Meet Erika Soto Lamb Vice President, Social Impact Strategy – MTV Entertainment
Erika Soto Lamb’s background is a mix of politics, cause and corporate work. Learn more about her and her inspiring work in our latest feature.
For those who don’t know you, tell us a little about your background.
My background is a mix of politics, cause and corporate work. After starting my career working on campaigns, I spent a handful of years working at public affairs agencies and then went in-house for both nonprofit and corporate entities, all the while grateful to take on some of the most pressing issues and figure out how to make things a little better.
What are you most looking forward to about reviewing Anthem Awards entries?
I am looking forward to learning from peers, seeing how others in the social impact space are thinking creatively and innovating — and figuring out how it can help me do better work!
What does it take for a project or campaign to cause real-world change?
Did you leave it better than you found it? Did you move the needle in the direction of positive social change? Sometimes — especially on the toughest social challenges — it’s only inches at a time, one person at a time but every once in a while you get the chance to make big swings and affect a lot of lives at once or fundamentally change the way systems work. We need to celebrate both the big and the small because they go hand-in-hand.
How does your work at MTV Entertainment support your mission?
Working on behalf of brands that are cultural leaders — whether MTV, Comedy Central or one of the other 7 brands I work on at ViacomCBS — is exciting because we have a built-in audience and the opportunity leverage our content and campaigns to change how people view issues and drive them to go from passive viewers to action takers.
Bonus: What’s your favorite purpose-driven project or mission-driven campaign right now, and why?
My favorite purpose-driven projects right now are corporate responses to humanitarian crises. As someone originally from Texas who is concerned with maintaining reproductive rights in our country, I loved how Austin-based Bumble responded by setting up a fund to support people affected by the state’s new abortion ban. On another issue entirely, I was grateful to see Airbnb step up to provide housing for 20,000 Afghan refugees following the end of the war in Afghanistan. Whenever there is a problem, there are entities that can step up to help and I love seeing that in action.
