Donna Murphy

​Donna joined Discovery in July 2008 as lead strategist for the Discovery Channel Marketing team.  In 2011 she imagined and created a bit of a ‘skunk works’ called The Insight Lab, expanding to full team size in 2012. Moving beyond the "what" to include "why" and "now what", Donna led The Insight Team in de-coding motivations and importantly setting in motion new areas of insight for creative exploration. Through deep investigation into cultural themes, shifting behaviors, why we watch what we watch to understanding our rapidly changing TV category, this group is designed specifically to support internal originality and inspire unparalleled content quality and innovation.

 

In 2016, she brought together the Consumer Insights and Ad Sales and Digital Research teams to be one cohesive group. The team led consumer research and data to further strengthen our ad sales offering; increasing our understanding of viewership behavior across our TVE and OTT products; and deepening the relationship between the corporate creative, marketing and ad sales teams.

 

Today, she takes the lead on enterprise wide consumer behavior again and leads The Consumer Insights and Culture Lab, bringing back the deep focus on consumer behavior in a rapidly changing consumer-driven environment.

 

With over 20 years in branding and account planning work, Donna has worked on some of the most iconic, consumer-connected brands; Snapple Beverages, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Warnaco Intimate Apparel, Target Stores, Diaggeo, Virgin Mobile, Radio City Music Hall, AMC, MTVN, HBO, and TBS. Along with Brand Strategy, she developed a passion for product innovation while working on Diaggeo and Warnaco new product development – booze and bras.

 

Donna has produced non-fiction documentaries ranging in topic from a holocaust survivor’s story to young women with breast cancer to identical twins to the man responsible for the advent of the Witness Protection Program under Bobby Kennedy. She was the President of 2Chicks, 2Bikes, 1Cause, a non-profit with an aim to raise awareness about breast cancer among women under 40, and a way to satiate her need to bicycle a lot of miles. Along with real stories in the non-fiction world, she is passionate about fiction writing and an accomplished photographer.

 

Donna graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 1986 with a Bachelors in Marketing, attended The University of New Hampshire studying photography and fiction writing, The New England School of Photography in Boston, The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, The Writer’s Studio in NYC and The Creativity Workshop in Prague.