CMO Next 2019: 50 Game-Changing Marketing Leaders

Chief marketing officers sit at the forefront of change within their organizations, driving technology investment, innovation, customer experience, new-product development, and the shaping of purpose, values, position and culture.

As the practice of marketing continues to transform at breakneck speed, so too does the CMO role itself, as new responsibilities and demands fall on their desks seemingly daily. Nowhere is the evolution of the role as evident as in a close look at the people who are assuming that title—and variations thereof—at companies big and small, incumbent and startup.

Today Forbes launches its second-annual CMO Next list, a compilation of 50 CMOs who are redefining the CMO role and who embody all that the role is becoming, can be and will be in the future. Through qualitative research tapping into the expertise of industry watchers as well as Forbes’ editorial industry knowledge, the list features 50 people who have reached the highest-level marketing position within a given company—CMO title or equivalent—and who are driving brand and business growth. Forbes reporter Marty Swant and I researched and compiled the list, which highlights the individuals’ education, expertise, experience, mindset and mandate within organizations. The individuals hail from both new and emerging companies as well as legacy, established corporations. Not a ranking, the goal is to annually spotlight CMOs who serve as models of a new, emerging and disruptive chief marketer.

There are some familiar names on this year’s list—and some relatively little-known. They may not all be household names—yet. They may not be as visible as more established counterparts at big, multinational companies. They may have spent their time thus far heads down, toiling to build a new brand or reset a historic company for future growth. They may have chosen an entirely new career track, bringing a diversity of thinking and expertise to a fledgling culture. Through their work, the day-to-day of their posts, they are reimagining, reinventing and redefining the CMO role. They have diverse educations and career paths. They are progressive thinkers who bring an obsessive customer-first mindset to the job.

That’s in line with experts’ thinking that we have hit a new era of CMO.

“With the rise in data, social and e-commerce, the CMO’s role has changed more in the last five years than the previous 20,” said Greg Paull, cofounder at R3. “It’s become a massive balance of innovation, creativity and data—of head and heart as well as hands and legs.”

This year’s CMO Next listers are leading marketing and brand at startups; young, direct-to-consumer companies; and large, established brands. This year’s list-makers hail from companies such as Allbirds, Freshly, Brandless, Drizly and Stitch Fix as well as Saucony, Carhartt, Moleskine and REI Co-op. Among the 50, some are new to the role; others have logged years in the seat. They have attended universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University, New York University, University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. The educational backgrounds of the list-makers are extremely varied and include history and politics, economics, international business, English literature, visual culture, art history, documentary film, computer science, sociology, human resources and finance, among others. About 20% have M.B.A. degrees, and only about 10% of list-makers spent time at Procter & Gamble or Unilever, for many decades the de facto training ground for future marketing leaders.

Many bring digital brands, tech, consumer-goods and niche-community experience. Several have global experience and a data and engineering background; still others are bringing their liberal arts educations to bear at a time when brand storytelling through multiple platforms is paramount. Several have worked at agencies previously, and others hail from companies such as Google, Uber, Spotify, Nike and eBay. In their written responses, the words “soul,” “purpose,” “community,” and “art and science” dominated. Half are women. Besides CMO, titles include chief brand officer and chief customer officer. All oversee marketing and brand engagement—even as they redefine what that is.

Collaboration is key, both inside and outside companies, at a time of “increasingly blurred lines between other functions, as the CMO’s role continues to morph into relatively new areas including the adoption and enablement of technologies, harnessing talent-power for both internal and external purposes, fueling product and service innovation, and more,” says MaryLee Sachs, cofounder of Brandpie.

Kevin Lane Keller, the E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, agreed. “CMOs and marketers in general get involved with so many different parts of the business—they really are asked to do so many different things. That is only going to increase with all the different interfaces with marketing and finance, operations, corporate strategy, etc.” 

And there is an awareness on the part of the CMOs on this list of consumers’ growing interest in—and expectation of—marketers’ positions on cultural and societal issues and the communities they’re building and what they stand for. “Over the years, more and more consumers are seeking out brands that align with their values,” said Cassie Hughes, cofounder of Grow Marketing. “In today’s highly polarized and politicized environment, CMOs need to determine where they can/should/want to take a stand—and how they can do so authentically. This is a huge shift. Consumers have access to more information about how organizations operate than ever before, they are much more marketing savvy, and their opinions can spread more widely and quickly than previous generations. This evolution has put every marketing effort from brands under unprecedented scrutiny.”

Of the best educational backgrounds for CMOs, Hughes said, “board positions are the new degrees of choice. In a changing and evolving industry, experience with other companies, issues and approaches is priceless. Well-rounded and broad-range thinkers are in high demand. We see leaders rounding out their business education with diversity of thoughts and perspectives—anthropology and social studies, along with organizational and collaborative management. Understanding people and their motivations is a key factor for future growth and success for all the areas of the CMO’s terrain.”

Indeed, added Bonnie Smith, founder of Studio B Entertainment, “the educational focus is around culture,” she said. “Implementing educational opportunities within their organization, providing authentic interaction and access to leadership and transforming internal culture to one that is diverse, inclusive and equitable—bottom line, it’s better for business growth.”

And innovation for today’s and tomorrow’s CMOs is “becoming increasingly about the market in marketing,” said Carlos Cata, managing partner at recruiting firm Caldwell Partners. “I’m seeing innovation being driven more by category creation—not just adding incremental [stuff]. Like Apple moving into credit cards with Goldman Sachs, like Disney going into streaming with Disney Plus. I’m seeing more happening around creating categories for business. Innovation has a new flavor, and it’s called category creation.”

Read on for profiles of each of the 50 individuals on this year’s Forbes CMO Next list.

