These 50 marketing chiefs are acting today and building for tomorrow, knowing they can either drive change or be driven by it.
By Seth Matlins, Managing Director, Forbes CMO Network
Additional Reporting by Leslie Blount
For brands, businesses, and the chief-marketers helping steward both, this year has begun as the last ended. A continuing cavalcade of crises of all types and flavors, each influencing the human context that they market in and around, required CMOs to reconsider what, how, where, and when, they do what they do to drive sustainable growth.
A still looming recession, fluctuating stock market, inflation, indictments, the cost of eggs, gas, rent, mortgages and money itself; Russia’s war in Ukraine, quiet quitting, layoffs, floods, AI, North Korea, Taiwan, China, TikTok, Twitter, bank failures, indictments, the war on ESG, “wokeness,” school shootings, and 10,001 other macro and micro things can all play a part in a chief-marketer’s decisions to do or not.
So, as it turns out, Voltaire was wrong, and this is most definitely not “the best of all possible worlds.” But it is the world in which the marketing chiefs highlighted in this, the 2nd annual Forbes Entrepreneurial CMOs 50 list, operate so well.
Forbes has been championing entrepreneurial capitalism and those driving it for 105 years. While the circumstances these marketers contend with change on the regular, our definition of what makes an Entrepreneurial CMO remains constant and begins with their mindset and approach. The Entrepreneurial CMO is one who is beholden neither to the status quo nor to disrupting it for disruption’s sake.
Strategic risk takers, they learn from both what does and doesn’t work, iterate, and optimize. They are resilient, both adapting to change and driving it, fueled by curiosity, creativity, and an ability to test, learn, and connect dots in real time, even if the dots, like goalposts, keep moving.
For the 2023 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list, we again recognize 50 marketers—selected from hundreds of nominees, based on qualitative evaluation and review by marketing industry leaders, list alumni, and Forbes editors—whose entrepreneurial approach and actions are transforming not only their brands and businesses, but oftentimes marketing, commerce, and culture itself.
The 50 marketing leaders making this year’s list include those from Walmart and Tiffany, the brand stewards of both Big Bird and the Geico gecko, as well as those from cultural touchstones like Netflix, Spotify, and the WWE. App-first brands have a strong presence, representing over a quarter of those making the list.
As you read through this year’s list, you’ll find that many are thinking “like owners,” eschewing traditional organizational constructs to build new and better ones as they reconsider what their marketing organizations need to look like to get done what must. They are acting today and building for tomorrow, knowing that they can either drive change or be driven by it. Those recognized here, have unanimously chosen the former, and share an unwavering commitment to ensuring their marketing matters and does more.
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Taj Alavi
Position: VP, Global Head of Marketing
Company: Spotify
Because Alavi doesn’t stop working to reinvent and identify better ways to enable the artists and creators on Spotify’s platform to connect with their fans and generate revenue.
On a brand-mission to unlock the power of human creativity and empower artists to make a living from their art, she sees every challenge as an opportunity, and creativity as an engine of growth. All quite useful for someone whose team and responsibilities cut across brand and creative, product and channel marketing, in each of the 180 markets where Spotify is live.
Because by creating culture-defining marketing—securing the company’s ranking as a top audio streaming subscription service in over 180 markets globally—she and her team have harnessed the power of culture, creators, community, and data to expand and enhance the brand experience for users and brand partners alike. Alavi and her marketing team root everything they do in product features and add-ons, and have capitalized on the popularity of Wrapped, Spotify’s highly personalized—and much-shared—end-of-year personalized listening recaps, by creating new moments and play-lost programs for listeners to build, create and share year-round based on their interests and lifestyles.
Knowing that music is inherently connected to self-expression and play, she’s added depth and dimension to the fan experience by partnering with Roblox to create “themed islands” with games, quests, merchandise and of course artists and music, and kicked off an FC Barcelona partnership marrying usic and sport and featuring Drake’s record label logo on the team’s kit to celebrate the artist reaching 50 billion streams.
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DoorDash
Kofi Amoo-Gottfried
Position: Chief Marketing Officer
Company: DoorDash
Because in a highly competitive market, Amoo-Gottfried’s marketing responsive, iterative, and creative. The approach he and his team take to their three-sided marketplace, focuses on creating new ecosystems and opportunities to “meet the moment” for the merchants looking to grow their businesses on the brand’s platform, the “Dashers” looking for new and time-flexible ways to earn an income, and consumers looking for their next meal (etc.).
Always and actively listening, analyzing, and reconsidering the approach to solving problems for each and all of the brand’s constituencies, he and his team have built an industry-first benefits program that leverages the company’s scale to aggregate products and services and negotiate discounts on behalf of DoorDash’s merchants. And to attract and retain drivers, they have also built a perks program for Dashers providing them relief at the gas pump, and discounts from the merchants they deliver from.
As Amoo-Gottfried told Forbes, “Because we index towards solving problems and providing value, our output is varied – we make everything from activations to product hacks to enduring business programs to short films to magazines to “standard” commercials.” Always learning from what works and what doesn’t, he and his team turned a glitch that allowed users to order from merchant Cheesecake Factory without paying into an opportunity by later partnering with restaurant to “hack” and gamify the chain’s extensive menu, a making lemonade from lemons idea that drove a double-digit lift in traffic to the restaurant’s page, and a meaningful lift in orders.
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Airbnb
Hiroki Asai
Position: Global Head of Marketing
Company: Airbnb
Because Asai and his team at Airbnb rejected the company’s status-quo “performance” strategy, slashed ad spending, lessened their reliance on search and invested in brand, helping lead Airbnb to its most profitable quarter (Q4’22) ever.
Driving expanded consideration of how and when to use the platform led Asai and the Airbnb team to think beyond the hospitality industry’s status quo business and/or leisure construct. They launched Airbnb It, a brand campaign supporting the release of new products and services, helping “bring to life how Hosts reimagine their homes as Airbnbs, discovering new occasions they can Airbnb their places.”
Asai’s focus includes building Airbnb’s in-house marketing and creative capabilities, in order to service a brand and business built as a “true hybrid of tech, travel, and design.” As CMO of one of few brands and companies that is both a noun and verb, Asai continually finds ways for Airbnb to enter the cultural conversation, keeping the brand top-of-mind, in order to recruit and retain more hosts and guests.
After all, in good economic times or bad, an empty home or room is a perishable economic asset—and a terrible thing to waste.
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Flock Freight
Orlando Baeza
Position: Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer
Company: Flock Freight
Because for Baeza, “good enough, isn’t.” Because he knows disrupting a category like freight shipping and fundamentally changing the way—and at what environmental cost—goods move across the United States, requires reimagining marketing.
In his first year with Flock Freight, he’s swiftly connected the dots between lessons learned as a B2C marketer to this new remit and B2B enterprise. “Conventional strategies rely on bloated outbound sales teams that lack visibility and predictability. We are flipping that structure into a more sustainable, inbound-driven growth strategy that starts with building awareness with breakthrough creative, social media and thought leadership.”
Baeza and his nascent team knew they had to disrupt the category’s historically masculine tropes and uninspiring content to capture attention and coax shippers of all sizes into using the company’s “Shared Shipload” solution. They tapped Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort to launch the brand’s first campaign; a provocative spot that called out the category’s historic inefficiencies and cheekily clarified the differences between its truckloads.
Developed and launched in three months and recognized as one Adweek’s best of 2022, the campaign was a foundational effort in growing the company’s size, scale, appeal, and commercial viability.
As Flock Freight’s CMO, Baeza sees his mandate as “rooted in this moment of massive opportunity, and building a new supply chain legacy brand that lives up to that ambition—one that has the equity and depth to outlive everyone at the firm today.”
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StockX
Deena Bahri
Position: CMO
Company: StockX
Because she markets by thinking big, acting small, and always being willing to fail “for the sake of learning.”
In pursuit of their customer’s hearts and feet, Bahri and her team have pursued the new and different for the company: An expansion into the Mexican market, a partnership with Marvel and Wakanda Forever, and an entry into the women’s shoe category.
