“How can we say YES to the that bold, brave idea? Rather than why it’s not going to work and why it can’t be approved, what if we ask ourselves what it would take, what would need to happen for us to say YES. Finding more reasons to sign up than to opt out of great creativity.” #Cannes2024

DAY ONE

Cannes Lions Day 1 summarised in the spirit of Brutal Simplicity of Thought. Robert Grace and I sharing highlights in a format of One Word, One Quote, One Piece of Work.

One word:

YES

Global McDonald’s CMO inspired with a challenge to look at brave work and consider how one says YES – what would it take, what would need to change – vs just saying NO. A spirit of optimism and excitement around bold creativity featured prominently in many CMO talks on the day.

One quote:

“I’m a technology optimist.” ~ HRH Princess Beatrice

Excited to see how the industry (and even royalty) is leaning into AI, moving away from a conversation of fear and uncertainty last year to new ways of embracing AI to unlock creative excellence, agility, new opportunities.

One piece:

Loved the Dinner after Dinner McDonald’s campaign in Dubai that rewarded still-hungry fine dining patrons with a free burger in exchange for their expensive restaurant bill. One can imagine the many logistical NOs vs the YES for a campaign that delivers off a real truth!

~ Jacques Burger

DAY TWO

Day 2 of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity saw an inspiring line-up of speakers and the wealth of smarts shared could probably inspire multiple posts and articles, so Robert Grace it will be interesting to see how you summarize it – it’s a hard one, but in a good way!

One word:

Truth

Plenty of conversations around getting to the bottom of effective work and what we think is working, but actually isn’t. Sobering statistics shared by Jon Evans and team from System1 quantified the staggering cost of dull advertising and highlighted just how much bad work is out there, but with inspiring tips on how to make sure one avoids it – more to follow on this!

One quote:

“55% of people can’t think of a single brand they feel connected with or that understands them”

Sobering research across 2000 UK consumers motivates for more authentic and entertaining storytelling, such as the beautiful, simple moments shown in a lot of the P&G work Marc Pritchard shared.

One piece of work:

I have to share two. A campaign for Magnum, where they shared coordinates of places where you could find some sun in winter to enjoy a Magnum – a beautiful truth around how people associate ice cream with sun and summer as a consumption moment – and how to use this to inspire different behaviour. Then a campaign for Heinz, again tapping into a simple truth, beautifully executed.

hashtag#CannesLions2024

M&C Saatchi Group South Africa

DAY THREE

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity day 3 highlights shared together with Robert Grace in a format that is hopefully quick and easy to digest.

One word:

Play

It’s exciting to see the many inspiring and frankly mindblowing applications of AI at Cannes – from data and analytics to creativity and everything inbetween. One idea I came across at the Festival is an app in Canada (The Inflation Cookbook) that tracks inflation on grocery prices in real time and advises on best prices per item in the moment as you shop, then building recipe suggestions instantly using these products as you build your basket. Where Cannes 2023 dealt with AI as a theme, this year it’s very much about playing with and exploring application.

One quote:

“We have to unpack it, break it into different pieces first, before we put it back together”

In conversation with the very brilliant Karen Nelson-Field PhD from Amplified Intelligence, she briefly shares a view on AI in reference to a journey on effectiveness and it strikes me as so true and important. We have to play with AI, start using it, even if it doesn’t fully make sense yet, in order for it to make sense, in order for it to become valuable and start to present as a powerful solution in our world.

One piece:

Disclaimer: it’s not an ad. It’s a photo from a Google presentation highlighting features from their AI tool Google Gemini showing a user drawing of a stickman dreaming about another stickman dreaming about another. The AI bot is then asked to think about a movie this image references and it comes up with the answer: Inception.

What to do with this and how it can be useful in the development of our next ad campaign? I have no idea! But it’s mindblowing and makes me want to go and play!

hashtag#CannesLions2024

M&C Saatchi Group South Africa

DAY FOUR

Day 4 of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity delivered some of the best talks of the week and I’m sure Robert Grace will agree. Some talks provided enough brilliant content for an entire presentation, nevermind a post, so this is going to be a tough one!

One word:

Dig

Getting to a deeper level, understanding what lies beneath the surface, is key to unlocking powerful communication tactics. I loved the talk by Microsoft Chief Brand Officer Kathleen Hall, making the most sense of AI for me at the event so far. How she framed a benefit of search enhancement to productivity enhancement, perfectly articulated a benefit lead approach to AI in a way that was easy to understand and interpret – for the first time this week, like her family she referenced in her talk, I felt included, understood and excited about AI!

Carla Zakhem-Hassan from JPMorganChase managed to ground the idea of Brand Purpose in a similar way by talking to how what can be a lofty statement, is grounded in communication and action through initiatives such as 2nd chances – a genius initiative to help individuals clear a minor criminal record in order to access credit – giving substance and gravitas to the JPM purpose of making people’s dreams come true.

One quote:

Be in it – James Patterson

Genius storyteller and commercial mastermind JP shared this insight as the key to powerful storytelling – if you can’t feel it yourself, if you’re not there in the moment feeling the emotion, neither will the audience. A simple, but powerful filter for how we judge work and ideas.

One idea:

The Kraft Heinz story deserves special recognition and possibly its own presentation. In fact, I might do a seperate talk or post just on the talk done by chief growth officer Diana Frost. What is incredible is the clarity of thinking that has moved them from a lost organization trapped in conventional FMCG communication less than 4 years ago, to a leading brand and creative company with exceptional commercial success today. What I loved is orientation around not reinventing oneself, but rather understanding oneself. Unlocking a truth around a consumer (and internal) love for the product that borders on the obsessive and irrational has unlocked endless campaigns of brave and exciting work, delivering massive commercial success.

M&C Saatchi Group South Africa

hashtag#CannesLions2024

DAY 5

CMOs are among the most dynamic and influential leaders in the C-suite—and for good reason. Their roles are complex, constantly evolving, and often dizzying. Especially in times of uncertainty.

To thrive as a chief marketing officer requires grit, boldness, creativity, resilience, and the ability to navigate chaos with confidence. The choices they make every day have the power to redefine brands and drive business transformation. It’s a high-stakes role with equally high rewards.

Now in its third year, the Marketing Vanguard Awards honor the CMOs making the greatest impact—those driving their companies forward and proving themselves indispensable to their CEOs, peers, teams, boards, and the broader business.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

CMOs have a tough job.

They have to show business results by capitalizing on trends and reaching new audiences like Gen Z, while harnessing data and emerging tech like generative AI responsibly. And they have to do it all while navigating an increasingly polarized political landscape.

Business Insider’s annual list of the “Most Innovative CMOs,” in its 10th year, spotlights the top marketers rising to these challenges. This year’s 25 CMOs came from 117 nominations from their peers and other industry insiders.

The CMOs represent big brands like Walmart and the NFL, challengers like Milani Cosmetics, and tech companies like Lenovo.

There’s Klarna’s David Sandström, who bucked controversy and doubled down on using AI to improve efficiency, cutting costs by $10 million a year. Then there’s Jennie Platt of TD, who leaned into DEI-themed messaging to rebuild the bank’s reputation while some other companies backed away, helping increase the bank’s awareness by 20%.

Here are Business Insider’s 2025 “Most Innovative CMOs,” listed in alphabetical order by last name.

Brad Audet, Mazda’s chief marketing officer for North American operations

Mazda

In September, Audet led the relaunch of Mazda’s brand platform, which carries the tagline “Move and Be Moved.”

The new platform anchors Mazda’s marketing around the role the brand plays in people’s lives. One example of the brand platform in action included the release of the “First to the Finish” Amazon Prime Original series, which spotlights women in motorsports. Season 2 is in production, and Mazda said the show is already converting interest into sales.

Last year, Mazda forged a partnership with Tribeca Film Festival to champion up-and-coming filmmakers, building a festival within the festival to showcase seven shortlisted but overlooked films. Keeping with the movie theme, Mazda ran a TV ad during the Oscars that showed everyday people giving thanks to important people in their lives. Mazda said the campaign led to the highest spike in new website visits it had recorded all year.

Mazda ran research studies that found the overall brand platform relaunch has led to a 15% increase in brand consideration, a 20% lift in purchase intent, and a rise in consumer perception that Mazda “was the brand for them.”

Priscilla Barolo, Neat’s VP of marketing

Neat

Barolo joined Norway-based Neat, which makes software and devices for videoconferencing, in 2023 to reposition the company as many employers call staff back to the office. Since then, she’s doubled Neat’s marketing and business development team head count. Under her leadership, marketing contributed to over 40% growth in sales from October to December 2024.

Barolo, a 10-year Zoom veteran, did it in part by launching sponsorships with the Formula 1 Oracle Red Bull Racing team and the Los Angeles Clippers. These went beyond the usual partnerships and were geared toward the relationship-building essential for enterprise sales. In addition to having its logo displayed on race cars and in the Clippers’ home arena, Neat had its products used by both teams’ staffs and in their hospitality suites so that Neat could invite prospects to sporting events.

Taking a page from how companies build relationships with influencers, Barolo also spearheaded a customer advisory board initiative, where Neat’s largest customers gather once a quarter to share insights and review Neat’s road map. The initiative is already starting to bear fruit: Neat plans to release its first product later this year created in partnership with the advisory board.

Leslie Berland, Verizon’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president

Verizon

Berland joined Verizon in January 2024 and six months later spearheaded the company’s first brand refresh in almost a decade. She worked on a plan to embed a message among consumers that Verizon powers their lives.

The work included the introduction of the Verizon Access loyalty program, tying Verizon more closely to entertainment by offering members access to live events like the Super Bowl and Live Nation festivals.

Connecting brands to culture is Berland’s specialty. After seeing the rise of TikTok beauty creator Jools Lebron, Berland’s team moved quickly and in three days had tapped up the “very demure, very mindful” meme for a Verizon-sponsored video.

“I think if we had even lost a day, it would have been too late; there’s no room for committees and reviews upon reviews or hierarchy,” Berland said in an interview earlier this year.

Berland also forged a partnership between Verizon Home internet and Mattel to create the “Barbie Streamhouse” holiday attraction in New York City.

Berland flipped the switch on the Super Bowl this year, leaning more into local marketing efforts. Rather than buying a 30-second spot like many brands, Verizon instead delivered the Super Bowl FanFest watch parties at stadiums and other venues in 30 cities across the US, offering live music and celebrity meet-and-greets.

“Leslie relaunched our brand and that’s gone very well,” Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon’s consumer unit, said onstage last month at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference. “It’s given us more traction in social. We are getting picked up in social a lot more, and we are part of everyday life.”

