Allen Adamson is one of the most widely recognized brand strategy experts in the United States, with decades of hands-on experience building, managing, and protecting brands across virtually every major industry. A five-time author, Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and Co-Founder of brand consultancy Metaforce, Allen brings a rare combination of academic rigor and deep practitioner expertise to every engagement, including his growing role advising legal teams as a brand expert witness in high-stakes intellectual property and brand-related litigation.
Allen is regularly retained by leading law firms and corporate counsel to provide expert analysis, reports, and testimony in cases involving trademark and trade dress infringement, likelihood of confusion, brand identity and logo disputes, package and product design conflicts, false and misleading advertising, licensing violations, and brand defamation and dilution. His ability to translate complex brand equity concepts into concrete, marketplace-grounded analysis that resonates with judges and juries sets him apart from purely academic experts. Allen’s opinions are rooted not in theory alone, but in decades of advising Fortune 500 companies on the very brand decisions that become the subject of litigation.
He is a regular contributor to the New York Law Journal, Attorney at Law Magazine, and other legal publications, where he writes on the intersection of brand strategy, intellectual property, and emerging issues such as AI’s impact on trademark protection. He also writes a regular column for Forbes on branding topics.
Allen’s expertise is grounded in a career that spans both the client and agency sides of marketing. He began at Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, before holding senior management roles at Ogilvy & Mather and DMB&B. He went on to become Chairman of Landor Associates, a global brand consultancy, where he led engagements with brands including Accenture, GE, Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, HBO, Marriott, MetLife, P&G, Sony, and Verizon. He also guided the branding efforts of major non-profit organizations, including the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the Central Park Conservancy, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
As an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern, Allen lectures on the challenges brands face in a fast-changing marketplace. He also serves as the brand expert-in-residence at NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship, working with student entrepreneurs to develop and launch their brand strategies.
Allen is the author of five books on branding: Seeing the How (2023), Shift Ahead, The Edge, BrandDigital, and BrandSimple, several of which are used as textbooks in university business programs across the country. A sought-after commentator, he has appeared on ABC News, NBC’s Today Show, CNBC’s Squawk Box and Closing Bell, and Fox Business Network, and is regularly quoted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg.
Allen is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Metaforce (www.metaforce.com), a marketing and brand strategy consultancy that takes a multi-disciplinary, channel-agnostic approach to helping leaders identify and execute the strategies yielding the highest returns.
He received his B.S. from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. For more information: https://allenadamson.com/