By adding women creators to their collaborators and customer base, signing women athletes to first-ever NIL deals, leveraging women’s behavioral trends on TikTok to create customized content, and adding luxury footwear to their product assortment, StockX found the sweet spot in categories historically dominated by men, and saw women become the majority of new customers.
Bahri’s key priority this year is to put the customer at the center of every decision (known in the company as their “True Love” initiative). “I am a huge proponent of customer-centricity, and StockX has invested accordingly in customer insights and customer experience management tools, so we have the proper pulse on what matters to the buyers and sellers who are our customers.”
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Intuit
Lara Balazs
Position: General Manager and CMO
Company: Intuit
Because in order to stay in front of a market that’s changing quickly, she’s transforming her marketing organization to both think and operate based on a brand-reputation risk calculus.
Because she and her team have transformed the Intuit brand from that of a lesser known parent entity of its better-known product portfolio (which includes TurboTax, QuickBooks, MailChimp and Credit Karma) into the unifying brand attached to and elevating all. “We’re leading with the Intuit name in every instance where you see one of our products and we use data and customer input from across our platform to serve up personalized solutions to meet specific customer needs,” Balazs told Forbes.
Balazs and her team updated the brand’s identity, for only the second time in its 40-year history, designed next-gen digital strategies across TikTok, Roblox and the metaverse, partnered with the viral machine that is Mr. Beast, as well as with Steve Ballmer and the L.A. Clippers on the building of the team’s new technology-forward arena, the Intuit Dome. Under her leadership, Intuit is also investing in creating a more inclusive economy, supporting underserved communities and small businesses in countries where the company operates.
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Philips
Lorraine Barber-Miller
Position: EVP and Chief Marketing and E-Commerce Officer
Company: Philips
Because when Barber-Miller joined Philips in February of 2020, she likely didn’t realize she’d be transforming the 131-year-old consumer products company into a full-fledged health technology company virtually overnight. Yet, that’s what she and her team of 3,000 marketing, communications, digital and e-commerce practitioners across 100 countries did.
Because she steered a complete overhaul of the company’s procedures; shifting to a more customer and consumer-led operations model that prioritized personalization and incorporated AI and machine learning to deliver data-driven capabilities across all business segments.
Under Barber-Miller’s leadership, the company has used data science, real-time analytics and digital performance while scaling D2B and D2C channels to fuel explosive growth, with profits surging from $120 million in 2019 to $3.5 billion in 2022. What’s her biggest priority at the moment? Finding new opportunities based on customers’ “continued obsession with personalization and predictive capabilities.”
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Prada Group
Lorenzo Bertelli
Position: Group Marketing Director and Head of Corporate Social Responsibility
Company: Prada Group
Because when you run marketing for a 110-year-old luxury brand, challenges to process, approach and materials don’t just disrupt the brand’s status-quo but the foundations of its appeal. But these are among the things Bertelli, Prada’s CEO-in-waiting, and the House are considering.
Because Bertelli (along with his mother, Miuccia, and Raf Simons, the label’s designers) has helped reinvigorate the Prada brand, making it once again one of the “hottest” and fastest growing luxury brands globally. Responsible for a broad remit including both the Group’s (which includes both Prada and Miu Miu) marketing and communications strategy and its sustainability strategy and programs, Bertelli has unified its digital marketing, bringing the brand into the metaverse, TikTok, opened the Prada Caffé in Harrods, London’s historic retail destination, and dressed John Wick.
This past fall, the House launched its first jewelry collection, where the gold used was certified recycled and the diamonds ethically sourced. Bertelli knows the future must be different from the past and looks to the blockchain both to ensure and promote a supply-chain transparency that many staid luxury brands have been slow to embrace because, as Bertelli told the New York Times, “Exclusivity makes no sense with sustainability, and (we) need to challenge industries that are opaque.”
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Ally Financial
Andrea Brimmer
Position: Chief Marketing and PR Officer
Company: Ally Financial
Because Brimmer’s marketing recognizes the tension between a category often characterized by dislike or apathy on the one hand, and the emotional context that surrounds protecting and growing their customer’s money on the other.
Because, as she told Forbes, “you can’t be a digital-only company and not be on the leading edge (if not the bleeding edge) of where consumers are moving, engaging them in what’s next.” And Brimmer’s moves to take Ally into Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and a financial literacy initiative with the makers of Pokémon Go, consistently demonstrate a test, learn, optimize approach to building brand and using the brand to drive growth.
Brimmer and her team understand their marketing resources can be deployed to create value and change the world. In May 2022, Ally announced its 50/50 pledge, committing to spend their ad dollars equally across women’s and men’s sports over five years. A cornerstone of this effort was playing a hands-on role in moving the broadcast of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) Championship to network prime, the first time a women’s championship game in any sport has ever had that platform. The move drove ratings increases of 70%+, which was good for CBS, the league and Ally’s sponsorship, and the commitment led Ally to be named a top-five brand in women’s sports among professional and college athletes (source: Sponsor United, 2022), remarkable on its own and more so because Ally isn’t sports endemic. “Proof,” as Brimmer says, “that deeds, not just words, can make real change.”
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American Eagle Outfitters
Craig Brommers
Position: CMO
Company: American Eagle Outfitters
Because Brommer recognizes “you have to be ready to tap dance-or maybe TikTok-at any moment,” when you’re marketing to a fast-moving Gen Z audience, in a “what have you done for me lately” retail industry. Proof of return on this mindset lies at least in part in AE’s being named the #2 brand among this young cohort.
As a youth-retailer, focusing on building the brand, the base, and the business, requires marketing to always be in next-gen acquisition mode. Because they understand “listening is a key tenet for growing,” Brommer and his team built a panel of 2000 shoppers aged 15-25 to glean insights that translate into scalable brand and business results, create culture-defining moments and drive business growth.
His marketing approach is entrepreneurial in as much as it moves fast, embraces risk, and is undaunted by failure. He moved aggressively into the Metaverse and partnered with Snap to build an AR pop-up shop that resulted in millions in sales, served both the brand’s Gen Z audience’s craving for unique experiences and appetite for new technologies, and the brand’s need to be present and within reach of their consumer’s desire. Wherever they may be.
Brommer’s focus on experimentation is driven by his understanding that the consumer has become the new, de-facto brand marketer. AE has partnered with some of Gen Z’s biggest creators and harnessed the power of the brand’s employee ambassadors to launch a store influencer program called myAE, empowering their 35,000 associates to become branded content creators.
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Geico
Damon Burrell
Position: CMO
Company: Geico
Because a deep-rooted fascination with consumer behavior and why people do and don’t buy in a changing marketing landscape pushes Burrell to embrace risk, test, and learn from what is on the cutting-edge today but may be less so tomorrow.
With instincts honed working across an array of industries, media, entertainment, consumer goods, and of course insurance among them, Burrell and his team are applying lessons learned in one industry to bring a different and multi-category perspective to Geico’s brand and business.
Burrell has restructured the company’s marketing organization, putting an enhanced emphasis on integrated marketing and media, shifting the brand’s approach to content creation from a tv-first model to an omni-channel one, allowing them to reallocate resources to digital and social.
To “modernize their agency go-to-market approach and shift the organization from a focus on volume to value,” Burrell’s led his team to design an agency model that “integrates all channels and allows for real-time investment optimizations in response to tactical performance, cultural trends, customer behaviors and business results at the state and national levels.”
Burrell and his team have also reconsidered the company’s status-quo approach to sponsorship, reducing the volume of deals to “increase the value and impact” and again, allowing for dollars once spent here to be redirected, a hallmark of the entrepreneurial CMO.
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D-K
Andrea Davey
Position: CMO
Company: Tiffany & Co.
Because she and her team are writing the future of this 186-year-old luxury brand, making it feel newly culturally resonant and relevant, and the work is generating both buzz and revenue as a result.
