Department of Marketing Outstanding Alumni Award
Blagica Bottigliero, B.B.A.’98
Principal and Founder, Zlato
An entrepreneur, speaker and digital advocate, Blagica Bottigliero has 25 years of experience at the forefront of the ever-changing World Wide Web.
Bottigliero began her career at Giant Step where she assisted brands like Maytag, Energizer and Purina. From there, she traveled to Orbitz, where she joined the company pre-launch and was one of the first members of its in-house eMarketing team.
Bottigliero then balanced consulting projects and speaking engagements as she tested her chops with two of her own startups, while also serving as a member of the NBC5 Street Team, where she was awarded an Emmy for her work in new media.
Returning to the corporate space as the vice president of strategy for Edelman Digital, she led strategy for brands such as Quaker, Kraft, Kimberly-Clark and True Value. Bottigliero then joined Motorola Mobility as the global director of social media, with Motorola named one of the top 10 Chicagoland companies ‘doing social media right’ by Crain’s Chicago Business.
In recent years, Bottigliero has used her entrepreneurial background and her deep knowledge of digital marketing, and applied it to Bottles Nation, one of the first virtual tasting event platforms in the country. Co-founding the venture with her sommelier husband, Bottles Nation has hosted over 2,000 events.
Today, she runs her own consulting agency, Zlato, where she creates marketing campaigns, trains
C-suite executives and empowers the everyday professional.