Chris Brandt, Chipotle’s chief brand officer

Chipotle

Brandt’s marketing mantra is, “Ideas always win.” This fuels his mission to transform Chipotle into a lifestyle brand, shifting the restaurant chain into unexpected venues, from beauty to pop culture.

This past summer, Chipotle teamed up with Gen Z beauty favorite Wonderskin to create a “burrito-proof,” guacamole-inspired metallic green peel-off mask that revealed a nude-pink lip stain. It built on a popular TikTok trend and aimed to solve a key frustration: lipstick leaving smudges on food.

Not only did “Lipotle” sell out almost instantly, but it generated hundreds of headlines and videos created by social media users, earning 1.2 billion global press impressions.

Later in the year, Chipotle built on the social media trend of users creating their own Halloween costumes using the recognizable Spirit Halloween costume bag. Chipotle partnered with Spirit Halloween to turn the memes — like “Chipotle Fork” and “Chipotle Napkin” — into real Halloween outfits. The stunt earned more than 13 billion press impressions, boosted weekly sales, and drove signups to the Chipotle Rewards loyalty program.

Chipotle grew revenue by 14.6% and widened its profit margins last year. Digital sales now account for more than a third of total transactions, and the company’s return on ad spend has grown to more than 35%.

In 2025, Brandt aims to continue his culture-first marketing approach and help expand Chipotle’s footprint in physical locations and digital channels, while building more consumer love for the brand.

Phil Cook, WNBA’s chief marketing officer

WNBA

The WNBA had a transformative year in 2024, with attendance up nearly 50% and record-breaking viewership and merchandise sales. Cook, a Nike vet who became the league’s first CMO in 2020, has been helping build the brand around the W. Cook’s 2024 campaign, “Welcome to the W,” by longtime Nike agency Wieden+Kennedy, introduced the league to new fans with humorous spots that poked fun at rookies. He followed that up with “Viewer Discretion,” a series of vignettes to kick off the 2025 season that highlight the top stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese and their key attributes.

Cook has also worked to keep the WNBA, which is majority owned by the NBA, top of mind throughout the year and on social media. Players appear at cultural events beyond sports, like the Met Gala. At this year’s draft, athletes donned Coach and other high-fashion brands, turning heads on the orange carpet. All the while, Cook’s social team makes sure to capture it all: The league garnered nearly 2 billion views across platforms in its 2024 regular season, more than four times the year before.

Kristen D’Arcy, True Religion’s chief marketing officer

True Religion

D’Arcy became True Religion’s first chief marketing officer in 2023. She set about transforming the apparel company into a primarily digital brand. E-commerce now accounts for 50% of the company’s total revenue, up from 35% three years ago.

True Religion has increased its marketing budget from 3% to 10% of its total revenue since D’Arcy joined, a signal of confidence in her strategy. The company is forecasting sales of $450 million in 2025 — double that of 2021 — and has set its sights on hitting a $1 billion revenue target in the next three to five years.

D’Arcy has helped the brand stay true to its hip-hop and streetwear roots while introducing it to a new cohort of customers, marketing at the intersections of fashion, music, sports, and entertainment.

Her team launched the “Own Your True” brand platform and ad campaign during Super Bowl week this year, featuring the Brazilian pop star Anitta and an event in New Orleans cohosted by Sports Illustrated that was attended by 4,000 people.

“Own Your True” extended through Coachella with its “Buddhafest” activation, which contained a True-Religion-branded Ford Mustang. On-site sales at Buddhafest this year were 65% up on the previous festival. True Religion also created custom looks for Megan Thee Stallion and her dancers for their headline show, and partnered with her tequila brand, Chicas Divertidas, to give out samples to festivalgoers.

In November, D’Arcy revamped True Religion’s loyalty program, boosting it with in-person experiences and other rewards designed to feel less automated than the previous version. True Religion is targeting 40% annual growth in its membership numbers this year.

Esi Eggleston Bracey, Unilever’s chief growth and marketing officer

Unilever

The consumer packaged goods industry has been navigating uncertainty in recent months amid global trade wars that impact multiple supply chains. Unilever said in April that it’s considering price increases, which will mean the company will be looking to Eggleston Bracey to have built a strong foundation for the strength of its brands to ensure that consumers don’t choose cheaper options.

Despite the chaos, Unilever started the year well, reporting underlying sales growth of 3%, which the company attributed to the strong investment in its brands and the quality of its product innovation.

Eggleston Bracey took Unilever’s Dove and Hellmann’s brands to the Super Bowl this year with two memorable spots. The “It Hits the Spot” ad for Hellmann’s featured Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan humorously recreating their classic deli scene from “When Harry Met Sally.” Dove had a social media-first campaign that sparked a conversation about how girls are spoken to ahead of its “#KeepHerConfident” game-day ad.

Eggleston Bracey led a 4% increase in Unilever’s social media spending last year, and a further 4% increase is planned for 2025. She’s also been investing in new data analytics and other tools that better enable the marketing team to optimize campaigns for the best performance.

AI has been another key focus for Eggleston Bracey. Unilever has been integrating AI tech like Nvidia Omniverse to cut down the time it takes to do product shoots, resulting in 55% cost savings and a 65% faster turnaround time for its beauty and well-being brands. What’s more, early results show these images hold people’s attention for three times longer than the previous assets, Unilever said.

Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer

Business Insider

The NFL is bigger than ever, and its reputation has gone up as Ellis has pushed a message emphasizing its humanity and connection to culture. The league has been working to broaden its audience, an effort that accelerated last year when Taylor Swift became its newest fan, bringing women and young viewers into the fold. The NFL quickly seized the moment, promoting her on its social channels and working with brands to promote product tie-ins. Ellis continued to press the inclusion message with 2025’s Super Bowl ad, “I Am Somebody,” which placed fifth in USA Today’s Ad Meter for 2025.

Under Ellis’ leadership, NFL viewership continues to dominate the media landscape, with 72 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2024. The league also claims its most diverse fan base ever, with growth driven by kids, women, and the Latino community. As of 2024, the NFL ranks as the No. 1 sports league in the US for brand sentiment, per YouGov’s Brand Index.

Ellis joined the NFL in 2018 from Activision Blizzard. Earlier, he worked at Volvo and Volkswagen, where he created “The Force,” which Time called “the ad that changed the Super Bowl forever.”

George Felix, Chili’s chief marketing officer

Chili’s

Casual dining chain Chili’s is having a moment, and there was an unlikely trigger: inflation.

As dining out at fast-food restaurants became more expensive in recent months, Chili’s began promoting the value of fare like its “3 for Me” meal deal — and the fact you get served at a table, with cutlery — in direct contrast to that of McDonald’s. The “Chili’s Better Than Fast Food” campaign is continuing this year.

For a brand that recently marked its 50th anniversary, Felix has helped Chili’s stay fresh and modern on social media, particularly TikTok, where consumers often take to vent about the rising cost of food. Videos where creators show off their best “cheese pulls” while eating Chili’s fried mozzarella have garnered more than 200 million views.

The brand has also tapped into nostalgia in its marketing. This year, it opened its first restaurant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is themed on “The Office.” It enlisted stars from the sitcom to feature in a campaign for the Scranton Branch’s opening, notching up more than 9 million impressions.

Elsewhere, it partnered with Lifetime Television to create a 15-minute rom-com film starring Maria Menounos and Taye Diggs to celebrate National Margarita Day in February. The same month, it created a country music track and video, “Ride the Dente,” to court NASCAR fans. And it created its own online version of the ’80s arcade game “BurgerTime,” where players competed to win a lifetime of burgers.

The efforts have resulted in a big comeback from the brand, driving visits to Chili’s restaurants. Parent company Brinker said in April that top-line sales growth was up 31.6% year over year in its fiscal third quarter, with traffic up 20.9%, all amid a turbulent period for the wider restaurant industry.

Carla Hassan, JPMorganChase’s global chief marketing officer

JPMorganChase

Brands are increasingly bringing their marketing operations in-house, which can be hard to do well even for small and mid-sized companies. One of Hassan’s biggest moves has been to bring JPMorganChase’s media work in-house. That’s no small feat for one of the world’s largest marketing organizations. 70% of the bank’s paid media is now handled internally, which has reduced costs and helped the company move faster while meeting its standards for brand safety.

Hassan has also made Chase’s marketing more efficient, reducing its message delivery time by almost 50% and using generative AI tools to cut the content briefing process time by 70%.

Hassan, who is in her fourth year in the role, spearheaded a new global slogan, “Make dreams possible for everyone, everywhere, every day.” It was underpinned by a new ad campaign, “Make Happen,” that showed how Chase is enabling people in underserved communities in cities from Detroit to Paris to bring about positive economic change.

Hassan has also introduced a series of educational sessions called “Marketing Mixes,” where marketers learn about topics like revenue generation, and created the role of CMO for employee experience to improve internal communication and culture-building.

Laura Jones, Instacart’s chief marketing officer

Instacart

Jones has had a busy year helping Instacart stay in the conversation by leveraging big media partnerships and iconic brands, and it shows: Instacart’s awareness has increased over 140% and its consideration by 66% under her leadership. Jones’ team worked with The New York Times to make its popular recipes shoppable and launched NBCUniversal’s “virtual concessions” feature that encouraged TV viewers to order snacks from their TV screens while watching the Summer Olympics.

She also led Instacart’s first Olympics ad buy. Based on its success, Instacart aired its first Super Bowl ad in a popular spot that starred mascots from 11 brands like Mr. Clean and the Jolly Green Giant. (That let Instacart save on actors’ fees but still required getting permission from all those brands.) New user traffic to Instacart soared 72% after the ad aired, and it was one of the company’s biggest press drivers in its history. It just followed that up with a new ad that nods to 90s nostalgia by featuring brands like Capri Sun and Bagel Bites.

Jones also carried out more than 70 co-marketing campaigns with grocery companies, including Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo, contributing a key source of ad revenue for the company in 2024.

At a politically polarized time, Jones has emphasized Instacart’s mission of providing food to all. When wildfires devastated Los Angeles, she helped Instacart deliver 45,000 items to help those affected by the fires and create a school donation program, Classroom Carts.

Emily Ketchen, Lenovo’s SVP and chief marketing officer of Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets

Lenovo

Artificial intelligence features are coming to personal computers, and Ketchen helped Lenovo beat its sales expectations in the nascent category with the launch of its first AI PCs. Ketchen took a multipronged approach to the rollout, helping Lenovo capture 20% of the global market.

She spearheaded “AI for You,” a campaign that promoted Lenovo’s PCs as a natural extension of people’s lives rather than an unwelcome tech intrusion. She also leveraged industry events such as IFA, CES, and Mobile World Congress, and influencers to drive demand for AI PCs.