As Davey and her team helped the once staid brand become more current and cultural on the back of a high-profile collaboration and partnership strategy, the LVMH-owned brand had what was reported as record year in 2022. Tiffany has long been aspirational, but its marketing is making it increasingly desirable too. The brand’s high-wattage partnerships have included those with global and focused generational appeal. From those with BTS and Black Pink ,in a direct appeal to their massive K-Pop fanbases, a collaboration with coveted streetwear label, Supreme, to the Tiffany x Nike collaboration that seemed to eat the internet when it was launched, and a second collaboration and campaign with Beyonce in a video extension of her “Renaissance” album, the Tiffany brand is witnessing its own renaissance.
But for Davey and her team tapping into the pop-cultural zeitgeist and conversation isn’t an end in and of itself, but a strategic means to one, as conversation is translating into revenue for the now-LVMH owned enterprise.
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L’Oréal
Asmita Dubey
Position: Chief Digital and Marketing Officer
Company: L’Oréal
Because her vision to lead L’Oréal’s marketing into the digital age and her acute understanding of, and readiness for, the speed at which technology moves has cemented the French beauty conglomerate’s status as one of the most innovative brands in the world and an undisputed leader in Beauty Tech.
Dubey’s swift embrace of Web 3 broadly and the Metaverse specifically, along with other emerging tech, demonstrates her entrepreneurial approach, and has made way a first in beauty partnership with NFT peer-to-peer marketplace, Opensea, and partnerships with James Cameron’s Avatar, Meta, and investments with US-based startup, DIGITAL VILLAGE, that earned the company a Brand of the Decade Award from Kantar for “Fastest Online Adoption.”
Despite the brand’s Web 3 ventures, Dubey’s strategy remains “firmly grounded” in Web 2.0 deployment, personalized beauty services, and data-driven and ROI based marketing. Brand and product marketing programs have included A/R beauty services and virtual try-ons for hair and makeup and skin diagnosis through AI, have amassed over 40 million uses in the past year through both owned assets and retailer channels.
Her conviction that “the future of beauty will be physical, digital & virtual and that beauty consumer journeys will continue evolving from offline and online to offline, online, on-chain”has led Dubey and her team to expand L’Oréal’s footprint in the new media landscape with retailer media, gaming platform Twitch, Connected TV and Netflix’s new ad supported service. What’s new is next.
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The North Face
Mike Ferris
Position: VP, Global Brand Management
Company: The North Face
Because, as a recent Fast Company profile of the brand’s longtime ambassador and collaborator, Jimmy Chin, for its “Brand That Matter” issue put it: “Over the past year, the North Face has established itself as the rare label able to straddle two distinct spheres of cultural relevance, while most other brands are flop-sweating to inhabit just one.”
Ferris himself put it another way in a related LinkedIn post: “TNF is not only among those driving strength for [parent company] VFC, but the brand is also outperforming versus the broader market, realizing double digit growth in an environment that has been anything but stable given both supply chain disruption and general consumer unease.”
The brand Ferris stewards continues to lead by example when it comes to authenticity, sustainability, innovation, making the great outdoors even greater and making an impact on culture. Ferris and his team have partnered with fashion-forward hypebeasts and athletes like the Oscar-winning filmmaker, whose product-testing and adventure-filled content for the brand has helped it achieve a 33% growth in 2022. Or as Ferris notes in his post, ”Company performance and brand purpose are intertwined, and the brands that are having the most success and impact are those who are learning how to make these complementary versus competing ambitions. Although we are certainly not perfect and are on a journey here ourselves, I am extremely proud of the work The North Face team has done in this realm over the last several years to find this balance and move the brand forward.”
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Combs Global
Deon Graham
Position: Chief Brand Officer
Company: Combs Global
Because overseeing the marketing, growth, and development of Combs Global’s diverse and expanding portfolio of brands and businesses finds Graham treating each one as if he owns them. This “ownership” mindset, he says, allows him to take more creative and strategic risks with the company founded by music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
With a brand portfolio comprised of spirits brands Cîroc Vodka and DeLeón Tequila, Sean John, Aquahydrate, REVOLT Media, Bad Boy Entertainment, the newly birthed Love Records, and a $185 million Cannabis acquisition—Graham and his team’s fundamental priority is to grow each of them in service of one comprehensive vision: “Building the largest portfolio of leading Black-owned brands in the world, and a more equitable future for the company’s Black and brown audiences.”
This charge requires him to find innovative ways to integrate the portfolio’s brands while being intentional about “elevating and involving the culture, amplifying creative voices from our target market, listening to the community, and incorporating what they want to see and who they want to hear from.”
It’s a responsibility that has informed the design, development and launch of many of the brands’ campaigns across products, content, and ventures. And the approach is working: the company has seen growth across its own portfolio of metrics, from profit, viewership, awareness, to the cultural resonance and relevance that has always defined its founder’s career.
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Kraken
Mayur Gupta
Position: Chief Marketing Officer
Company: Kraken
Because the tech and startup veteran’s hyper awareness of the intricacies of marketing and its best practices make him the go-to exec for companies looking to jump start their brand and product awareness.
“I am the first CMO at Kraken in our 11th year,” Gupta told Forbes. “All the growth in the first decade has come on the backing of an incredible product, building a category that just had not existed…To establish marketing as a growth engine in a world like that at this stage is entrepreneurial and challenging.”
Adding more layers to Gupta’s new challenge: A spate of news and events in the past year since he joined Kraken shaking some investors’ faith in crypto. Still, he remains undaunted, optimistic, and focused on the task and opportunities ahead.
“This is not our first bear run…we have always used these times to continue to build great products, optimize our foundation and get ready to capitalize on the next bull run. For marketing, this meant getting that engine ready.”
For Gupta, that meant redefining the brand’s purpose and mission, establishing a clear 5-year North Star strategy, hiring leaders who brought diversity of experience, culture and mindsets, completing their first customer research and segmentation work, focusing on optimizing their lifecycle engagement and leveraging content to educate their customer base about more advanced products and capabilities, and amplifying their creative production process.
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JPMorgan Chase
Carla Hassan
Position: CMO
Company: JPMorgan Chase
Because Hassan takes a “test, measure, and go back to the drawing board” approach to marketing, and keeps a learning mindset at all times.
Because despite unrivaled change for today’s CMO in their array of responsibilities and an explosion of inputs complicating the same, Hassan understands that what’s unchanged is marketing’s job is to drive revenue growth. She understands equally that “marketing in a bubble will not work” and that this requires thinking like—and being able to communicate in the language of—the CFO, and the chief product and technology officers.
Hassan knows that a changing human context requires always ensuring the company infuses humanity into their products, services, and marketing approach, and she is constantly optimizing internal structures to ensure the right people have a voice in how the company goes to market. In an era when so many CMOs are using data as a salve for—and not as in service to—their go-to-market strategies, Hassan and her team know they “need the data, but we also need humanity,” and they work to break down silos bifurcating the data and creativity that inform ideas. Under her watch, Marketing has become a leading contributor to JPMorgan Chase’s progress on diverse supplier spending, hitting their Racial Equity Commitment, 2 years ahead of their 5-year goal.
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11:11 Media
Krystal Hauserman
Position: CMO
Company: 11:11 Media
Because to “build the brand beyond the icon” she’s helming a strategy to transform Paris Hilton’s business into a modern, diversified entertainment and consumer products company. Because, like the pop-culture icon whose company she helps steward, Hauserman is unwilling to accept a status quo that doesn’t serve brand or business, and she understands that making pop-culture waves is a strategic means…not an end.
As many a marketer can attest, there’s nothing easy about making a legacy brand “cool,” especially one like Hilton’s, which so clearly embodies and reflects a specific moment in time. But that’s exactly what Hauserman and the team at 11:11 are working to do, and they’re doing it across a portfolio of product and content launches including film, television, audio and podcasting, books, music, an array of Web3 and metaverse activations, and, oh yea, new branded consumer products in the fashion, pet, beauty, travel, fragrance, and cookware spaces.
