There are lots of stories told in the halls of Meredith Corp. about Jeannine Shao Collins, and they usually go something like this: At an Association of National Advertisers conference a couple of years ago, she and a group of her associates cornered the chief marketing officer of a major packaged-goods company that Meredith had been trying to woo. A few minutes into the conversation, Collins, svp of Meredith 360, the company’s integrated marketing arm, discovered that she and the CMO were graduates of the same high school in Potomac, Md. A connection, and subsequent business relationship, was born.