Ketchen also used partnerships with Formula 1 and FIFA to show the real-world value of its products — testing its AI PCs at the Chinese Grand Prix, for example. The company credits the F1 partnership with a 31% year-over-year increase in total media value, 88% year-over-year growth in digital and social engagement, and an increase in brand favorability among F1 fans.

Next, Lenovo plans to integrate its devices, IT services, and more at the FIFA World Cup in 2026 and the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027 to improve the fan experience and make data more accessible to fans and teams.

Jeremy Lowenstein, Milani Cosmetics’ chief marketing officer

Milani Cosmetics

To grow Milani Cosmetics, an independent brand in a category dominated by big, public companies, Lowenstein has had to adopt a challenger mindset.

To reinforce Milani’s positioning as prestige yet affordable, he tapped into the popularity of women’s sports, enlisting four top female athletes, including Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles and the WNBA’s Sabrina Ionescu. The “Face Set. Mind Set.” campaign helped boost sales of Milani’s Make it Last setting spray by nearly 20% in 2024, according to Nielsen, and got widespread media coverage.

Lowenstein followed that up with America’s Next Top Primer, a campaign inspired by the nostalgia for 2000s reality TV (also the era of Milani’s founding) that pitted primers against each other for the top title. Lowenstein drafted Molly Mitchell, a former writer of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” to write the script, then pulled together a diverse cast of entertainers, including Zainab Johnson and Ele Woods to play the “host,” “contestants,” and “judges.” The campaign generated more than 30 articles and helped make Milani one of the fastest-growing brands in face primers, per Nielsen.

Don McGuire, Qualcomm’s chief marketing officer

Qualcomm

McGuire has been instrumental in helping chip maker Qualcomm expand beyond its business-to-business roots into two distinct brands: the Dragonwing industrial-focused portfolio and Snapdragon, its consumer offering.

2024 was a big year for the Snapdragon brand, which launched its Snapdragon X series chips for the PC market. McGuire and the team helped boost awareness of Snapdragon through partnerships, principally its sponsorship of the Manchester United soccer team. It pulled out all the stops to promote its front-of-shirt sponsorship, with the launch achieving more than 3 billion brand exposures for Snapdragon. It also became the club’s first-ever back-of-shirt sponsor. More than 80% of Man U fans “deeply trust and love” the Snapdragon brand, while 91% see Snapdragon as a leader in smartphone processors, Qualcomm said.

McGuire also led Snapdragon’s sponsorship of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, announced last September. And he’s been instrumental in helping the Snapdragon Insiders program — which gives members access to competitions, giveaways, and events — grow to 18 million members.

Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s chief marketing officer

Tubi

Parlapiano’s unconventional approach to marketing has helped give Fox’s Tubi free streaming legitimacy — and put more established players to the test.

As paid TV streamers have hiked their prices, Tubi, free and with a massive library of movies and shows, has been having a moment, along with other free alternatives. Last year, it became the fastest-growing streamer in TV viewership, up 60% year on year, according to Nielsen.

Parlapiano has made sure people know what Tubi is, with a stunty approach to marketing, starting with a 2023 Super Bowl ad that made many people think that someone had sat on the remote. She turned viewers into promoters, with Stubios, a platform she spearheaded that uses fans to help select filmmakers, and a gifting program that surprises fans on social media with tokens of appreciation like popcorn makers. As Hollywood tries to figure out how to compete with YouTube, she’s also been a champion of social-born creators, getting influencer Noah Beck cast in the young-adult movie “Sidelined: The QB and Me.” The film ranks as Tubi’s most-watched original.

When Tubi simulcast the Super Bowl LIX alongside Fox this year, Parlapiano seized the moment to boost its awareness and credibility. This time, with a less stunty (but still memorable) campaign, Tubi ran an ad to promote its library and new licensed offerings like “Dune” and originals like “The Z Suite.” It also ran shoulder programming to bring in those who weren’t sports fans. Along with helping push the game to a new record of 127.7 million average viewers, Tubi signed up 8 million new registered viewers to its own platform. And after the game, people were more likely to have heard of Tubi when asked to identify it among streamers, with a 36% lift in awareness with viewers ages 18 to 34, per new stats Tubi shared with Business Insider, citing YouGov.

Jennie Platt, TD Bank’s chief marketing officer

TD Bank

TD Bank needed a reputation fix after a money laundering scandal in 2024. Platt swung into action with a new marketing and communications blitz to show how TD was there for customers.

As much of corporate America backed away from DEI, TD leaned in, hitting on four areas: TD’s support of Black-owned and -led businesses; access to affordable housing; digital tools like the TD Accessibility Adapter, which lets customers customize their online experience; and welcoming of LGBTQ+ customers. Under Platt, who is active in TD’s efforts to support the LGBTQ+ community, the bank launched a Chosen First Name feature in 2024, which lets people choose a name other than their legal or given name on their accounts or cards. Overall, the strategy helped people become more aware of and likely to consider TD for their banking, with a 20% lift in awareness when people are prompted to identify it.

Platt also increased marketing-driven sales through a number of initiatives, including sending customers cash incentives, financial advice, and personalized communications. As a result, marketing-driven sales doubled from 2022 to 2024, and marketing’s contribution to sales roughly doubled, to about 19%, in the same time period.

John Rudaizky, EY’s global chief brand and marketing officer

EY

Rudaizky is applying the B2C approach to B2B marketing, harnessing techniques like creative campaigns, hero films, and marketing designed to make people actually feel something. Known as Ernst & Young until a rebrand in 2013, EY is one of the “big four” accounting firms and also offers other professional services like consulting. Recently, it launched EY Studio+, a new design, marketing, customer experience, and sales offering that specifically targets marketers.

Rudaizky was influential in the July launch of EY’s new global strategy, dubbed “All In” — the company’s equivalent of Nike’s “Just Do It” tagline. The plan is to position the company, which has doubled in size in the last decade to reach annual revenue of $50 billion, to find its next $50 billion opportunities in areas like transformation, managed services, and sustainability.

The new strategy was supported by three big campaigns.

EY’s brand refresh, “Shape the future with confidence,” was its biggest in more than a decade.

“Transformations” nodded to the global economic uncertainty in the market by tapping into real-world, high-stakes decision-making moments. The multi-pronged campaign reached 15 million people in airports, 5 million impressions on digital billboards, and 3 million viewers on digital and TV.

Lastly, “Generations,” a film that debuted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, used the voices of children from diverse backgrounds to urge business leaders to consider the lasting impact of their decisions. The company said the campaign drove a seven-point uplift in brand favorability among C-suite audiences and an 83% increase in its content being shared on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.

The company said the impact of all this work is that EY is recognized as one of the top 25 brands in the world, per Brand Finance, and the strongest brand in the UK.

David Sandström, Klarna’s chief marketing officer

Klarna

Klarna has sparked fervent industry conversations about how it’s using AI to make its marketing more efficient. Sandström has doubled down on integrating tools like Midjourney, Firefly, and DALL-E across its marketing operation. The technology has cut Klarna’s creative production costs by $10 million annually and its overall sales and marketing spend by 11%, the company said.

One of Sandström’s big achievements last year was creating Klarna’s AI shopping feed, an effort that spanned the company’s marketing, product, and engineering teams. He’s been vocal on industry podcasts and at events about Klarna’s flat structure and on topics like AI ethics.

Sandström enlisted Shaquille O’Neal for its most recent holiday campaign — renaming him “Shaquille O Deal” — as part of his efforts to differentiate the brand in the crowded US buy-now-pay-later market. Sandström has also played a pivotal role in inking partnerships with big platforms like Apple Pay, Uber, Walmart, Airbnb, and eBay — moves that aim to make Klarna more accessible.

Efforts like these helped Klarna grow to more than 100 million active users and 724,000 merchant partners, as of May this year.

Jennifer Storms, NBCUniversal Television & Streaming’s chief marketing officer

NBCUniversal’s Television & Streaming

Storms, who goes by Jenny, uses NBCUniversal’s sprawling TV and streaming assets to get NBCUniversal’s famous sports and entertainment properties the biggest audiences possible.

Working with her counterparts at Universal Film, she helped make “Wicked” a streaming event with a marketing campaign that included partnerships with NBCU’s entertainment properties, stunts, and buzzy social initiatives. “Wicked” wound up being Peacock’s biggest film in the Pay 1 window, the first period following its theatrical run, in the streamer’s history, with close to 1 billion minutes viewed in its first week.

She tapped creators and celebrities to promote the Paris Olympics, helping score a 77% increase in viewership over the Tokyo Games and a massive amount of social media impressions. Now, Storms is preparing for 2026, when NBCU will host a trifecta of famous sporting events in the Super Bowl, NBC All-Star Game, and Winter Olympics.

Storms, who was promoted to her role in January, has also put a big focus on fan engagement by leaning into real-life experiences. For “Saturday Night Live’s” 50th anniversary special, her team orchestrated “Live from New York: The SNL Experience,” a four-day pop-up that recreated the program’s iconic studio and drew over 1,000 fans each day. For the 25th anniversary of “Law & Order: SVU,” she created activations in New York and Boston that let fans celebrate the iconic crime show.

Doug Sweeny, Oura’s chief marketing officer

Oura

Sweeny joined the company in 2022 at a time when demand for wearable devices like Oura was slowing. He revamped Oura’s marketing, cutting customer acquisition costs by more than half and launching Oura in over 1,000 retail locations and expanding to 32 new markets.

Sweeny made Oura part of the cultural conversation, leaning into the national election when other brands shied away by sponsoring CNN’s Magic Wall of election results. Sweeny’s team also led partnerships with “Mission: Impossible,” using Tom Cruise to show off Oura’s stress-monitoring feature, and with England Football in the World Cup. He led the global campaign for Oura Ring 4, which included takeovers in New York, London, and Los Angeles, and expanded the brand to include women’s health features.

The proof is in the numbers: People’s awareness of Oura when they’re prompted to identify it has grown more than fivefold in the US during his tenure, according to the company, citing YouGov. Revenue has doubled for two years in a row, and the company reached profitability a year ahead of schedule. This heightened awareness and growth helped the company raise $200 million in investment in December, which valued it at $5.2 billion.

Up next, Sweeny looks to keep expanding awareness and distribution while keeping an eye on economic uncertainty caused by tariffs, helping minimize their cost and impact on the company’s supply chain.

Dara Treseder, Autodesk’s chief marketing officer

Autodesk

In her three-year tenure as Autodesk’s marketing chief, Treseder has been propelling the technology company into the mainstream through smart partnerships and activations that bring the purpose of its software to life. Autodesk makes software products used across industries like construction, engineering, film, and architecture.

For May the Fourth — Star Wars Day — Autodesk invited Star Wars fans to enter a droid-maker contest using its software, ahead of the launch of the new Disney+ series “The Acolyte.” The competition and a TV commercial that aired during the show’s premiere showcased how Autodesk played a role in designing characters from “The Acolyte,” like Pip.