From a genre-busting 10-minute TikTok done in partnership with another of this year’s list-makers (Hilton Hotels’ CMO, Marc Weinstein), to her work with the company’s Media Impact team to “dismantle the $23B ‘troubled teen’ industry,” Hauserman and 11:11 are determined to make the world a better place for women and girls. For them, results and impact aren’t just measured in the growth of the business and its revenues, but in seeing their impact work drive changed laws in 7 states—and 2 countries, England and Ireland.
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Instacart
Laura Jones
Position: Chief Marketing Officer
Company: Instacart
Because Jones has led the company through series of firsts, from the brand’s first integrated marketing campaign to its first influencer efforts, all while setting—and delivering against— “ambitious” growth goals.
Thinking and acting entrepreneurially, she and her team have achieved this by “launching and scaling under-leveraged channels including social, audio, linear TV and direct mail – and building net-new capabilities and enhanced marketing technology” to deliver a masterclass in brand lift.
The former Uber exec, who was promoted to CMO after a stellar first year during which she spearheaded the creation of a full brand identity refresh to reflect its business expansion beyond grocery to include beauty, home goods, electronics, and office supplies. In the first month of its launch, the new look drove a double-digit percentage growth in new site visits.
Jones and her marketing org also launched a groundbreaking campaign, “The World Is Your Cart,” starring Lizzo in a shoppable ad timed to run following the artist’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, one where the brand also tapped SNL cast member, Chloe Fineman to arrive wearing a branded and viral “Cart Couture” gown that was a walking snack shelf.
Viewers could shop “Lizzo’s Cart” through the ad and via the brand’s social channels, for a full-funnel, omni-channel experience. Within the first two days of the campaign’s launch, it had generated 2 billion earned impressions, over 130 articles, and brand mentions increased 302% within its first week. She and her team have also begun building out the brand’s new CPG co-marketing capability, recently working with merchant partner Michelob Ultra for their first shoppable Super Bowl ad.
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eos Products
Soyoung Kang
Position: CMO
Company: eos Products
Because Kang “believes in innovation as an imperative, and in creativity as an amplifier for smart strategies.” Because she counters being outspent by larger brands by identifying opportunities for what she calls “marketing arbitrage,” where dollars invested are likely to yield an outsized return.
As CMO, she’s transformed a product-portfolio long-known as “that egg-shaped lip balm from middle school” into a diversified and multi-category disruptor. A one-time BCG consultant, Kang’s time outside marketing and her background in finance, strategy and general management have made her a multi-faceted CMO. This has served her and the org she leads well, as they implemented a complete brand overhaul. New identity, new segments, hundreds of new SKUs.
To capture the attentions and intentions of her Gen Z audience, Kang and her team lean into creative that is strategically provocative, and both culturally and individually relevant. Stigma-busting, conversation-starting and ultimately viral campaigns for vaginal care, including “Bless Your F*ing Cooch,” “and “Pubes for The Planet,” work to engage their audience by being both entertaining and educational. Her “marketing arbitrage” strategy has led the brand to creator collaborations and its early adoption of platforms like TikTok and Roblox. All of this has helped make the brand culturally relevant again and led to three years of “accelerated” revenue growth.
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PepsiCo
Todd Kaplan
Position: Chief Marketing Officer, Pepsi
Company: PepsiCo
Because he’s refreshed the iconic brand’s legacy position within the cultural zeitgeist with a fearless approach to creativity, a challenger mindset, and instills an “intrapreneurial” approach to marketing.
Because he pushes his internal and external teams to “think big while acting small,” and to continually reconsider their approach to building the brand and business. This mindset has led to the creation and launch of innovative and category-disrupting products and content, helping drive sustained growth for the brand in the five years since he became CMO.
His “culture-in, brand-out” marketing strategy and focus has steered Pepsi from the Super Bowl Halftime to Web 3 explorations, NFT collections, celebrating and supporting female artists, a music competition show, and most recently, the first brand identity refresh in 14 years.
Beyond this, Kaplan insists on what he calls “collaborativity,” between client and agency, where good ideas come from anyone and anywhere, removing the things that so often get in the way of the best ideas and work. This process has delivered some of the brand’s strongest work in years and helps set its direction for the future while never losing sight of its past.
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T-Mobile
Mike Katz
Position: President of Marketing Innovation & Experience
Company: T-Mobile
Because he’s not afraid of failing fast and adapting, as he modernizes how the company markets and tells its story.
Oversees the brand’s growth strategies, and responsible for elevating the product, communications, and interactive experience for the brand’s more than 110 million customers, the 25-year company veteran, has held roles in sales, operations, the T-Mobile for Business Group, making him extremely well-versed in all aspects of the business and remarkably adaptable in a constantly evolving industry.
“We constantly listen to our customers and our frontline employees so we can use their feedback to drive our actions,” Katz told Forbes. “I root every decision I make from a brand and marketing perspective through a customer lens.”
Among those decisions was Carrier Beyond, a benefit offered to the brand’s customers during their return to post-pandemic travel, allowing them access to high-speed data in over 210 countries and destinations. The benefit also offered in-flight connectivity and streaming through the carrier’s airline partners at no cost to the customer. The company also teamed up with SpaceX to offer coverage in “dead zones,” and enacted a price lock on their monthly rate during inflation to alleviate customers’ financial burdens.
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Accenture
Jill Kramer
Position: Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
Company: Accenture
Because for Kramer and her team, “change is not an indictment of the past, but an acknowledgment that we can do things differently going forward.”
Agility, speed, intuition married with data and innovation, are all hallmarks of Kramer’s entrepreneurial approach and ingredients in her work leading oversight of the 2000-person global team for the consulting behemoth’s brand, corporate and financial communications, analyst and media relations, research, insights, and analytics arms.
Frustrated by the outdated perspective that B2B marketing is “uncreative,” Kramer and her team are upending the model; bolstered by a determination to drive B2B transformation both internally at Accenture, and externally throughout the industry. An example of which is “Let There Be Change,” the company’s largest brand campaign in over a decade, architected by Kramer “to help B2B CMOs reframe the business goal and rebrand the marketing term using a more entrepreneurial approach.”
That approach is further evident in her and her team’s work: Their focus on enhanced creativity, reduced marketing, and brand complexity, eliminating hindering internal processes, and putting better technology and systems in place have made the company “more human-centric,” and has delivered “a measurably stronger Accenture brand” across industry benchmarks from Kantar BrandZ, Interbrand, and Brand Finance. She has also transformed the company’s global marketing function and led a talent-optimization effort to give her team the room and opportunity to do their highest value work.
For Kramer, “let there be change” isn’t just a campaign—it’s this chief marketer’s raison d’etre.
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Netflix
Marian Lee
Position: CMO
Company: Netflix
Because in the midst of a sea-change in the company’s operating model and a wildly dynamic time in the highly competitive category, Lee’s approach to marketing is rooted in thinking less like a marketer and more like a fan.
Because she’s reframed how the company thinks about marketing’s role in engaging audiences for the streamer’s content, from “targeting consumers to serving fans,” and because she and her team at Netflix understand the fan isn’t just an audience but an active participant in the marketing process and product.
Instead of spending more dollars on media, they’re spending more time turning fans into media, and “not just delivering messages; (but) giving fans the space and inspiration to be our biggest media platform.” Among the most viral evidence of this approach is ”The Wednesday Dance” which was widely mimicked and generated 25 billion views on TikTok. Impressions drove impact and Wednesday became the second most-watched English-language show in the streamer’s history.
Responsible for marketing the brand and its massive content portfolio in over 30 countries, Lee told Forbes her “biggest priority is to ensure we do not get distracted by the wrong things, or even worse, grow fearful of doing the right things,” proof positive of an entrepreneurial mindset.
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Riot Games
Francine Li
Position: Global Head of Marketing
Company: Riot Games
Because, according to Li, her superpower is “bridging brands and culture for explosive business growth.” And for her, finding new ways to engage 180 million monthly active users, and creating safe spaces and connections for a culturally diverse player community that will keep them coming back is not a game.
