“I attended a CEMS workshop with Google, met a recruiter and ended up joining Google’s marketing team full-time.”

Tobias Rauscher, Influencer Marketing Lead at Google and founding member of Social Lab

I first dipped into tech at the age of 14. I taught myself how to code and put together a scrappy social network, which over the years evolved into a community with profiles, chat rooms, discussion boards and a basic ad platform. The network grew to 60,000 members, before selling it in 2007. 

 After my undergraduate studies in Germany, Spain and South Africa, I made it into CEMS, with WU as my home university and an exchange semester at the Stockholm School of Economics. I joined the global Student Board, representing WU, and helped develop and implement CEMS’ social media strategy. 

 After graduating from CEMS in 2011, I joined Google’s marketing team in Germany as an Associate Product Marketing Manager, leading “Online Motor Deutschland”. The initiative aimed to help German SMBs to grow their business via trainings in more than 10 cities. A year later, I was offered a regional role in London, focused on product launches (including Google+, Google Photos, Google Hangouts), partnerships and pan-regional initiatives for Europe, Middle East & Africa.

 When marketing investment around Google+ slowed down, I initiated a task force to improve Google’s social media efforts. When the effort caught the attention of Google’s leadership team, I was offered a role at headquarters in California, building Google’s social media team, the Social Lab, from the ground up. 

 Most recently, I took on a new role around influencer marketing, leading collaborations with large social media influencers and YouTube creators, and framing each activation with a robust measurement approach to demonstrate the effectiveness of each partnership.