This past summer, Autodesk became a supporting partner of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, its first-ever Olympics sponsorship and a large new business opportunity. Autodesk’s software is being used to help adapt venues and design temporary buildings for the LA28 Games. Treseder and team also ran a huge push later in the year to highlight how Autodesk’s technology played a big role in restoring the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, after the landmark was damaged by fire in 2019.

This year, having appointed Giant Spoon as its first-ever creative agency, Autodesk ran its biggest campaign to date. The campaign featured the actor and comedian Tony Hale playing God. His role was a play on a quote from Autodesk’s former CEO Carol Bartz: “If it wasn’t made by God, it was made by an Autodesk customer.”

Autodesk said Treseder’s marketing efforts have helped the company achieve a 25% lift in direct digital channel revenue. Treseder has also helped Autodesk fulfill its commitment to prepare young people for the world of work. More than 100 million students and educators accessed the free version of its software in 2024, a usage figure that was up 18% year over year.

Sherry Weiss, Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal’s chief marketing officer

Dow Jones

It’s debatable how much legacy news outlets, especially iconic ones like The Wall Street Journal, can shift perception and broaden their audiences. That makes Weiss’ accomplishments all the more notable. Last year, she led the effort with “It’s Your Business,” the paper’s first major marketing campaign in several years, to grow its readership beyond its finance base to reach younger, more diverse readers. The campaign included out-of-home ads in key markets like New York, Miami, and Dallas.

In concert with the Emma Tucker-led newsroom’s work to make coverage more lively and enterprising, the campaign drove additional site traffic in nine out of 10 markets, increased people’s likelihood to recommend the Journal to others by 19%, and boosted people’s likelihood to subscribe, especially women ages 35 to 44, according to the company, citing external research. Total subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal grew 3% year over year in the quarter ended March 31, to over 4.3 million on average; digital subs represented 90% of those and grew 5% in the quarter, to over 3.9 million on average.

Working with the newsroom, Weiss also helped draw attention to the plight of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. One striking campaign, “Missing Articles,” featured blank front page spaces of the Journal to signify where Gershkovich’s reporting would have appeared had he been free, topped with headlines like “His Story Should Be Here.” Gershkovich was released in August after a year and a half in Russian detention.

William White, Walmart’s SVP and chief marketing officer

Walmart

White has helped keep Walmart a step ahead of rivals with campaigns that associate the retail giant with cultural touchstones, not just low prices.

For its last holiday campaign, “Gifts that Show You Get Them,” the retailer featured cast members from popular series like “Gilmore Girls” and “SpongeBob SquarePants” giving gifts to their loved ones. It followed Walmart’s Black Friday campaign “Deals of Desire,” a 10-part series starring actors like Walton Goggins and TikToker Jake Shane that spoofed popular TV shows like “Bridgerton” and “Yellowstone.” (Goggins also stars in Walmart’s latest campaign, tagline “Walmart: Who Knew?”, which drafted a bunch of celebrities to show that the retailer sells more things than people might have thought.)

As retailers try to crack the code on shoppable TV, White and his team have been bold about trying new approaches. In their latest effort, Walmart sponsored its first feature-length holiday film, Roku Original “Jingle Bell Love,” that prompted viewers to buy items relevant to the film during shoppable breaks.

At a time when CMOs are being required to do more with less, White’s ability to demonstrate marketing’s financial value has enabled him to expand his budget as Walmart has outperformed rivals like Target and Costco.

Next up, look for him to expand Walmart’s three-year-old Creator Platform and use AI to personalize marketing messages to customers.

Katie Williams, Haleon’s US chief marketing officer

Haleon

Williams has seized on IRL experiences, beauty, and inclusivity trends to drive business for Haleon, the consumer healthcare company that contains household brands like Advil, Tums, and Sensodyne.

To launch Emergen-C Immune+ Crystals, she created a campaign that included a product giveaway and a pop-up at JFK airport. The pop-up gave cold-susceptible travelers a sensory experience that mimicked the effect of the supplement. The campaign exceeded Haleon’s product distribution goals by 114%. She also launched Sensodyne Clinical White, a teeth whitening paste aimed at beauty consumers, which Haleon credited with helping grow sales revenue of the Sensodyne portfolio by 14%.

With concern about fake ads on the rise, Williams adopted a digital watermarking system to ensure the authenticity of Haleon’s ads.

Williams has also embraced the brand-supported entertainment trend. She helped develop a feature-length documentary called “Sensory Overload” about the needs of neurodivergent and sensory-sensitive people in places like the dentist’s office. The documentary is available to stream on Hulu as paid content.

Mike Zeman, Life360’s chief marketing officer

Life360

Zeman has been working hard to ensure Life360, a family safety app, can earn the trust of Gen Z, and not just their parents.

TikTok has become a breakout channel for Life360, which has more than 1.5 million followers on the app. Rather than being overly promotional, the brand gets sassy in the comment sections and regularly posts memes. The approach helps build the legitimacy of the brand by leaning into trends like teens using the app to follow their parents around the map while they’re out of the house.

Zeman has also applied the edgy TikTok energy to Life360’s ads. Its “Back to School” spot utilizes UGC-style videos and humor to emulate the chaos families often experience during the back-to-school period. Its “Family-Proof Your Family” series of ads uses funny examples of exaggerated family miscommunications to convey the message that Life360’s Tile brand can prevent small misunderstandings from becoming major problems.

Under Zeman’s leadership, Life360 has reached about 80 million monthly active users, including 2.3 million paying Circles — the private groups where members share their locations and chat with each other. Zeman plans to scale his team’s marketing efforts in 2025 as Life360 launches new product categories like pet tracking.

Understanding customer use cases is a core part of a marketing strategy, but JPMorgan Chase CMO Carla Hassan is the rare Fortune 500 executive who can recall these kinds of customer success stories offhand.

This is because Hassan’s imperative is customer centricity. Much of the work she’s done on behalf of the brand centers on customers, and specifically the small-business owners and entrepreneurs who rely on the financial institution for backing. That includes Access Trax, a company founded by Kelly Twichel that makes outdoor experiences accessible for people with disabilities.

“It’s incredible, and when you talk to her, you can’t help but, as a marketer, want to tell more of these stories,” said Hassan of Twichel and her company.

Recognizing the 50 Most Influential CMOs in the World

By Seth Matlins , Managing Director, Forbes CMO Network

Additional reporting by Liz Kneebone

S ometimes, complicated times beg for simplification. And these are certainly those so, if you’ll indulge a simple definition, marketing is fundamentally nothing more than the practice of influencing attitudes and behaviors in service of sustainable, profitable, growth. A marketer influences the decision to buy, or they don’t. That’s the job.

Would, however, that the Chief-Marketer’s job were as simple as the definition offered. It is not. Would that the exercise and impact of a Chief-Marketer’s influence were equally simple. It is not. Indeed, no position in the C-suite is and has been more affected and influenced by changes at the micro, macro and socio/cultural/economic levels than has the CMO’s.

Today’s chief-marketers are expected to separate signals from an unprecedented explosion in noise, to adapt to changing attitudes, behaviors and events in real-time, to react to the hijacking of their brand narratives in a moment by consumers, employees and, sometimes, their C-suite colleagues; to provide absolute certainty that every dollar invested will deliver a 1:1 return (also in real-time), when no such certainty exists but is still, often, the expectation of those for whom their understanding of marketing is (often) limited to the fact that they have been marketed to.

What was once the singular province of a CMO who had oversight if not control of positioning, product, price, and promotion, is now (again, often but not always) spread like too much butter on a piece of toast. And this is the thing about brands today; they are built, sustained, and sometimes punched in the face by people who aren’t the CMO. But such is life, marketing, and the decentralized nature of a CMO’s influence in 2023.

Despite our very human want for simplicity amongst complexity, cumulatively, all this makes the effective exercise of a chief marketer’s influence more complex and ever harder and, thus, the achievement of being recognized on a list measuring it even greater.

The 2023 Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs List, again recognizes the 50 chief-marketers whose influence on their brands, businesses, culture, people, and the global marketing community, stand apart. Along with this year’s Forbes CMO Hall of Fame inductee, the thinking, approach, work, leadership, impact, of this year’s 50 honorees—28 of whom make the list for the first time—merits not only celebration but consideration as there is much to be learned from them.

Like the increasingly complicated exercise of a marketer’s influence the evaluation of it requires context, as what one considers influential “another may not. So goes marketing, and as with every other aspect of it, reasonable people can disagree—which is why, along with our primary research partner, Sprinklr, and with key supplemental data and analysis provided by LinkedIn, we take a broad, multifaceted, rigorous, and data-led approach to it, ultimately analyzing over 11 billion individual data points to get to the 50 CMOs.

So, how do we evaluate and measure it? How do we isolate and identify the CMO’s influence as opposed to, say, that of a brilliant—or terrible—product? History that was inherited but they didn’t create? The actions of others that challenge their brand and business beyond their control, for good or less so? It’s neither simple nor easy, and to get closer to it at scale, globally, and across industry, we will continue to make methodological improvements.

To be absolutely clear, this is not and has never been a “pay for play” list. No one can apply for it or be nominated to it. There are no submissions.

We started the 2023 process with an initial eligible universe of 2,892 brands or companies that appeared in one or more of seven distinct and authoritative data sources (including The Forbes Global 2000 and Brand Finance 500) which is up from four sources in 2022. This was also the first year where the marketers of privately held enterprises were eligible. And in cases where the eligible company or brand did not have a current executive with the CMO title, we considered the most senior executive with responsibility for marketing, customer, and/or digital experience.

In order to get from nearly 3000 to our final 50, we used a data-driven screening process scoring CMOs on data encompassing 20 separate influence indicators. Sprinklr, our primary research partner, used their suite of proprietary products to measure and analyze CMO performance and influence across 11 billion individual data points, including news stories, mentions, tweets, posts, and comments, globally. Additionally, LinkedIn, who provided important secondary data and analysis, measured CMO’s industry and organizational influence by analyzing over 6 million CMO/brand mentions along with almost 1.5 million individual engagements on CMO posts across their platform.

The 22 indicators of and proxies for CMO influence included individual, brand, marketing, and campaign attention, sentiment, and salience; the CMO’s visibility in the marketing and business communities and, for the first time, financial performance, specifically year-over-year (YoY) revenue, and market-cap metrics, for those publicly traded companies reporting same. Individual scores and CMO rankings, were then determined based on a weighted aggregation of these 22 indicators. For more detail on how the most influential CMOs are scored and ranked, see Sprinklr’s companion report .