“I approach every day open and curious,” Li told Forbes. “As Dan Wieden used to say, ‘Walk in stupid’ – I always assume there’s more to learn, assumptions to question, and frequently reserve the right to get smarter. It’s an approach that’s served me well over my career, having been an entrepreneur myself, as well as helping build or redefine iconic brands like Netflix, Procter & Gamble, and ESPN.”
Among the many initiatives Li and her team have created: A campaign targeting the largely ignored and underrepresented female gamers, introduced an LGTBQ character in a game, sparking a viral social media response, and partnered with a League of Legends fan to create an original song for their summer gaming event that charted on the Billboard Hot Dance/Electronic Song list. She has also worked with Cannes Lion in the creation of the Entertainment Lion prize, which will have its inaugural launch during this year’s festival, raising the brand and its community’s profile exponentially in the creative space.
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Deloitte Consulting LLP
Scott Mager
Position: Principal | Chief Marketing Officer
Company: Deloitte Consulting LLP
Because for this co-founder of Deloitte Digital and now CMO of the company’s consulting arm, an “entrepreneurial mindset means never following a traditional path; it is about being focused on building things that generate value.”
Because he teamed with Ryan Reynold’s, AMC, and The Walking Dead finale, to shift and humanize the consultancy’s brand narrative, and add depth to what the firm’s clients, prospective clients, and potential talent recruits know and understand about the firm’s offerings and approach.
Beyond this buzz-getting execution, certainly a risk for a category not well known for its sense of humor or cultural connectivity, Mager and his team have focused on expanding external brand permission to new areas, transforming how the company’s internal network understands, view and values marketing, and increasing DEI within the organization’s creative community.
Mager has led investments in “agile processes that position our teams to seek possibilities and execute very quickly on new ideas” a hallmark of the entrepreneurial approach, and expects that by the end of FY2023, the entirety of his Marketing and Comms community will be trained and activating in agile processes.
He and his team are also piloting a multi-year mar-tech and data road map to enable more real-time, personalized content delivery and next generation lead creation capabilities, that will serve as a growth engine moving forward. Taking the company responsibility to create change seriously, he’s also working to ensure creative careers become more accessible to those from underrepresented communities.
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Andrea Mallard
Position: Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
Company: Pinterest
Because despite having 450 million active monthly users across the brand’s global platform, Mallard and her team still market like a start-up. “We’re a challenger brand, always pushing ourselves to differentiate and challenge existing orthodoxy…I constantly think about the role technologies like Pinterest play in society and culture.”
At a time when algorithms serve up outrage as a strategy for getting users to engage, Pinterest’s products, policies, and marketing foster inclusivity, safety and designing a better Internet. To these ends, in September of last year, Mallard and her team launched an integrated global brand campaign, encouraging people to “defy the saboteurs — internal and external — that keep them from creating a life they love.”
Building value-driving products and tools for both consumers and advertisers is also key to Mallard’s remit. She and the company have expanded their Pinterest Predicts and annual “Not-Yet-Trending-Report” efforts, aggregating the platform’s search insights to help users and advertisers understand what’s coming and what will be big in the year ahead. Mallard describes this as the cultural zeitgeist equivalent of “having a cheat sheet to a major exam.” The report adds value, drives recurring revenue, and puts the brand into the cultural conversation, a trifecta of smart marketing.
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Sesame Workshop
Samantha Maltin
Position: EVP, Chief Marketing & Brand Officer
Company: Sesame Workshop
Because she understands stewarding this iconic legacy family entertainment brand isn’t child’s play, and that the much beloved nonprofit’s “global brand power and health are directly correlated with our ability to drive social impact.”
Maltin transformed the brand’s initially modest, service-oriented team into a robust global marketing unit that now includes “an audience development function to more intentionally utilize and integrate email marketing, social, digital, and data strategy; an operations team to streamline workflow and more effectively support the creative and strategic needs of our business units; and Brand-in-Motion to shift from a primarily off-air creative team to include all aspects of brand-in-motion.”
Her mission to “be wherever families are,” has led to beloved characters such as Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Elmo appearing on television in ads for United Airlines, in storybooks, on YouTube, in classrooms, in viral feuds over a pet rock on TikTok, on Roblox, on podcasts, on Adidas sneakers, and promoting health foods. They’ve also been tapped to help children and families navigate through more challenging subjects, such as Covid and the learning gaps created during the pandemic, even “reaching out” to those affected by conflict and crisis through WhatsApp and chatbots.
She’s also spearheaded the launch of the brand’s first animated Sesame Street spinoff series, Sesame Street: Mecha Builders. Originally launched on YouTube, the show was later launched on Cartoon Network and HBO Max after the first episode attracted over 3 million views in just one week.
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e.l.f. Beauty
Kory Marchisotto
Position: CMO
Company: e.l.f. Beauty
Because in the world of this nimble and forward-thinking marketer, “anything is e.l.f.ing possible,” and she’s been consistently proving so. She was one of the first marketers to adopt TikTok; creating the “eyes.lip.face hashtag challenge” that became a viral sensation, generating billions of impressions and engagements, spawning a song beloved by fans, and catapulting the brand into renewed relevance and pop culture lore. She’s since added BeReal to the brand’s digital strategy, and started a Twitch channel called “e.l.f. You,” appealing to the brand’s gamer consumers.
She also spearheaded out-of-the-box collaborations with Dunkin’ and Chipotle, with the latter’s makeup collection selling out in record time across many of the brand’s online channels, generating over 4 billion media impressions, and winning a Shorty Award for Branded Content.
“I love to explore unexpected brand partnerships with like-minded disruptors,” Marchisotto told Forbes. “I’m the first to say that e.l.f. goes beyond beauty; we are an entertainment company at the intersection of music, beauty and beyond – we are where our community is.”
It’s that thinking that led to one of her most meaningful collaborations: Being President of Keys SoulCare, a lifestyle beauty brand created with Grammy-winning artist Alicia Keys that Marchisotto declared is “changing the conversation in beauty.”
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Rakuten
Dana Marineau
Position: CMO
Company: Rakuten
Because upon taking the CMO’s reigns at Rakuten, she reconsidered how the brand went to market and how her marketing organization was built, both in order to make the Japanese brand, then little-known in the U.S., into a household name.
Because she built a marketing organization from scratch, over Zoom, bringing the company’s essential marketing and creative capabilities in-house staying, as she told Forbes, “mindful of the composition of the team mirroring the brand. Highly skilled, passionate, collaborative, aspirational, and primed to achieve big goals.” Getting the organizational buy-in to build a world-class marketing team from scratch required constant communication to sell the strategic rationale across the company’s c-suite.
Marineau and her team have focused on top-of-the-funnel brand fundamentals, driving awareness, understanding, and trust as the pillars propelling the brand and business. She and her newly built in-house team looked to the Super Bowl, the last truly mass-media platform, to launch its first brand campaign featuring Hannah Waddingham, the much-loved actress from cultural touchstone, Ted Lasso. This multimedia and digital effort increased Rakuten’s brand index score, drove spikes in member sign-ups, app downloads, and search volume, and a 10% year-over-year uptick in buyers in each of the following two quarters.
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Anheuser-Busch/InBev
Ricardo Marques
Position: VP Marketing, Michelob Ultra
Company: Anheuser-Busch/InBev
Because in a mature category with nearly 1000 direct competitors, he’s driving double-digit growth, making Michelob Ultra the fastest growing beer brand in the world. Again.
For Marques, being an entrepreneurial marketer means placing “more emphasis on the potential of the idea than the (initial) ambiguity of its execution. It’s easy to get trapped in the immediate feasibility of a project when the focus should be on how impactful it can be.”
Marques and his team build their brand and business by approaching everything with a “founder’s mentality,” a deep sense of urgency and conviction that challenging the status quo requires thinking and doing differently—especially in a category challenged by everything from spirits to shifts in the consumption attitudes and behaviors of younger generations.
To these status-quo rejecting ends, Marques and his team look to future-proof the $3B brand by “failing fast and cheap.” They test and learn from local pilots before investing in national launches. They operate like a newsroom: Learning from how their audience reacts to content on social media to determine what works, what doesn’t, and what media investments they should be making.
