiss engineering story should sound to a runner in Portland or a walker in Chicago. That translation is where a brand strategist earns the job.
On also sits in a crowded, confident category. Nike and Adidas have owned running culture for decades, New Balance has staged a comeback, and Hoka arrived with its own big-cushion pitch. Standing out means more than louder ads. It means a clear, defensible idea of who the brand is for and why, held steady while the product line keeps widening. Basing the Americas strategy in Portland puts White in the middle of that fight, a short drive from the agency world that shaped him and the sportswear giants he now competes against for attention.
Brands in the résumé · before On
Each account is a different discipline: scale, culture, mood, and the news cycle. The mix is the point.
04 / Why the path makes senseThe reporter never really left
It is tempting to read a career like White's as a series of clean breaks: journalist, then strategist, then brand executive. The more honest read is that the same instinct runs through all of it. A reporter walks into a room and tries to find the true story under the obvious one. A brand strategist does the same thing, then has to decide which version of that story a company can honestly tell for years.
That is also why the international relations degree is not a detour. Brands, like countries, are collections of stories people tell about themselves. Someone who studied how nations build narratives has a useful head start on how a sportswear label does the same. The through-line is not the industry. It is the question underneath every one of these jobs: what makes people believe?
Time by chapter · roughly
White keeps a low public profile, which fits the trade. The best brand strategists tend to be invisible: you feel their fingerprints on a campaign long before you learn their name, if you ever do. Their measure is not personal fame but whether a brand sounds like itself, consistently, across markets and years. On its current trajectory, On is a demanding place to practice that craft, and a revealing one.
Where it goes next is an open question. On keeps widening its ambitions, from performance running into apparel and lifestyle, and the Americas are central to that plan. For a strategist who has already lived on three continents and worked on some of the most recognizable brands in the world, it is a fitting assignment: take a story that started in Switzerland and make it land, honestly, on this side of the ocean.