In aggregate, the 50 CMOs recognized here as the world’s most influential marketers, come from businesses headquartered in 13 countries around the world, and have direct influence over thousands of brands across categories and industries, globally.

The companies they help steward employ almost 12 million people globally and represent nearly $9 trillion in market capitalization (as of May 12, 2023). But, as always, this list is about people—not brands and not companies, though of course they are inextricably linked as attention remains table stakes for influence, as influence needs a platform to heard, seen, spread, and heeded.

With thanks again to our partners at Sprinklr and LinkedIn, we invite you to get to know the 50 marketers on this 2023 list. Around the globe, they are influencing the character and destiny of our industry, the world itself, as surely as they do their own brands and companies.

THE FORBES CMO HALL OF FAME

This is the second class of the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame, created last year to recognize those chief marketers who have, or would have, appeared on our World’s Most Influential CMOs list five times. Doing this, given the massive changes to the art and science of marketing, is an extraordinary achievement.

Coming into 2023, only one chief-marketer had made the list 4 times previously and was thus the only CMO eligible for inclusion in this year’s Hall of Fame class. While eligibility is not certainty, on what would have been her fifth year on the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list, we are privileged to induct Morgan Flatley, Global CMO at McDonald’s, into the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame.

She joins the 18 inductees from the inaugural class, each recognized for the enduring influence and impact they’ve had on the brands and businesses they’ve led, on our industry and, often, the cultural landscape itself.

The Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs List: 2023

#1-10

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1. William White

Chief Marketing Officer: Walmart (United States)

As CMO of the world’s largest retailer, White is responsible for the breadth of the company’s marketing strategy, planning, experience, and insights. Focused on driving customer demand, loyalty and ensuring the enduring strength of the Walmart brand, he has been instrumental in the enterprise’s digital transformation and e-commerce evolution. In the U.S. alone, over 37 million people shop Walmart every day, and under White’s leadership, Walmart’s marketing continues to evolve to meet the equally evolving needs and wants of this massive customer base. To build deeper and differentiated relationships with younger audiences, he’s launched Walmart’s Creator Platform, harnessing the power of these next-gen customers as creators, collaborators, and media unto themselves, giving them the platform and tools to recommend, sell, and be rewarded for it. While forward looking macro-economic conditions remain uncertain, with White stewarding the brand, and at the conclusion of Q1 23, year-over-year (YoY), quarterly revenues were up over 7%, and its stock over 31%, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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2. Marcel Marcondes

Global Chief Marketing Officer: Anheuser-Busch InBev (Belgium)

Global CMO of the world’s largest brewer since April of 2022, Marcondes’ strategic approach to creativity has reinvigorated AB InBev’s marketing organization and output. Intentionally correlating awards success with business success, in 2023, Marcondes became the first marketer to have twice been named the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year. With oversight of a global brand portfolio that includes Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois, and the recently embattled Bud Light. Marcondes has built a reputation as a strategic thinker and leader, and as post-Pandemic consumption behaviors have shifted, he has led commensurate shifts in the portfolio’s go-to-market strategies around the world. Immediately prior to this publishing, ABI was recognized as being among the most effective marketers globally, by industry standard, Effies Worldwide. As of the conclusion of March, ABI reported quarterly revenues were up over 7% YoY.

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3. Conny Braams

Chief Digital and Commercial Officer: Unilever (England)

Braams, who recently announced she would be leaving the company in August, after 33 years, has oversight of Unilever’s 400 brand portfolio which includes household names like Dove, Hellman’s, LifeBuoy, and Vaseline, and with global responsibility for the British multinational FMCG giant’s end-to-end digital transformation, marketing, and customer development. She has been a vocal advocate for Unilever’s once-activist-shareholder-challenged approach to purpose-driven marketing, championing change not just for brands within the company’s portfolio but more broadly. These challenges seem to have been quieted by the company’s market capitalization having appreciated 18% YoY, as of the close of markets June 16th. Noting that “the convergence of media, entertainment and commerce has blurred the lines between marketing and sales,” Braams is known for her tech-forward approach to building brand loyalty and is leading the company’s charge for and current focus on reducing its environmental impact and making sustainable choices easy and accessible to consumers around the world.

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4. Greg Joswiak

SVP Worldwide Marketing: Apple (United States)

Since joining Apple in 1986, Joswiak has played a material role in cementing Apple’s position as the most valuable company in the world (with a market capitalization of over $2.6T as of this writing.) Joswiak reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the long-time company executive has played a key strategic role in many of the company’s most successful product launches and campaigns historically, including both the original iPod and iPhone, and today has oversight for Apple’s global marketing efforts. Under his marketing leadership, Apple’s strategic focus on privacy and commitment to protecting user data within their walled-garden has become a key differentiator and consumer motivator. So too has it forced companies across industry to respond and adapt. As of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s stock was up over 40% YoY.

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5. Dirk-Jan van Hameren

EVP and Chief Marketing Officer: Nike (United States)

With oversight of the iconic brand’s global marketing efforts, van Hameren’s tenure as CMO has been marked by a near-constant flow of marketing that keeps the brand as culturally resonant and relevant as any in the world. With a global footwear market share of 22% (and a dominant 34% in the U.S.), van Hameren leads work continuing Nike’s longtime equity in making “ads” people want to see. Collaborations with the likes of Tiffany, Billie Eilish, Ambush, Kim Jones, and so many more all fuel the brand’s marketing and consistent presence in the cultural news cycle. As the company places increasing emphasis on DTC channels, “DJ” and his marketing organization consistently finds ways to market both the brand’s performance and lifestyle equities. The company’s revenues were up nearly 14% YoY, for the period ending in February.

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6. Marian Lee

Chief Marketing Officer: Netflix (United States)

She’s the CMO of one of the world’s largest entertainment companies, and in the past year alone, has overseen the launch and promotion of over 800 Netflix Originals globally. With over 232 million subscribers worldwide (as of the end of March) in pursuit of new revenues, including an expanding merchandise operation, and subscriber growth, Lee is also part of the leadership team helping manage the brand’s pivot to in-platform advertising and expansion into gaming. As of its most recent financial report, the streamer said 25% of its newest subscribers came in through their new ad-supported offering. Rather than spending more dollars on media, Lee has reframed how the company thinks about marketing’s role in engaging audiences of fans; a strategic shift from marketing to audiences to marketing with and through them, and from “targeting consumers to serving fans.” As of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s stock was up almost 150% YoY.

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7. Asad Ayaz

Chief Brand Officer, The Walt Disney Company and President Marketing, The Walt Disney Studios and Disney+ (United States)

As both Chief Brand Officer for The Walt Disney Company and President of Marketing for the company’s studio operations and Disney+, Asad’s work is seen by audiences around the world. Responsible for managing and activating the Disney brand globally, guiding the company’s digital and social strategy and presence, and setting corporate synergy and franchise priorities, Asad’s influence also includes leading consumer research and analytics for Disney’s brands and franchises, including Marvel, Star Wars and Toy Story amongst other globally iconic properties. As President of Marketing for The Walt Disney Studios and Disney+, he oversees all aspects of global marketing for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Studios, along with all aspects of marketing for Disney+, content marketing for all Studio films and series on both Disney+ and Hulu. As of March, the company reported quarterly revenues were up over 13% YoY.

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8. Mathilde Delhoume-Debreu

Global Brand Officer: LVMH (France)

Delhoume is the Global Brand Officer for the world’s most valuable luxury holding company, and its portfolio of globally iconic brands including Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Moet Hennessy, and Hublot, just four among its 75 Houses and six core categories of operations. Delhoume and her teams have responsibility for brand image and content, media, and customer research in what the company utilizes as a “center of expertise” across their portfolio. Focused on helping each LVMH Maison drive brand desirability, the hallmark of luxury brand relevancy and performance, Delhoume’s center of expertise and approach to luxury marketing amidst uncertain global economic circumstances, has helped the Group to impressive financial results; In April, LVMH reported quarterly revenue growth of 23% YoY, and its stock is up over 66% YoY, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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9. Tim Ellis

Chief Marketing Officer: The National Football League (United States)

CMO of the richest sports league in the world, and what is the last truly mass-media property in the United States, Ellis plays a key strategic and creative role in growing the league’s presence and fan-base in markets globally. With responsibility and oversight for the NFL’s brand strategy, advertising, and content creation efforts, under Ellis’s strategic and creative leadership, the League has been working to make its marque, the sport, games, and the League itself more accessible. A growing focus on the grassroots, including no-contact flag-football, is creating more opportunities for play for more people, inviting new audiences into the sport on new terms. As a private entity, the NFL does not disclose financial results publicly, but as individual team valuations reach new heights (the pending sale of the Washington Commanders for $6.05B (USD) would be the highest sale price ever) the League’s aggregate annual revenues across broadcast, licensing, sponsorship etc.) are estimated to have crossed $18B (USD), reflecting an almost 50% increase over the past 3 years.

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10. Harish Bhat

Brand Custodian: Tata Group (India)

The long-time Brand Custodian and de facto Chief Brand Officer for India’s largest conglomerate, Bhat leads brand strategy for the Tata brand, which is utilized by the parent company’s thirty plus subsidiaries, including those in motors, consulting services, steel and coffee, to name a few. As brand custodian, Bhat plays a critical role in building and strengthening the Tata brand both within India, and globally. His deep understanding of the Indian consumer landscape and his years of building successful new brands like Titan and Tata Tea for the Group make him a highly influential figure in the marketing industry. As an author and columnist, Bhat is also committed to sharing his expertise to inspire the next generation of marketers.

#11-20

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11. Lorenzo Bertelli

Group Marketing Director and Head of Corporate Social Responsibility: Prada Group: (Italy)

Prada has been recognized as the world’s “hottest” fashion brand in each of the past three quarters—and its sister brand Miu Miu was recognized as the 2nd, in April both by the well regarded Lyst Index. With oversight for the Prada Group’s marketing and sustainability efforts, and as heir apparent to the Group’s CEO position, Bertelli’s influence is significant. As head of marketing, communications and sustainability, Bertelli is instrumental in driving the portfolio’s focus on sustainability and eco-innovation, leading brand campaigns and initiatives showcasing the company’s commitment to reducing its environmental impact without sacrifice or compromise to its luxury standing. With particular strength coming from the Asia Pacific region, the company reported YoY revenue growth of 23% in Q2, and Bertelli’s efforts are influencing not only the Group’s bottom line but also setting precedent for others to follow.

