In 1996, a young journalism graduate took a communications job at a health company that most people, if pressed, could not describe. It made things. Some pharmaceuticals. Some tests. Some nutrition products. It was old, it was large, and it was not the kind of name that came up at dinner. Melissa Brotz walked in the door anyway. Then she did the thing almost nobody in modern marketing does. She stayed.
Nearly three decades later, she runs the whole picture. Marketing. Communications. Sustainability. Philanthropy. As Abbott's senior vice president of global marketing and external affairs, she is the company's chief marketing and communications officer, and she is also president of the Abbott Fund, the company's charitable foundation. The business she helps represent employs somewhere near 114,000 people. The brand she helped shape is now one you recognize.
01 / THE LONG GAMEThe career built by not leaving
Brotz did not start inside a corporation. She came up agency-side, the way a lot of the best communicators do, learning the trade under deadline and client pressure. She was a senior account executive at Porter Novelli and a group supervisor at GolinHarris before Abbott. That grounding shows. She thinks like someone who has had to earn attention rather than assume it.
When she moved in-house, she did not treat Abbott as a stop. She treated it as a place to build. She rose through the pharmaceuticals business, then the corporate office, then took over global communications, and in September 2018 was named vice president of global marketing and external affairs. In November 2024 came the promotion to senior vice president, with sustainability folded into her remit. The title got longer. The company got the same steady hand.
- PRE-1996Agency years - Porter Novelli, GolinHarris
- 1996Joins Abbott from the agency world
- SEP 2018Named VP, Global Marketing and External Affairs
- 2021Inducted into Medill Hall of Achievement
- NOV 2024Promoted to SVP; adds chief sustainability officer duties
There is a fashionable idea that careers should move fast and sideways, that you collect logos the way you collect stamps. Brotz's path is the counter-argument. When you know a company for decades, you can tell its story in a way no outsider can fake. You know where the bodies of good work are buried. You know which claims are real.
02 / THE RULERelevance over everything
Ask marketers what they are optimizing for and you will hear a lot of words. Reach. Impressions. Engagement. Awareness. Brotz cuts through it with a sentence that sounds almost too plain to be a strategy.
"In marketing, the only thing that matters is if you are relevant to the people with whom you're trying to communicate."
Notice what is not in that sentence. Not clever. Not viral. Not loud. Just relevant. It is the discipline of starting with the audience and refusing to move until you have a reason they should care. For a company whose products touch people at ordinary, human moments - a glucose reading, a lab result, a bottle of nutrition formula - that is exactly the right north star.
It also happens to be the instinct of a trained journalist. Brotz earned her Bachelor of Science in Journalism at Northwestern's Medill School, with a second major in political science. The newsroom question - who is the audience, and why should they care - never left her. She just started asking it on behalf of a company instead of a byline.
03 / THE WORKChanging a look and a voice
The hardest part of building a brand is not the launch. It is the middle - the long, unglamorous stretch where a company has to actually change how it looks and sounds, in every market, in every language, across tens of thousands of people who all have to buy in. Brotz has been honest about that part in a way marketers rarely are.
That work has a public face in Abbott's "Life. To The Fullest." platform, the human-first framing of a company that would otherwise read as a wall of diagnostics and devices. The platform's website picked up a WebAward for health care in 2017. The bigger prize is harder to hang on a wall: a global company that now sounds like it belongs to the people it serves, not to a regulatory filing.
She does not pretend it is comfortable. "I challenge others and I get challenged every day on that," she has said. It is the sound of someone who treats consistency as a daily fight rather than a finished project.
04 / THE OTHER JOBMarketing that gives money away
Most CMOs sell things. Brotz also gives things away. As president of the Abbott Fund, she runs the company's philanthropic arm alongside the brand. It is an unusual pairing, and a telling one. The same person responsible for how Abbott is seen is also responsible for a piece of what Abbott actually does in the world. It keeps the storytelling honest, because the storyteller has to help deliver the substance behind it.
Recognition has followed. She is a regular on PRWeek's Power List of the most influential communications leaders, and in 2021 her own alma mater brought her home, inducting her into the Medill Hall of Achievement. She still serves on Medill's board of advisers - the graduate who never fully left the newsroom, now helping shape the next set of people who will ask, on someone's behalf, why anyone should care.
Depth is a strategy. Stay somewhere long enough to know it cold, and you can tell its story better than anyone parachuting in - and defend its reputation like it is the only asset you have. Because, she would argue, it is.
There is no dramatic origin story here, no single campaign she hangs her name on. What she has built is quieter and, in its own way, harder: a reputation, held steadily, over a long time, for a company that a lot of people now trust without quite knowing why. That is the job. She has been doing it since 1996.