They also take a phased and product-driven approach to marketing program development, allowing learnings to inform optimization along the way, as was the case for the brand’s much-lauded “McEnroe vs. McEnroe” initiative. “We had micro-failure moments throughout the project that would have killed it in a traditional approach, but didn’t because we remained agile and flexible throughout, adjusting, and calibrating when faced with challenges.”
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Uber
David Mogensen
Position: VP Marketing
Company: Uber
Because he sees constraints as creative opportunities, and because his approach to ensuring every dollar drives a return is rooted in thinking critically and moving quickly.
The tech industry moves quickly, of course, and marketing planning cycles are more typically measured in weeks than years. But when the quarterback for the NFL’s Chicago Bears tweeted about a less than ideal Uber Eats experience, and a number of other athletes joined in, Mogensen and his team saw an opportunity to turn a problem into an opportunity. They scrapped the campaign they’d been about to launch and immediately crafted a new call-and-response spot, where league superstar Odell Beckham addresses the QB’s complaint, reinforces the service’s reliability, and turns bad press into good.
Understanding that sometimes the tried and true can be applied to the relatively new and absolutely disruptive, Mogensen and his team brought the company’s measurement data in-house, implemented upfront buying, and consolidated the company’s list of agencies by 50%, allowing him to trim Uber’s media spend by tens of millions of dollars, allowing the company more flexibility and reach, all while improving the efficiency, quality, and impact of the work.
Prior to his current role, leading the brand’s global marketing team, he led its marketing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for two years; bringing with him a broad cultural perspective he hopes inspires and enhances his team’s approach as they look to expand their reach beyond the 70 countries Uber currently serves.
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Bose
Jim Mollica
Position: CMO
Company: Bose
Because without either the infrastructure or budget of many larger companies, thinking fast and acting nimbly are core to how he and his team are transforming the way consumers see sound—and Bose.
With sound at the core of everything Bose does, Mollica needed to figure out what would make the brand stand out and apart. “Our goal” he told Forbes “was to truly understand the role music plays in their lives, where they listen to music, and why.” From this ethnographic exploration, he and his team uncovered new ways of reaching their audience based on listening occasions, settings, and the environments and the moments where music is important.
To help modernize the 60-year-old brand, Mollica and his team have increased its presence in the spaces where music matters to his audience. In his words. “we’ve done a lot over the last year by connecting Bose closer to communities that share our passion for great content and sound.” Looking to partnerships as a core element of their marketing strategy, they’ve worked with top artists, athletes, and entertainment entities, notably with The Prince Experience, HBO’s megahit, House of Dragon. Additionally, he seized an opportunity for the brand to connect with influential tastemakers by launching the brand’s new earbuds during New York Fashion Week, a less than typical place for Bose to show up. The effort resulted in a mountain of media impressions, but more relevantly, led to Bose securing a top 20 Gen Z brand-affinity ranking for the first time.
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WWE
Catherine Newman
Position: EVP Marketing
Company: WWE
Because as a “fan-first” organization whose broadcast content alone is available in over 1 billion homes globally, Newman takes an entrepreneur’s “first day of work approach” to marketing and activation across the company’s diverse lines of business.
Not one to believe that yesterday’s success is any guarantee of tomorrow’s, since joining the company in June of 2022, the former Manchester United CMO has led WWE’s Data & Analytics team to build a 360-degree strategy and “meta-psychology” fan profile across different audience segments, providing deep and nuanced insight into its fans, and an enhanced understanding of the ‘why’ behind the fandom. These efforts have “fundamentally changed” how WWE does what it does, informing decisions across all parts of the brand and business mix, leading to more efficient and effective fan targeting, and expanding its reach and revenues.
As its name suggests, World Wrestling Entertainment is a brand, product and business transcending cultures and reaching audiences internationally, which requires finding the balance between fan commonalities, distinctions and nuances, around the world. Fueled by the deeper understanding of the fan “why,” Newman and WWE have created new moments and content to bring their fans closer to the stars at the heart of the fandom.
Marketing and programming are inextricably linked for enterprises like WWE, and launching activations like the UNDERTAKER 1 deadMAN SHOW, where the Hall of Fame wrestler, known for his silence, took fans behind the scenes of some of the most iconic moments & stories from his career…undeniably serve as both.
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ServiceNow
Michael Park
Position: CMO
Company: ServiceNow
Because Park is out to do nothing less than “change the fundamentals of Marketing,” from an antiquated B2B model to what he’s coined as B2P2: Business to People and Purpose.
For him and his team at ServiceNow, “purpose” isn’t a buzzword, it’s a strategic focus and fulcrum that’s reframing the company’s concept of marketing at a time when the aperture of the business is expanding—as the nature of work has and does—from the historic confines of the workplace to the world at large.
Park sees macroeconomic volatility and changes to the current and future state of work not as things to which he must adapt to, but instead as a springboard for what comes next, providing “almost unlimited opportunities to redraw the parameters we set our growth targets against.”
In the past 12 months, he’s built a robust data strategy in order to iterate, personalize, and optimize efforts in real time, as well as launched a new company rallying cry to communicate their transformation.
Park never loses sight of the need to build a “culture of change management,” and has worked to simplify his marketing organization’s structure, so as to elevate the importance of—and empower—faster decision making. Hallmarks of an entrepreneurial approach.
(Disclosure: One of the editors working on this list owns stock in ServiceNow.)
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Claire’s
Kristin Patrick
Position: CMO
Company: Claire’s
Because she’s transformed a 50-year-old brand that had been relying on physical retail to stay relevant with a digitally native consumer, and has turned it into a fully integrated fashion brand once again finding its way to “cool.”
When Patrick joined the company two years ago, it was still best known for its early-aughts heyday and reliance on store signage and physical foot traffic from mall goers. She has since steered it into its “phygital” age; driving the brand’s evolution, image creation and omni-channel integration to “springboard it into the 21st century.”
Patrick has brought structure and cohesion to the marketing organization as well as marketing’s role within the larger enterprise. Thinking and marketing beyond the mall, she and her team launched Claire’s first fully integrated, full-funnel brand platform; driven partnerships with the likes of Roblox, audience-relevant, brand elevating fashion experts, all while also creating an in-house content studio, and opening the retailer’s first Paris location.
By thinking differently she’s helped double Claire’s loyalty and engagement numbers, getting the attention of both her audience and the fashion world. Thinking like an entrepreneur finds her now in the process of launching new revenue-generating categories to leverage the brand’s strengthening equity.
“Our consumers want more from Claire’s and they want the brand involved in more places in their lives beyond accessories,” says Patrick. “This expansion will drive deeper lifestyle relevance, increase revenue, and create a whole new reason for the world to love this brand.”
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Diageo, North America
Ed Pilkington
Position: Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer
Company: Diageo, North America
Because he’s not afraid to take big swings and smart risks when it comes to identifying new growth opportunities. From diversified product offerings, partnerships, creative and talent, as CMO Pilkington has played an integral role in the acquisition of category leaders Aviation Gin and non-alcoholic spirit, 21 Seeds, and is currently leading the global expansion for recently acquired premium cold brew coffee liquor, Mr. Black.
He’s made Diageo the first spirits partner of NFL, which “gives our big brands a scale platform,” and became one of the Super Bowl’s first spirits advertisers with a full-fledged campaign resulting in increased in-store real estate and market share for its Crown Royal brand. He and his team have begun experimenting with opportunities to bring its portfolio of brands into the metaverse, and have also introduced new product-led innovations including a Rose tequila anticipated to be a large contributor to the company’s P&L, amidst an even larger effort to increase visibility and demand with luxury spirits connoisseurs.
Pilkington says his biggest priority is “to actively manage our portfolio so that it is set up for the future, and to make sure that (within that portfolio) we have progressive, bold and ‘in culture’ plans on our brands that take us from a 7% share of all Beverage alcohol to 10% and beyond.”
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Eshan Ponnadurai
Position: Global Head of Marketing, WhatsApp
Company: Meta
Because he’s preternaturally disposed to taking big swings and strategic risks, both tenets of an entrepreneurial CMO.
