About Us

The firm is run by Vicky Rideout, a veteran Foundation executive, non-profit program director, and political aide whose career has run the gamut from working with then-State Senator Barack Obama on his historic speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention, to winning an Emmy Award with MTV for most effective public service campaign.  In addition to being covered in the popular press, her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Pediatrics, and the Journal of Marketing and Public Policy (where she received the Thomas Kinnear Award recognizing the article that “makes the most significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues within the most recent three-year period”). 

Ms. Rideout founded VJR Consulting in 2010, and since then the firm's clients have included Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, Common Sense Media, the Joyful Heart Foundation, Cartoon Network, Hope Lab, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and many others.  The firm's projects have included national surveys on children's use of new technology, families' use of educational media in the home, parenting in the digital era, teenagers' experiences with social media, and teachers' opinions about the educational impact of students' media use. The company's work for our clients has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, ABC World News Tonight, and many other news outlets.  We have helped our clients negotiate media partnerships worth millions of dollars with Viacom, USA network, and Time Warner Cable. 

Ms. Rideout has been a featured speaker at the Association of American Publishers, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Banff World Television Summit, the Youth Mega-Marketing Event, annual conferences of the National Association of Broadcasting and the National Cable Television Association, and at retreats for the Fox Broadcasting Company and PBS Kids. She has testified on youth and media at the U.S. Congress, the Institute of Medicine, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission.

She currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Children and Media, where she was editor for Reviews and Commentary from 2013-2019. She previously served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention, the James Irvine Foundation’s Leadership Awards committee, the PBS Kids Advisory Board, and the Advisory Council for the San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum.

Prior to founding VJR Consulting, Ms. Rideout spent more than ten years as a vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, where she established and directed the Foundation’s Program for the Study of Media and Health.  Prior to joining the Foundation, she founded the Children and Media program at the children’s advocacy group Children Now. 

Before joining the non-profit world, Ms. Rideout had many years of experience in government and politics, including as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives and as a policy adviser and speechwriter to numerous officeholders and candidates. She was the director of speechwriting for the 2004 and 2008 Democratic National Conventions, where she worked closely with the Obama campaigns on Barack Obama’s remarks to the 2004 convention, and on message and strategy for the 2008 convention. 

She graduated with honors from Harvard University and received her MA from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Peer-Reviewed Publications >