Emmanuel Kofi Brown is used to being ahead of the curve. When he began college in 1994 at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, he already knew how to get by on his own after having spent six years at a boarding school.

“Boarding school shaped me more than my college,” he said. “College was a breeze. I already knew how to do my own laundry. I had been away from home for six years.”

As a digital marketing executive, Brown seeks to maintain that ahead-of-the-curve pace by pushing his clients to embrace digital innovation.

“Technology is not something you can walk away from,” he said.

Brown puts that maxim to work at his new job as director of digital marketing at Hollywood’s Allied Integrated Marketing, which focuses on the entertainment industry and consumer brands. He will be working with major movie studios such as Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox on how to use technology to effectively market their products.

Brown will be putting to use skills he first developed working for Nike Inc., the Beaverton, Ore.-based athletic footwear giant. It was there that he learned the importance of pushing people out of their comfort zones.

“(At Nike) we never waited for the consumer to react,” he said. “You always dictate and tell the consumer where to go. No one wants to be a loner, and everybody wants to be a part of something cool.”

It was also there that Brown saw the Internet take a more prominent role in companies’ marketing efforts, as Nike’s digital arm grow from him and another staffer to an entire division.

Today, he eschews the conventional wisdom that only substance matters in using marketing to stir potential customers. To Brown, the medium that is used to reach consumers is also a priority.

“Content is king,” he said, “but it’s how content is given to you (that’s) the biggest thing right now.”

In that regard, Brown said he is high on the opportunities of using Apple’s iPhone as a marketing tool. “The iPhone is going to be the new mobile frontier.”

Brown, 33, is single and lives in downtown Los Angeles. In his spare time, the former college track and field athlete and soccer player enjoys watching sports and exercising.