His work around the globe as Head of YouTube Music, Head of Brand for Google in APAC, and Marketing Director for Uber, has been a crash-course in cultural commonalities and nuances, and taught Ponnadurai to listen first and build after.
Because as the data-privacy conversation accelerates in the U.S., Ponnadurai and his team have architected the first US brand campaign for WhatsApp (acquired by Facebook in 2014), which while used by something near 25% of the global populace finds its usage in the American market relatively undeveloped and a significant growth opportunity.
In leading the brand’s first US campaign, Ponnadurai and his team needed to challenge both the status-quo and entrenched SMS competition, as well as the relative lack of insight and understanding about data-privacy, in the market. Using humor and metaphor to teach Americans that what they think is private, their SMS messaging, isn’t actually, the brand’s “Delivering Doubt” campaign, done with BBDO, sought to humanize the benefits of the platform’s end-to-end encryption service and private messaging.
In leading a conversation on protection and privacy, Ponnadurai and his team have avoided the mistakes of 2022 crypto-creative, of which the Super Bowl was a principal platform, which valued driving top-of-the-funnel awareness over driving understanding and mitigating the category’s perceived risks; further proof that Ponnadurai markets by listening, looking, and then acting.
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sweetgreen
Nathaniel Ru
Position: Co-founder and Chief Brand Officer
Company: sweetgreen
Because fifteen years after co-founding the company, Ru remains relentlessly curious and hungry for new ways to grow the business and deliver on its mission to connect food and culture to communities in a healthy way.
He and his team combined the traditional drive-through pickup experience with the modernization and convenience of mobile ordering to open its first-ever sweetlane location in Chicago. Since its opening, 65% of transactions have been through its pickup window, a strong sign that there’s an appetite for the format. He’s also launched campaigns and partnerships with health experts and notable athletes to promote the connection between food and fitness and is investing in the brand’s digital experience following learnings revealing 66% of their Q1 22 total revenue came from online channels.
Ru says the mantra of his marketing team is “building intimacy at scale.” “We are committed to learning how to do right by the people we work with and the customers we serve, before we open any restaurants.”
His biggest priority is continuing to tell the brand’s story in a way that resonates with suburban customers as the company expands, and leaning into a new consumer behavior shift that finds consumers more curious about food origins and their impact on the environment.
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Etsy
Ryan Scott
Position: CMO
Company: Etsy
Because the once 14-year-old entrepreneur sees every “bug” as an opportunity, and understands that in a rapidly changing market, flexibility and agility are foundational for the entrepreneurial CMO.
Always ready to pivot strategies and programs in response to changes in the market, customer needs, or competition. Scott is responsible for a global marketing team that includes brand, performance, advertising, communications and engagement channels, market search, and international growth initiatives, for this evolving e-commerce brand and business. With 5.3 million sellers who rely on the platform to reach new customers, and hundreds of millions of buyers, Scott never loses sight of the two-sided market he and the business serve.
As CMO, he operates with a wholly collaborative mindset, certain that “when everyone is informed, involved, and feels ownership from the beginning, it allows for quick decision-making about how investments should grow as programs scale.” He and his team are pushing to increasingly create personalized, multichannel communications, and investing in new channels to deliver their messaging. On the back of tis new strategy, Etsy has seen double-digit growth in awareness metrics in the U.S., and U.K., and nearly 100% in Germany.
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Melissa Selcher
Position: Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Company: LinkedIn
Because her tenure as LinkedIn’s marketing and comms chief has been what she says is a “masterclass in adaptive leadership – we’ve written new playbooks while operating, we’ve pivoted and re-pivoted… (but) what anchors us in all of this change is the consistency and clarity of our vision – creating economic opportunity.”
Selcher looks to Reid Hoffman, one of LinkedIn’s founders, to define the framework of her entrepreneurial approach. In this, there are three critical elements: 1) courage and optimism; 2) ingenuity; 3) agility. And that “within those three, he highlighted: a bias to action; a comfort with chaos; a capacity for quick decisions; grit; optimism; a steady supply of plan Bs.”
A steady supply of Plan Bs has served Selcher, her mandate, teams, and the company well, as they’ve reacted to a total disruption to the working world’s status quo, and what that means for the platform and its global community of users.
“A few years ago,” Selcher told Forbes, “no one talked about work, we just worked.” To adapt to this sea-change, one caused not only by the Pandemic but the evolving expectations of a new generation, she and the LI team have, among countless other initiatives, tapped TikTok’s Gen Z audience to create content helping navigate quiet quitting, preparing for an interview, and saying “no” to their boss. And from helping B2B buyers and sellers “move past B2C constructs that don’t serve them well,” Selcher leads efforts to remove the historic workplace stigmas associated with everything from time away to Black hair. As one of the world’s authorities on work and working, they’ve doubled down on helping people, companies and, in fact, countries better understand what is happening, what might, all while helping them find optimism on the path in front of them.
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Converse
Sejal Shah Miller
Position: CMO
Company: Converse
Because she approaches marketing with a firm conviction that it’s not a marketer’s job to tell people what to think nor how to act, but instead to listen to and understand them intimately, so that the brand’s narratives and stories connect and help them feel “seen.”
Because leading a brand long rooted in the ever-shifting sands of youth culture and in one of the most competitive of categories means operating with a belief, as she told Forbes, “that where consumers lead, brands should follow. We seek to engage in new places and spaces that motivate and inspire them.”
To these ends, Shah Miller and her team spearheaded the launch of the brand’s first “nearly 100% digital” integrated multi-platform campaign, which generated over 1.6 billion impressions, earning media coverage from over 200 global outlets, and scoring an immediate top-of-mind brand awareness lift. She and her team ensure Converse stays culturally relevant and connected by never losing sight of who and what the brand is and has always been, even as they express it differently for today. Brand partnerships that build on Converse’s equity in music with the likes of Tyler the Creator, where the two collaborated on a “democratized sneaker drop,” are a part of her cultural strategy.
Her biggest priority is ensuring lasting relevance for the brand, and deepening customers’ emotional connection to it. “Our collective responsibility” she says, “is to leverage that connection and our brand’s scale to serve as a platform and champion of youth creativity well after the utility of our shoe has ended.”
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PayPal
Leanne Sheraton
Position: CMO
Company: PayPal
Because Sheraton is integrating PayPal’s capabilities, assets, and partners in new ways, in order to give people more reasons and options to use PayPal every day.
Because she’s building and supporting what she calls a “value creating ecosystem of partners, creators, merchants, and team members” to better solve problems for and champion the company’s global network of constituencies. With responsibility for the global brand portfolio, which includes Venmo, Xoom and Braintree among others, Sheraton and her marketing organization are focused on helping customers make and do more in times of economic uncertainty, grow and protect their businesses, with a do well-by-doing-good strategic approach.
For Sheraton, “community” doesn’t just define the audiences the company markets to but is an essential part of the marketing machine she’s built, allowing them to stretch resources while also driving trust, authenticity, and deeper engagement with those they serve. “Our creative” she told Forbes, “is produced by our loyal customers and advocates, which has enabled us to produce and publish tons of highly engaging and impactful content.” Tapping communities as creators and active participants in shaping brand narratives and content, has also quickly found Venmo, as example, among the top 1% of the fastest growing branded accounts on TikTok. Partnerships from those with the likes of Amazon, Uber, CVS, and Starbucks, also play a vital role in serving as a champion for their communities, adding value—and sometimes money—to their customer’s everyday lives.
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US SKI & SNOWBOARD TEAM
Guy Slattery
Position: CMO
Company: US SKI & SNOWBOARD TEAM
Because Slattery has brought an entrepreneurial marketing approach and mindset to the often staid and traditional world of Olympic sports marketing.
Formerly CMO and President of Television at VICE Media Group, Slattery knows today’s marketing campaigns “need to disrupt audience expectations in order have high impact.” To these ends, he’s brought a combination of creativity, risk-taking, and strategic thinking to USS&S marketing, connecting the sports and teams to culture in innovative ways, and connecting the federation’s sports and its brand on a global scale.
