After two decades in marketing services, Leona Hobbs founded Reset Digital with a vision to provide marketing services to technology companies at scale with a team empowered and supported with a unique delivery platform.
Biography of Leona Hobbs
It's been all about marketing for Leona Hobbs since her days editing school yearbooks. After Leona completed a journalism program, she was recruited to join Fleishman-Hillard, a global public relations agency. Leona pursued an entrepreneurial career path, working with clients across several sectors—video games, healthcare, software, food and telecom. With a knack for strategy, Leona was promoted through the ranks from intern to vice president over a seven-year tenure.
From the earliest days of her career, Leona has focused on the internet's disruption of mass media. The first internet client project she developed (in 1999) was a Tamagotchi-inspired online game designed to teach kids how greenhouse vegetables are grown. In addition to her digital projects, Leona honed her earned-media skills pitching and securing coverage.
In 2004, Leona began to work with Yahoo and immersed herself in Yahoo's four-pillar strategy for content, community, search and personalization. She worked closely with marketing, in-house counsel, sales and product teams for Yahoo’s operations in Canada and delivered co-marketing activities with Yahoo's business partner, Rogers. Over her three years working with Yahoo, Leona delivered programs to drive user engagement with services like Search, Mail, Music and Photos.
Hungry for more work with Internet services and applications, her next move was to Tucows as director of communications. While frequently remembered as the original software download site, when Leona joined in 2006, the business was wholesale domain names and email services. Starting her first day amid an extended service outage, Leona prioritized customer communications, war room protocols and deployed a 24/7 system status dashboard. Leona and team also delivered investor relations, technical writing, branding and product marketing.
Eager to apply her client-side experience to consulting, Leona joined Social Media Group in 2009 to service the Ford Motor Company account. Frequently working at the vanguard of social media marketing and driving applied innovation, Leona focused on strategic planning, team leadership and quality marketing execution. She was engaged to develop strategy and plans for 3M, Thomson Reuters, Insurance Institute of Canada, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Upstate Niagara Dairy Cooperative, RBC Royal Bank and Sleep Number.
For the past decade, Leona has taken a holistic approach to digital marketing strategy ensuring what is planned and recommended could actually be implemented and achieved. She planned and developed online communities with CAMH and ADP Canada. She did an exhaustive UX audit and digital marketing strategy for Siemens Canada. For five years, she consulted as a senior digital strategist with Intel—on B2B marketing, consumer demand gen, Thunderbolt and influencer marketing. She’s planned successful digital campaigns for Char-Broil, Toshiba Canada and ExperiencePoint.
Since founding Reset Digital, Leona has consulted with Canada’s leading UX/UI company, Second Harvest, Magnet, Who Plus You and Blue Umbrella.
A natural leader, Leona is committed to teamwork and establishing productive partnerships with colleagues, clients, vendors and her extended network. She is a self-confessed workflow geek and lover of agile business.
Family and friends are the grounding forces in Leona's life. She and her husband enjoy frequent retreats to the family cottage. Leona is the proud owner of Kip, a Heeler mix adopted in 2019.