Media Magnate Duda Melzer and Grupo RBS
Duda Melzer is owner of the RBS conglomerate and the chairman and president of Grupo RBS, one of Brazil’s largest media companies. He also has a foothold in the world of venture capital. He obtained a degree in Business Administration from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in 1998, and in 2002, was awarded an MBA from Harvard University.
His career in the Brazilian business world began in financial franchising through large multinationals such as Sweet Sweet Way and Booz Allen & Hamilton. He moved on to the United States, where he became a senior analyst at the Delphi Corporation and CEO of Box Top Media in New York. He attended the Effective Strategies for Media Companies and the Building and Leading Customer Centric Organizations at Harvard Business School in 2008, and became more deeply involved in media self-regulation organizations such as thew National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation (Conar).
Melzer became CEO for the domestic market at his grandfather’s firm, Grupo RBS, in 2004. He moved up to vice-president of market and business development in 2008, and executive vice-president in 2010. Two years after that, he became vice chairman and CEO. In 2016, he began serving as chairman of the board. He has received a number of prestigious awards for his work in media, including the Caboré Award, the Coletiva.Net Award, the Merit Award in Administration from the Regional Management Council of Rio Grande do Sul, and is listed on the Cambridge Institute for Family Enterprise.
Duda Melzer takes an innovative approach to business. His modus operandi is to achieve growth by taking over other companies and exporting some of Grupo RBS’ core competancies in logistics, marketing, governance, and financial restructuring. As Duda put it in a recent interview, “People are told to launch enterprises that are adjacent to something they already do. But that mind-set will never lead [them] to start a truly new business.”
