Anne Brownlee, Vice President of America, Omni Hotels & Resorts
Anne exemplifies what it means to smoothly transition from a decades-long career in global communications agencies to a role as a respected executive leader in a prestigious private enterprise. After almost 20 years as a PR agency consultant, Anne was recruited by Omni Hotels & Resorts to become VP of Corporate Communications. In just 24 months, and despite inheriting a skeletal staff (at one point she was the only person in her five-person department), she increased Omni’s communications metrics across the board by more than 20 percent last year.
Under Anne’s leadership, Omni had its most successful year ever for earned media coverage in 2013. With brand awareness at an all-time high, Anne capitalized on that momentum in 2014 with a concentrated and strategic push to heighten the visibility of one of the company’s best kept secrets — its roster of top-notch industry leaders and the executive team behind the company’s meteoric rise. She leveraged CMO Tom Santora and Vice President of Sales Tom Faust to embark on a storytelling campaign to raise the profile of Omni executives within the hospitality industry as a way to help attract new talent to the company. In addition, she targeted meetings and convention trade media for executive interviews and briefings to discuss the brand’s unique approach to group events and meetings to help grow the core meetings business. The push resulted in 14 feature stories on Omni, which quoted many executives and reached an estimated audience of 1.1 million.