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12. Chris Davis

Chief Marketing Officer and SVP Merchandising: New Balance (United States)

Under Davis’s marketing and merchandising leadership, the once-staid, “dad sneaker” brand, has become one of the most in-demand sneaker brands across a spectrum of audiences and cultures. While leaning into streetwear culture and a growing portfolio of collaborations from Aimé Leon Dore, Commes De Garçons and Miu Miu, all while managing not to alienate the “dads” and moms and others who help give the brand its scale. Davis and his team are known for giving their collaborators a great deal of freedom to create, and while the 106-year-old privately held company does not disclose financial results publicly, influence and growth metrics including search, resale value, retail dwell time amongst others are all on the upswing. Recent moves into football, signing global baseball icon Shohei Ohtani, and a strategic and creative redesign of 2500 New Balance stores around the world, are evidence of Davis’s approach to growing the brand’s market relevancy and differentiation.

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13. Romy Gai

Chief Commercial Officer: FIFA (Switzerland)

With a remit that includes growing the popularity of football (soccer) worldwide, Gai’s reach and influence is expansive. The most recent FIFA World Cup in Qatar was the first World Cup to be hosted in the Middle East and to feature female referees, important inclusion, and representation milestones on the global stage. The event also broke multiple records including total Finals match viewership of over 1.5B people globally, $7.5B (USD) in revenues earned for the sports’ governing body and set multiple English-language viewership records in the United States. The 2026 World Cup is set to take place in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and with influence over the governing body’s commercial results, Gai’s stage is truly global.

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14. Tariq Hassan

Chief Marketing and Digital Officer: McDonald’s North America (United States)

With responsibility for the U.S. marketing and digital customer experience for this staple of the American cultural landscape, Hassan leads an organization with oversight of media, brand content and engagement, CRM, and even North American menu strategy across its 14,000 U.S. stores and digital footprint. Building on the brand’s fan-based marketing approach and momentum, his influence has helped turn the brand from a corporate monolith into one that talks like a brand fan to other brand fans. Believing that when culture calls, you need to answer and connect, under his leadership the company has continued its traffic, sales, and buzz driving work like the McRib Farewell Tour and collaborations with the likes of Cactus Plant Flea Market. Hassan has the iconic brand leaning into and not away from the control today’s consumers have over most every brand. For the quarter ending in March, the company reported U.S. guest counts were up YoY, and as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock was up over 25%, also YoY.

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15. Laura Gentile

EVP Marketing; ESPN (United States)

Gentile has influence over and responsibility for the health of the iconic, global sports brand, and leads the marketing for all brands, platforms, shows, and events. Gentile’s remit includes oversight of all of ESPN’s Marketing’s creative output, media strategy, spending and budgeting, and fan engagement. As a result, Gentile helps drive the marketing, advertising and promotion for critical league partners including the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and F1 helping shape and grow the audiences for these brands as well. As audience’s continue migrating to streaming, as younger audience consumption is increasingly less game-driven and more “highlight” based, Gentile’s oversight of ESPN’s ecosystem of digital assets—from ESPN+ to their app—are increasingly important growth engines for both the company and its network of partners.

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16. Sarah Franklin

President: Salesforce (United States)

During her tenure as CMO, the reins to which she passed off on June 6th, Franklin reimagined and helped transform how the cloud-based software giant goes to market and drives brand and business growth. True to her own and the company’s entrepreneurial roots, her influence on the company’s marketing is driven by a listen, learn and apply approach to developing marketing work that inspires conversation, community, co-creation, and open idea exchange. A late-2022 deal to produce a show, The Shift, for CNBC will highlight how different Salesforce customers use the company’s technology to tackle societal issues, something Franklin is a long-time champion for. Franklin and her team have launched Salesforce’s Einstein GPT, the first generative AI-powered platform for CRM. The company recently reported revenue for the first quarter was up 11% YoY. As of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s stock was up nearly 30% YoY.

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17. Hildegard Wortmann

Member of the Board of Management for Sales and Marketing: Audi (Germany)

As a Member of the Board of Management for Sales and Marketing for Audi AG – part of the Volkswagen group – Wortmann is leading the charge to make Audi a sustainable, technological, and social leader by 2030. Under Wortmann’s leadership, the brand has expanded its product and consumer experience to a more holistic approach, integrating road safety, events, and collaboration with cities to manage traffic. In particular, Wortmann has been instrumental in driving the company’s emphasis on sustainability and has helped to launch extensive electronic vehicle charging stations at 320,000 locations across 26 European nations. As of the company’s reporting at the end of March, quarterly revenues had increased YoY by over 21%.

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18. Craig Brommers

Chief Marketing Officer: American Eagle Outfitters (United States)

CMO of American Eagle since 2020, Brommers’ strategy has reinvigorated the youth retailer’s cultural relevance among its core, Gen Z, shopper. Knowing the audience moves fast and that its attentions are fleeting, Brommers’ marketing relies heavily on borrowed interest partnerships, extending and deepening the brand’s abilities to connect meaningfully and where the audience is, and on-going experimentation with Snap, TikTok and Roblox, keep the retail brand front and center in the Gen Z cultural firmament. The brand recently launched a resale merchandise section, one tapping into younger consumers’ wants for more sustainable choices, and Brommers and his marketing organization have also built 2000 shopper panel to directly capture scalable and brand-driving insights. In a recent retail survey, and behind only Nike, American Eagle was named the second most popular apparel brand among Gen Z. As of the company’s reporting at the end of April, quarterly revenues had increased over 2%.

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19. Carla Zakhem-Hassan

Chief Marketing Officer: JPMorgan Chase (United States)

As CMO of the world’s largest bank based on its market capitalization of over $412 billion (USD), Hassan has responsibility for the marketing of Chase, J.P. Morgan, and corporate brands advertising, media, sponsorships, market research, and customer insights, across over 100 countries. In the midst of massive economic uncertainty globally, Hassan knows that a changing human context requires 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. Known for both championing that CMOs across industry must think like CEOs and CFOs, and her commitment to driving growth by using both data and empathy, Hassan’s influence is also seen in her work on the firm’s sustainability and DEI efforts. Under her oversight, the marketing organization has become a leading contributor to the company’s progress on diverse supplier spending, hitting their Racial Equity Commitment 2 years ahead of a 5-year goal. For the period ending in March, the company reported YoY quarterly revenue growth of more than 23%, and its stock is up over 26%, also YoY.

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20. Angela Zepeda

Chief Marketing Officer, Hyundai Motor America: (South Korea)

In her fourth year as CMO for Hyundai, Zepeda led the brand to record-breaking global growth. The company reported a particularly strong Q1 alongside five consecutive monthly sales records. Last year, she also placed particular emphasis on marketing to diverse consumers through digital platforms through customized messaging that centers consumer choice, including the new “It’s Your Journey” and new “Choose Yours” campaigns. Zepeda is focused on engaging diverse audiences through digital experiences on platforms like TikTok through influencer campaigns and through programs like their first-to-market virtual showroom on Amazon. These efforts, particularly among younger consumers, have helped Hyundai realize significant YoY market share gains in Zepeda’s U.S. market. As of the close of markets on June 16th, YoY, the company’s stock was up over 27%.

#21-30

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21. Asmita Dubey

Chief Digital and Marketing Officer: L’Oréal (France)

As Chief Digital and Marketing Officer for the world’s leading beauty company, Dubey’s work and influence are writ large, globally, influencing the French conglomerate and category, and how consumers feel about themselves as well. With oversight of a portfolio of 36 global brands from mass to luxe to professional, including L’Oreal Paris, Maybelline New York, Cerave, and Redken, Dubey has led the portfolio to #1 in category “Share of Influence” over the past year. She is also leading significant marketing investments in Web 3 and BeautyTech, augmented products and services helping people discover, try, and buy what’s right for them. While not leaving the Web2 world, this is part of an on-going marketing evolution into the next digital age. L’Oréal reported like-for-like growth of 10.9% at the end of FY22, and its stock was up over 41%, YoY, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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22. Zach Kitschke

Chief Marketing Officer: Canva (Australia)

First hired for only a single day to lead the launch of Canva in 2013. Since then, Kitschke has since held multiple roles for the Australian multinational online design platform, becoming CMO in 2021. With over 130 million monthly users worldwide, as CMO, Kitschke oversees Canva’s international brand and growth, and oversees teams including brand, product, and content marketing, PR, communications, affiliate, SEO, and ad creative. He is a key influencer in the private company’s quest to be used by every person on the internet and the democratization of the tools of creation in an increasingly visual world. As Canva embraces the power of generative AI for its expanding suite of content creation assets, and by leveraging this expanded product platform and the word-of-mouth it generates, Kitschke and the company are well positioned for continued growth.

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23. Dara Treseder

Chief Marketing Officer: Autodesk (United States)

In moving from Peloton, a brand seemingly always in the news, to Autodesk, the multinational B2B tech company, Treseder is tasked with rethinking the enterprise’s go-to-market strategy, and has responsibility for the company’s worldwide marketing, brand and communications, global demand generation, and its education business teams. Treseder has been driving brand growth and applied creativity as engines for driving the Autodesk business. In 2023, alone, and putting to work the cultural marketing skills honed throughout her career, she’s launched three of the company’s first broad-reach brand campaigns, each around cultural-touchstones—the Game of Thrones finale, The Oscars, and the company’s work in helping the French government rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral. Each are integrated parts of a whole that is broadening company awareness, interest and engagement, with the metrics for each seeing significant increase under her marketing influence. As of April, the company reported YoY quarterly revenue growth of over 8% and, as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock is up 27%, also YoY.

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24. Bettina Fetzer

Head of Marketing and Communications: Mercedes Benz (Germany)

Under her marketing leadership, Mercedes-Benz has leaned into its commitment to continuous improvement and evolution both in the vehicles themselves and the ways they’re reaching consumers. As the only automaker to act as a founding member of the Aura Blockchain Consortium, the brand has placed particular emphasis on utilizing newer technologies like NFTs to create a cutting-edge, custom consumer experience. Fetzer continues to highlight the constant evolution of the company in her work, and the 2022 international “Showcasing Innovations” campaign showcased the pioneering spirit of the brand. Fetzer has put its own stake in the ground, too, when it comes to the company’s electric vehicles through the EQ sub-brand and subsequent “First of a New Kind” campaign, which showcased the brand’s seamless combination of next-generation technology with the high-end Mercedes-Benz experience. Fetzer’s strategy helped the company to YoY revenue growth of over 7.5% as of the period ending in March. The company’s stock was up over 22% YTD, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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25. Chris Tung

Chief Marketing Officer: Alibaba (China)

Tung, who has served as CMO for Alibaba since 2016, leads marketing organizations across the Alibaba portfolio including Alibaba Cloud, Taobao, Tmall, and others. In 2022, Tung placed specific emphasis on sustainability to empower consumers as well as the company’s supply chain partners. In fact, Alibaba is now utilizing its platform power to empower its partners to become carbon neutral. Not only is the company increasing its prowess when it comes to the environment, but with Tung in the driver’s seat for Alibaba marketing, the company was named the second most valuable brand in China in 2022. In the last quarter of 2022 alone, sales grew 10% for the company. And in March of this year, Alibaba announced a split into six individual entities in a transition to align with evolutions in the tech industry.

