RJ Wilson is executive vice president of Go Fish Digital, the Raleigh, North Carolina, digital marketing agency co-founded by Brian Patterson. He spent eight years in marketing at Aramark, the food-service company, before joining Go Fish as a project manager in 2018. He rose to president and led the agency through its 2024 sale to the agency group Agital, and he now runs its strategy and operations.
Marketing for Carolina Dining Services
Wilson, who has also published under the name RJ LaPorte, started out in food-service marketing. In March 2010 The Daily Tar Heel quoted him as marketing coordinator for Carolina Dining Services, the dining program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a story about 1.5.0, a campus restaurant that served food grown or raised within 150 miles. He explained that the program's local buying dipped in winter: "Seasonality affects local food purchasing, and these numbers only reflect from January to March, so during spring semester, that average will increase."
His LinkedIn profile lists marketing roles at Aramark from 2010 to 2018, moving from district marketing manager to senior district marketing manager and then to director of marketing, where he ran national marketing programs, budgets, and return-on-investment tracking.
Joining Go Fish Digital
He came to Go Fish in 2018 as a digital marketing project manager. In an October 2018 post on the agency's blog, Google Certified in a Week, he wrote that he had been "a marketing director for a large organization with a primary focus on digital marketing" and had known Google Analytics well enough to get by. Joining an SEO agency "with a team of super smart people" meant he had to expand his skills "post haste," so he passed six Google Ads exams in about 25 hours over one week. He compared certification to car repair: a friend who can change a tire is not the person to fix your brakes, and "you'd most likely leave the brakes to a trusted certified professional."
He moved up to senior project manager, then to vice president in April 2021 and president in January 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. In October 2020 he celebrated the agency winning three US Search Awards.
Leading Go Fish Through the Agital Sale
In February 2024 Agital, a group that buys and combines digital agencies, acquired Go Fish, then known for SEO, paid media, digital PR, and online reputation management for clients including Amazon, GEICO, and Marriott, MediaPost reported. The agency's leadership stayed in place, with Wilson as president. "We are eager to bring our data and client-first approach to marketing strategies and brand presence to the rapidly growing Agital ecosystem," he said in the announcement.
Go Fish's team page now lists him as executive vice president in charge of agency strategy and operations. In May 2026 he announced Barracuda, a Go Fish marketing intelligence tool that groups related searches, content, ads, and audience behavior so the team can estimate how search and ad platforms will judge a client's visibility before money is spent. "What makes me most proud is the thinking behind it," he wrote on LinkedIn, crediting people across strategy, SEO, paid media, analytics, engineering, and product.
His Go Fish bio says he has read X-Men comics since he was a kid and has "very strong opinions" on how the storylines are adapted in the cartoons and movies.