Recognizing the need to use their platform to elevate awareness of climate realities impacting the sport (and world) in real-time, he worked with partners to create custom climate-change-themed speed suits worn by all U.S. athletes at the World Championships. The activation generated global press coverage that brought the brand, issue, and athletes to wider audiences.
He and his team also partnered with Kappa, known best for warmer weather sports, to become its official team apparel partner. The deal was the largest sponsorship in the organization’s history and marked the first time a single partner created uniforms for the entire national team. Notably, it confirmed Slattery and his team’s instincts and brought the brand and sport into broader lifestyle spaces and context. Following suit, the Federation bifurcated their media rights for the first time ever, splitting them between a linear broadcaster and a digital OTT partner, resulting in a doubling of revenue and an increased number of broadcast hours for the U.S. World Cup.
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Merrell
Janice Tennant
Position: CMO
Company: Merrell
Because she encourages her marketing organization and allows herself to “step into fear,” with a growth mindset and operating model built on innovation, testing, and learning. And because she’s building a new marketing organization structure to facilitate this and ensure the brand always understands the spoken and unspoken needs and desires of its growing audience.
Tennant is strategically focused on driving change as means of driving growth and has expanded the outdoor footwear brand’s reach to include more diverse and inclusive audiences; ones historically over-looked by the category’s status-quo. As a result of this strategic shift and inclusive embrace, and according to Outdoor Magazine, Merrell is on a path to doubling its online sales within one year. And while environmental activism is something of a category pre-requisite, Tennant and her team have gone beyond this, fostering a broader social accountability and orientation. They’re championing diversity and social justice for the brand and the outdoor industry overall, with a keen focus on women’s health initiatives, spearheading a “100% female-led” campaign, and mocking “self-care” rituals in order to promote “the healing power of the great outdoors” a category-leadership approach that is serving her brand and business well.
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Logitech
Najoh Tita-Reid
Position: Global CMO
Company: Logitech
Because in her words, she’s spent as much time unlearning things as she has learning things, to keep Logitech and their marketing efforts on the cutting edge.
As a result, the CMO of the Swiss American multi-national company set out to build a marketing leadership team reflecting the different perspectives and experiences of a diverse group across gender, race, region, sexual orientation, and neurodiversity, all to ensure a diversity of thought. Tita-Reid understands that a truly entrepreneurial CMO accepts and learns from failure, hence the diversity of the team she’s built creates the permission and psychological safety to try and try again, an added benefit: She’s created an environment where younger marketers can “see themselves” at work, which positively reflects their sense of self and their work performance.
To expand perceptions of the brand and company beyond its current B2B niche to include the B2C category and shake its reputation as a (literal) “peripheral,” she and her team have ambitiously embarked on creating an iconic brand essential suite of products. This has led to recent partnerships with Lizzo and League of Legends, fashion show collaborations, and the creation of Logi Play, a multi-day experiential activation expressing the many facets of the company, and strategically inserting the brand into culture to drive relevancy and revenues.
Making marketing a core competency of a company where it’s not traditionally been one continues to be Tita-Reid’s priority, and she is committed to doing this by “taking our values to drive commerce…not the other way around.”
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Hilton
Mark Weinstein
Position: CMO
Company: Hilton
Because integrating a marketing organization that had been divided amongst 10 hotel sub-brands, found Weinstein building for tomorrow by being able to show performance and results today.
On an intrapreneurial mission to create a world-class marketing organization and world-class work, Weinstein spent the first year of his CMO tenure establishing a single, clear brand purpose across the breadth of Hilton’s portfolio of brands. And, among other efforts, he and his now integrated team have enhanced the brand’s digital and marketing analytics capabilities, focused on deepening connections with guests and loyalty program members, and by building a more agile marketing eco-system and tech-stack. As consequence, Weinstein and his team have driven a 6x membership increase in Hilton Honors, resulting in a nearly 50% increase in occupancy rates by same.
He’s working to reinforce the Hotelier’s core audiences while expanding the brand’s relevance and reach to new ones. Programming and partnerships from F1 to TikTok, YouTube to the Grammy’s and NASA’s space-station Voyager program, have kept the brand in the cultural zeitgeist in a way it has not been historically.
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Walmart
William White
Position: CMO
Company: Walmart
Because despite leading marketing for the world’s largest retailer, White’s entrepreneurial approach considers every day as a new chance to bring change.
This perspective doesn’t just express itself in the work White’s team puts into the world, but in how he’s building an internal test-and-learn culture, which includes actively encouraging his team to take educated risks and empowering them to seize opportunities to make the customer experience better.
White and his marketing team are broadening perceptions of what Walmart is, does, and sells by, and among other things, adding emotional depth and dimension to the brand’s decades-long equity in every-day-low-pricing.
In the last year, these educated risks have shown up in a focus on driving marketing innovation across new and emerging platforms, from social commerce to community engagement. Driving brand salience with Gen Z found Walmart engaging the audience on Roblox—where 17-24-year-olds represent the fastest growing demo—with Walmart Land, “a first-of-its-kind, programmable, continually evolving experience, changing the way young adults experienced the brand.”
To meet people where they are and when they want to shop, White and his team have built a rich social commerce strategy; from driving direct-sales on Roku, to launching Walmart Creator, a platform for influencers to share recommendations and make money doing it. Beyond this, his approach to creating a new and better status-quo includes focusing on driving accountability for inclusive marketing, throughout the entire marketing supply chain in order to build resilient communities, create real change, all while driving brand love and business growth.
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Gold House
Rose Yan
Position: Head of Marketing
Company: Gold House
Because she’s quickly building a culture and community-defining brand, that is both driving cultural change and becoming all but synonymous with the Asian Pacific Islander community at its core.
Because she has built commercial viability into a cultural imperative, as a matter of strategy, and has seen critical acclaim and social impact as a result. In many ways, Yan and her Gold House team are quite literally reimagining what impact looks like. She’s building this non-profit brand and business by borrowing equity from strategic partners and building equities and IP like the brand’s annual A100 list, honoring influentials from across the API community, the Gold List honoring excellence in film, and by leveraging relationships built through the multi-faceted company’s ventures, consulting, and advocacy initiatives. In short order, Yan and her team have made Gold House one of the most influential organizations for the advancement of the API community.
For Yan, the biggest strategic priority in front of her and Gold House is in continuing “to build bridges across oceans and cultures, turning Gold House into a household name with continued outsized impact both in the United States, and in other multicultural communities abroad.”
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Hyundai Motors America
Angela Zepeda
Position: CMO
Company: Hyundai Motors America
Because Zepeda markets Hyundai, historically a sales and engineering-led company, with a challenger brand mindset, and a strategic approach to demand generation that finds what she calls a “delicate balance between making an emotional connection with consumers and selling our sheet metal.”
Since joining the company three and a half years ago, the former agency veteran has not only accelerated brand share gains, but she and her team have also disrupted the automotive industry in the process. Taking a “fewer, bigger, best” approach, under Zepeda’s leadership, the company has disrupted much of the industry’s status-quo where, when, and how approach to building brand and driving demand.
She and her team launched the first-in-market automotive showroom on Amazon, eschewing the traditional you-come-to-us model, and letting buyers buy and explore cars consistent with how and where they do must everything else. Initially implemented as a solution during the pandemic, it has since brought the changing but historically slow-to-adapt automotive industry into the digital age and introduced Hyundai to new audiences.
Zepeda’s reduced media spend for Sunday Night Football, a long-time automotive touchstone, reallocating these resources into digital and social investments, including TikTok and influencer programs, and work with Disney and Annie Leibovitz. She and her team have also been intentional about partnering with minority-owned multicultural agencies to produce in-market campaigns for the Hispanic and African American markets, delivering brand lift numbers above those for the general market, and introducing the brand to a younger, more tech-savvy audience.
Her entrepreneurial thinking has served Zepeda and the brand and business she helps steward well. It’s helping attract newer, younger, and savvier customers to the marque, moving and shaping the brand for the future.
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