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26. Elizabeth Rutledge

Chief Marketing Officer: American Express (United States)

With American Express for over 30 years, Rutledge has been the iconic financial services brand CMO since 2018. With oversight of and responsibility for strategic brand planning, global media, sponsorships, experiences, and customer insights, Rutledge’s influence and strategy focus on supporting customer needs and creating relationships that card-members describe not as simply having or using the card but as being “with” American Express, a brand loyalty that is the envy of many. Under her leadership, the company is moving increasingly towards highlighting the experiential, becoming less reliant on more traditional means of marketing. Rutledge’s strategy of showcasing unique experiences and the exclusive benefits of membership is keeping the brand relevant with younger consumers. Millennials and Gen Z now represent over 30% of accounts. In the first quarter, the company reported quarterly revenues increased more than 12% YoY. As of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s stock was up almost 20% YoY.

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27. Julia White

Chief Marketing Officer: SAP (United States)

In her role as Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer for SAP, White leads product and industry solution value propositions, global brand and digital marketing, government affairs, and corporate communications. As the company continues to build new tools to support business transformation, White’s eye for inclusion and accessibility has been critical in the launch of the company’s recent products GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP, both of which are designed to make transitioning to the cloud, and cloud adoption, easier for businesses of all sizes. The launch of these new programs and a strategy focused on the intersection of sustainability has helped the company grow significantly. For the period ending in March, the company reported YoY quarterly revenue growth of nearly 10%, and as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock was up over 47% in the past year.

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28. Jens Thiemer

SVP Customer and Brand BMW: BMW Group (Germany)

SVP of Customer & Brand at BMW since 2019, Thiemer leads the luxury automotive company’s global marketing and customer management efforts around the world. His focus on building deeper consumer relationships has created a strong sense of identity and community among BMW customers. Thinking beyond the norm Thiemer strategy has been central to ensuring the marque maintains its iconic status in a transitioning category. With increasing marketing investments in and emphasis on strategic partnerships and longer-form content in advertising and film, including the recently announced return of BMW Films, and brand expansions into apparel, festivals, and an integrated partnership with Vogue to bolster the brand’s place in the consideration set of affluent women, Thiemer is leading the way for automotive luxury brands looking to authentically integrate high art and fashion into their storytelling. For the quarter ending March 23, the company reported YoY quarterly revenue growth of over 18%. It’s stock was also up, almost 50%, as of the close of markets on June 16th, and YoY.

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29. Andréa Mallard

Chief Marketing and Communications Officer: Pinterest (United States)

As the company’s first Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Mallard oversees brand, external communications, performance, experiential, content, insights, and product marketing globally across all Pinterest audiences, including both “pinners” and advertisers. With over 450 million monthly users globally, Mallard’s strategy is focused on both driving recurring revenues and differentiating the platform as one of positivity and creativity. Seeing product and marketing opportunity at a time when many a social-platform algorithm seeks to enrage as readily as engage, Mallard and her teams are working to communicate that Pinterest is “building a better internet,” bringing this to life in multiple ways and across multiple channels, including the company’s new creator code, and partnerships with brands like Tesco, Amazon, and a globally expanding group of creators. Her safety-and-experience-centric approach, including providing unique insights to creators and advertisers both through programs like Pinterest’s ‘Not Yet Trending’ report, has expanded the company’s loyal fanbase. The company’s stock was up over 40% in the past year, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

30. Jessica Erding Liu

Head of Marketing and Brand: Shein (China)

As the newly appointed VP of Global Brands Operations for Shein, Liu has taken the company’s active digital strategy to new heights. Most recently, Liu led the fashion retailer to their most recent raise of $2 Billion in funding. The brand is particularly popular among Gen Z, where it falls right behind Amazon and Nike among younger shoppers’ favorite e-commerce websites. Shein’s affordable price tag, along with its wide variety of inventory, has been particularly effective with younger consumers. Shein ended the year as one of the most downloaded mobile apps globally, and boasts a dedicated TikTok hashtag #sheinhaul that garners tens of millions of views on the platform. As the brand looks to move away from its fast-fashion reputation, it’s also engaging directly with diverse designers and creators to fund their projects. Shein’s revenue has grown 10x since 2020, with a total valuation of $100 billion at the end of last year.

#31-40

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31. Jill Hazelbaker

SVP Marketing and Public Affairs: Uber (United States)

Since 2015, Hazelbaker has served as SVP of Marketing and Public Affairs for Uber, leading teams responsible for the company’s marketing, communications, and public policy efforts. Described as the company’s “image maker,” while her remit and influence are broader than marketing alone, her oversight and influence includes that for marketing the suite of the company’s offerings from ride-share, Eats, Grocery, the newly launched car-rental and an expanding ad-business among them, across 10,000 cities in 70 countries, Hazelbaker has led a shift in Uber’s approach, market-to-market, focusing promotion around global events like the FIFA World Cup and global initiatives like sustainability. She’s not only shaping the Uber brand narrative but has also set new standards for effective and impactful marketing across the technology sector. As of the end of March, Uber reported quarterly revenues were over 28% YoY, and as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock was up almost 100%, also YoY.

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32. Lisa McKnight

EVP, Global Head of Barbie and Dolls: Mattel (United States)

With oversight of this leading global toy company’s portfolio of over 70 doll brands including Barbie, Polly Pocket, Disney Princesses, and the recently relaunched Monster High, McKnight has been with Mattel since 1998. McKnight oversees a global team focused on brand strategy, product development and marketing. She’s been instrumental in driving the growth of and evolving the globally iconic Barbie brand, the staple of the company’s doll line, and has transformed the once dated Barbie brand and silhouette into one of the most diverse doll lines in the world, now with 176 different dolls, including nine different body types, 35 skin tones, and 94 different hairstyles, and the first Barbie with Down Syndrome, from which young (and old) consumers can choose, and in which they are better able to see themselves. For the past two years, Mattel has been the #1 Global Doll Manufacturer and Barbie has been the #1 Global Toy Property. Even prior to the July release of the long-gestating Barbie movie, McKnight’s work with the filmmakers and studio, has created interest, engagement, and the holy-grail of today’s marketing, culture defining word-of-mouth. Financial expectations are high for The Barbie movie, which is expected by some to reach $1Billion in global receipts.

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33. Cristina Diezhandino

Chief Marketing Officer: Diageo (England)

As Chief Marketing Officer for Diageo, Diezhandino oversees more than 200 spirits and beer brands including Casamigos, Tanqueray, and Guinness. There are few areas of the globe she doesn’t engage with, with responsibility for marketing for the company’s portfolio in more than 180 countries. Diezhandino’s influence is felt in myriad ways including her impact on ensuring gender equality and inclusion in Diageo’s advertising. Under her watch, and as of the past year, over 45% of the company’s global ads have been shot by women. Moreover, as the nonalcoholic beverage category continues to grow, Diezhandino has led the charge on promoting expanded offerings within Diageo’s portfolio and elevating safe, responsible drinking as a core tenet of their brands’ messaging. The company, which focuses on creating unique stories for each of its brands, is seeing its focus on storytelling and innovation pay off. Revenues grew 18% YoY, during the last reporting period.

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34. Don McGuire

Chief Marketing Officer: Qualcomm (United States)

With the U.S. wireless tech giant since 2016, McGuire leads global marketing across all Qualcomm’s businesses, as it diversifies beyond mobile into new growth areas. His influence extends across Qualcomm’s brand, product and technology marketing strategy, planning and operations, and all communications inclusive of creative, media, corporate communications; partner and channel marketing; sales and ecosystem enablement. McGuire has spent much of the last year bringing more of the company’s advertising and marketing practices in-house and has leaned further into consumer-facing marketing with the spin-off of its Snapdragon brand. At a time of major transition for the industry, culture and company, under McGuire’s leadership, Qualcomm introduced a powerful new campaign focused on its AI practices and showcasing the company’s expertise in device intelligence. YTD, as of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s market capitalization was up over 14%.

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35. Marc Speichert

EVP and Chief Commercial Officer: Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts (Canada)

Speichert oversees the development and execution of the luxury hotel company’s integrated commercial strategy, with a broad remit including responsibility for brand marketing, revenue growth across all lines of business, new product and market development, public relations, and social media, globally. Under Speichert’s marketing leadership, the hotelier has been building brand and property cultural reach, resonance, and relevancy in myriad ways. Deep integration into targeted streaming hits like Succession and, in particular, White Lotus, have put the brand into the cultural conversation, all while showcasing individual properties. Speichert is involved in all touch points of the Four Seasons guest experience, from the brand’s hotel and resort properties, restaurants, bars, and spas, to the company’s branded residential portfolio, private jet service, and a growing online retail program.

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36. Jill Kramer

Chief Marketing and Communications Officer: Accenture (Ireland)

With oversight of the 2000-person global marketing team for the consulting behemoth’s brand, Kramer leads corporate and financial communications, analyst and media relations, research, insights, and analytics arms for Accenture. Kramer has been a leader in B2B marketing for years, and since joining Accenture has earned a reputation for shaking up B2B marketing’s traditional approach. She is a significant advocate for applied creativity island the power of brand, and has pushed the industry at large to think beyond the status quo, and to embrace a Business to Human mindset. Her B2H approach has been brought to life in many of Accenture’s recent campaigns, including “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.” The company recently announced it will invest over $3B in AI over the next 3 years. As of the close of markets on June 16th, Accenture’s stock was up over 16% YTD.

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37. Ulrich Klenke

Chief Marketing Officer: Deutsche Telekom (Germany)

As CMO for Deutsche Telekom, Klenke has played a crucial role in maintaining the company’s position as one of the top three German brands in the world and as well as the most valuable telecommunications brand in Europe since 2014. In his role, and with a conviction that marketing spending is an investment in the company’s customers and market position, Klenke oversees marketing for the organization, which also operates as the parent company of T-Mobile in the United States. Klenke’s strategy focuses on bringing value to the everyday, with a particular focus on keeping communities and families connected. As the global brand looks to build on the success of this work, with 6.1% growth YoY in 2022, the company is also beginning a new joint venture with Vodafone, Orange, and Telefonika. The company’s stock was up over 10% YoY, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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38. Arnaud Carrez

Chief Marketing Officer: Cartier (France)

A key Maison inside global luxury giant’s Richemont’s portfolio, and as the iconic French luxury brand’s Chief Marketing Officer, Carrez oversees the global marketing portfolio for one of the best-known and highly desired jewelry brands in the world. Known for finding the right balance between the prestigious brand’s history and modern engagement strategies, essential efforts in ensuring the company maintains its cultural relevance with younger generations. Carrez is amongst the industry’s leaders in opening the aperture on luxury experience to increasingly include digital experiences. The digitization of its latest watch collection, where the showroom experience can be accessed entirely virtually, serves as but one example of his approach to marketing that bridges the timeless and timely, equity and modernity. The expression of the brand, which is all but synonymous with love in many circles, is increasingly being driven by Carrez to transparently reflect its values and global citizenship. The Cartier Maison’s results helped its parent company to record YoY results. In the company’s May reporting, revenues were up over 18%.

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39. Mike Katz

President Marketing, Innovation and Experience: T-Mobile (United States)

Katz’s influence is broad and deep, and extends across the company’s growth strategies, Digital, Product, Supply Chain and Wholesale teams. Focused on elevating the product, communications, and interactive experiences for the brand’s more than 110 million+ customers, continues to drive brand differentiation as the 5G wireless era evolves. The 25-year company veteran, is a key player in ensuring the brand stays true to and evolves its “Un-carrier” positioning, integrates the recent acquisition of Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile, and maintains its place as the largest 5G provider in the U.S. market. Over the last year, and among his broad remit, he’s helped drive brand differentiation by showcasing its extensive 5G capabilities as a customer acquisition strategy, and has continued to champion the company’s mission of using its network, scale and resources for good to support underserved populations including students and historically under-represented communities.. Strategic partnerships continue to play an important role in the carrier’s marketing, and include those with Disney’s StudioLAB, MLB, and the Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix, a physical manifestation of the speed 5G promises and delivers.

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40. Jonathan Bottomley

Chief Marketing Officer: Calvin Klein (United States)

In the CMO role since June of 2022, Bottomley is responsible for all aspects of Calvin Klein’s consumer marketing organization, including both engagement and brand experience. In his new role for this leading global lifestyle and apparel brand, Bottomley has brought his experience in culturally relevant, cut-through creative to continue the brand’s strong tradition of partnering with athletes and celebrities. He’s placed specific emphasis on bringing more global faces to Calvin Klein’s latest campaigns, like BlackPink’s Jennie and Australian model Akon Changkou. The brand’s commitment to simple, high-quality products is reflected in their advertising practices under Bottomley’s leadership, continuing the brand’s instantly recognizable aesthetic.

#41-50

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41. Sumit Virmani

Chief Marketing Officer: Infosys (India)

Virmani, who joined Infosys in 2004, took on the EVP and Global Chief Marketing Officer role in 2019. He now oversees market research, business alliances and development, direct marketing, and market strategy. At the start of last year, the company was named the fastest growing IT Services brand in the world, thanks in no small part to Virmani’s transformative B2B marketing approach with a particular focus on humanizing e-commerce. In the last year, Virmani has also emphasized building a diverse team, shifting hiring requirements to avoid certifications and bringing fresh thinking to the company’s strategy. The company saw tremendous growth over the last year with Virmani leading marketing efforts. As of the end of March, the company reported quarterly revenue growth of over 6% YoY.

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42. Alex Schultz

Chief Marketing Officer and VP Product: Meta Platforms (United States)

The UK-based CMO and VP of Analytics for Meta, Schultz leads global consumer marketing and product analytics for the tech giant and its portfolio of brands, hosting the most active users of any social media platforms. As Meta weathered a number of ups and downs in 2022, Schultz has been of essence to the company’s messaging focus on its expanding suite of products, including the launch of the Meta Quest Pro, the company’s newest mixed reality headset, showcasing the deep bench of Meta ventures and products. Schultz also played a significant role in the company reaching the landmark of 2 billion active users through innovations across its platforms including exploration in the Metaverse and expanded monetization of Reels on Instagram. At the end of March, the company reported quarterly revenue growth of over 2.5% YoY, and as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock was up over 71% versus prior year.

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43. Andrea Brimmer

Chief Marketing and PR Officer: Ally Financial (United States)

As Chief Marketing and PR Officer for digital-first bank Ally Financial, Brimmer is on the cutting edge of digital consumer engagement and taking a human-centric approach to marketing. Knowing people “didn’t need another bank just a better one” 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. Brimmer and her team understand marketing 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, among efforts leading Ally to be named a top-five brand in women’s sports among professional and college athletes. Recent collaborations in gaming, including with Animal Crossing, Pokemon Go, and Minecraft, are a testament to the Brimmer’s and the brand’s ability to drive growth through non-traditional category marketing channels. As of the close of markets on June 16th, Ally’s stock was up over 16% YTD.

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44. Marissa Jarratt

Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer: 7-Eleven (United States)

Jarratt took on the CMO role for the multi-national retailer in October 2019, and has since added Chief Sustainability Officer to her title and responsibilities. The brand and business, with 83,000 stores across 19 countries and regions, has spent the last year building deeper loyalty with Gen Z consumers as well as diverse audiences. Jarratt has been successful in strengthening the brand’s cultural relevance by marketing differently than the company has in the past, including through branded merchandise ventures like the 7Collection, featuring capsule collections of apparel with popular Gen Z brands. The company’s efforts to build a fanbase are paying off with Millennials, too, for whom 7-Eleven ended the year as the most popular grocery store destination.

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45. Carrie Palin

Chief Marketing Officer: Cisco (United States)

Responsible for driving the brand growth as an engine for increasing demand for the multinational information technology company’s products and services, Palin’s influence and remit extend across Cisco’s corporate brand strategy, events, customer advocacy, and marketing insights and analytics, regional field, industries, digital, and partner marketing. Palin is known for her willingness to take risks in service of industry-redefining marketing and has led the charge on transforming the company’s messaging to represent a more personalized “everything-as-a-service” model. To expand the brand’s reach and influence, Palin has taken Cisco deeper into social media, using platforms including TikTok, a historically non-traditional media venue for a B2B tech company. She’s also led the brand into global sports partnerships, including with Real Madrid and most recently the FIFA Women’s World Cup, using it as illustration of the company’s ability to build and integrate mission-critical infrastructures. For the period ending in April, the company reported quarterly revenues were up over 13% YoY and, as of the close of markets on June 16th, its stock was up 20%, also YoY.

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46. Manuel Arroyo

Global Chief Marketing Officer: The Coca-Cola Company (United States)

The Global CMO for one of the most valuable brands and beverage portfolios in the world, Arroyo’s responsibilities include global marketing and oversight of the teams for the company’s five beverage categories, as well as marketing operations, capabilities, and performance, human insights, and integrated marketing experience. Under Arroyo’s leadership, the company is driving a massive overhaul and transformation of its marketing organization and operations, one attracting the attention of global marketers across industry. in the past year, his marketing organization has been refreshing creative platforms for many brands in its portfolio of over 200. Working to ensure ever greater cultural resonance, in a climate of changing beverage and media consumption behaviors, especially among the company’s core youth audience, finds Arroyo increasing marketing spend and homing in on digital integration. Partnerships with next-gen relevant companies like Snapchat and OpenAI, while also leveraging long-standing partnership with global entities like FIFA and the Olympics, are all key to delivering on an ambitious goal of doubling the company’s customer base in 5 years. Quarterly revenues grew nearly 5% YoY for the period ending in March.

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47. Jane Wakely

Chief Consumer and Marketing Officer and Chief Growth Officer, International Foods: PepsiCo (United States)

At the start of 2022, Wakely began her role as Executive Vice President, Chief Consumer and Marketing Officer for PepsiCo, the second-largest food and beverage company in the world. She has oversight of category strategy, and marketing, R&D, and insights across multiple food and beverage categories for the global FMCG behemoth. Wakely’s reputation as a purpose-driven marketer has followed her to this role, where she has been instrumental in shaping PepsiCo’s pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) agenda, a driver of the company’s future value, and which utilizes the company’s consumer reach to make sustainability and inclusivity mainstream. For PepsiCo, this means completely evolving their supply chain towards sustainable innovation, and creating partnerships that maximize reach and impact, including N-Drip on water conservation, and the UEFA Champions League to help further girls’ empowerment in sports across the globe and reinforce their commitments to sustainability. At the end of march, PepsiCO reported YoY quarterly revenue growth of over 10%, and the company’s stock was up over 18 % YoY, as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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48. Jonny Bauer

Global Head of Brand Strategy and Transformation: Blackstone (United States)

As Global Head of Brand Strategy and Transformation for the PE giant, Bauer’s focus is not on the marketing of Blackstone itself, instead, his influence is felt across the company’s portfolio of over 250 brands, including Spanx, Supergoop, Crown and Ancestry. The former and long-time Global Chief Strategy Officer at Droga5, has brought brand strategy upstream as an essential and integrated part of business strategy and planning. With responsibility for connecting all elements of business transformation for the Company’s portfolio, Bauer considers expansion of brand narratives and how brands frame the categories in which they compete essential to driving brand and business growth and outsized enterprise valuations. Blackstone saw assets under management grow by 11% YoY in 2022. As of the close of markets on June 16th the company’s stock was up 25% YTD.

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49. Pamela Forbus

Chief Marketing Officer: Pernod Ricard (France)

Forbus oversees the North American marketing strategy for the French company’s portfolio of leading premium spirits and wines & champagnes brands, including Absolut, Jameson, and Perrier-Jouet. Her marketing influence and approach has been instrumental in moving the company beyond traditional spirits marketing towards an increasingly off-premise and consumer-centric strategy. Evidence of her differentiated approach to building responsible brands, Forbus led the first in 3 years U.S. television campaign for Absolut, encouraging people to vote first and drink second. Along with the company’s CEO, she has called on the ecosystem of businesses in the social media sphere to #EngageResponsibly, an open-source call-to-action to help stop hate speech online, and “keep social media social.” On the back of YoY revenue growth, the company’s stock was up over 25% YoY as of the close of markets on June 16th.

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50. Brie Carere

Chief Customer Officer: FedEx (United States)

After 20 years with FedEx, Carere was named EVP and Chief Customer Officer in June of last year. In her new role, she oversees the company’s global commercial strategy including sales, marketing, product, e-commerce, customer experience, and global pricing and serves as co-President and co-CEO of FedEx Services, the strategic and technological support arm of the transportation and business services company. Taking on the CMO role in a year of continued supply chain challenges, Carere has focused on ensuring quality customer experiences particularly around major holidays and shopping events like Cyber Monday. She has also emphasized the company’s sustainability commitments particularly when it comes to consumer’s carbon footprint, particularly with the recent launch FedEx Sustainability Insights, which allows customers to see their historical estimated carbon emissions and the impact of their shipping. In 2022, She and her team supported an almost 12% increase in revenue for the company, and as of the close of markets on June 16th, the company’s stock was up over 30% YTD.

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