Tony Ambroza, CMO, Carhartt

If anyone is to be credited with evolving Carhartt from a workwear brand to a lifestyle one, it’s Tony Ambroza. After a decade split between working on the marketing teams at Nike and Under Armour, he joined the 130-year-old brand in 2010 to help broaden its appeal without losing its rugged roots. In that span of time, brand awareness in the U.S. has nearly doubled. Carhartt also recently released a new TV spot created by the director of Friday Night Lights, which pays tribute to skilled workers, but it’s also involved with European skateboarding and BMX scenes while also collaborating with cutting-edge fashion lines. (It’s even created its own beer.)

Orlando Baeza, CMO, Verve

If you consider the past decade of Orlando Baeza’s marketing career, it’s clear why he describes the role of CMO as a “Swiss Army knife.” After working at both Adidas and Nike, he managed marketing for video games like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero while at Activision before going into brand strategy for Paramount Pictures, where he promoted movies like Ghost In The Shell and Fences and of xXx: Return of Xander, which broke the Chinese box office record for biggest opening weekend. After spending a year building and leading the marketing team at Buzzfeed, he joined Verve, where he’s built an in-house creative team, launched the experience marketplace Pollen and refined the brand ahead of Series C fundraising talks.

Russell Barnett, CMO, My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream

From Mike’s Hard Lemonade in the late ’90s to plant-based protein to the increasingly ubiquitous novelty of mochi ice cream, Russell Barnett has a track record of being on the cutting edge of marketing food trends for the U.S. market. As CMO of My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream—which has been busy creating new flavors and hosting pop up shops in places like SoHo and L.A.—Barnett sees the brand aspiring to “keep the weird” while maintaining “play as our purpose.” And thanks to distribution through more than 18,000 stores, it’s grown from unknown to $175 million in retail sales in 2.5 years, outselling Ben and Jerry’s novelties in absolute dollars and Häagen-Dazs novelties on a dollar sales per store per week metric.

Molly Battin, CMO, WarnerMedia

With a Princeton undergraduate degree in American history and an M.B.A. from Kellogg School of Management, Molly Battin is helping WarnerMedia “deliver the world’s best stories and most engaging content from talented storytellers and journalists to audiences around the globe” through marketing that is equally compelling. She is working to singularly define the company, a manifestation of the AT&T/Time Warner merger, for its various constituencies: consumers, employees, advertisers, partners and the creative community. Under her watch the company will unveil a new brand narrative, brand architecture and design this fall. But arresting creative must be bolstered by data and insights, she believes: For CMOs, “more than ever it is about mastering art plus science, math plus magic.”

Carrie Bienkowski, CMO, Peapod

With a decade of experience in marketing at Procter & Gamble before a brief stint as head of fashion in the European Union for eBay, Carrie Bienkowski says her husband describes her as a “Procter Googler with a heart and conscience.” (In between, at Cause & Effect, she advised C-suite executives in how to “turn good intentions into actions.) That’s all apparent in her role at Peapod, where she’s helped the $1 billion online grocery service compete with Amazon and Walmart. So how has Peapod, one of the older players in the space, kept up with even larger giants? Early last year, it opened Peapod Digital Labs in Chicago, which helped integrate the various departments. 

Damian Bradfield, CMO, WeTransfer

As president and CMO, Damian Bradfield has been with WeTransfer since nearly the beginning a decade ago, making file-transferring actually inspiring through marketing. Along with creating documentaries for musicians like John Legend, FKA Twigs and Bon Iver, the company recently partnered with writer Roxane Gay on a campaign to get people to spend less time on their computers and more time unplugged, thinking and creating offline. Bradfield also has been a proponent of providing free advertising space for social causes, and initiated a global takeover of WeTransfer’s ad platform to promote gun reform. To be a CMO is “to be a voice of the user or customer and to tell the truth,” he believes, adding that marketers “need to search for true insights from our customers and convert that insight into truthful actions.”

Scott Braun, CMO, Drizly

The Duke grad with an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan started his career as a brand manager at Gillette and soon was a marketing director at Procter & Gamble, where he developed new products for emerging markets and became “customer obsessed.” Then as VP of global marketing at Vistaprint he honed his digital-marketing chops. At alcohol-delivery service Drizly, he oversees both marketing as well as product development, as “there is an inextricable link between the brand and the product we are developing for the consumer.” Under his watch, the company is set to double the number of new users that try Drizly this year as compared to 2017—paying on average 30% less per new user to achieve those results.

Julie Channing, CMO, Allbirds

Early career experience at agencies Lot21 and AKQA set the stage for Julie Channing’s role as CMO at Allbirds. So did working for Levi’s, where she learned the power of authenticity—above all else. At Allbirds—an environmentally friendly footwear company that sold 1 million pairs in its first two years, has been profitable since its 2016 launch and has more than $77 million in funding—profit and purpose are interconnected. As CMO, she is “one part storyteller, one part calculated risk-taker, one part teammate and one part coach.” Unlike at some founder-led startups, where marketing is an afterthought, marketing always has been a priority: Founders Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger hired Channing six months before launch “to help them lay the brand foundation.”

Erin Clift, CMO, Waze

Erin Clift received an undergraduate degree from Indiana University in sociology and psychology, arguably a vital educational foundation for what marketing always has been but continues to become—people engagement. Previous posts at Google and Spotify inform her perspective now as the first CMO at Waze, as she knows well how to work across product, engineering, sales and marketing teams. She built a global team at Waze that includes brand and creative, communications, consumer marketing, business development and global partnerships. Most recently she led the launches of Waze Carpool and Waze for Cities and a brand partnership with Sesame Street.

Josh Dean, CMO, S’well

Josh Dean laid his marketing-expertise foundation, centered on brand storytelling and consumer centricity, at Unilever, where he spent 11 years at the start of his career. A move to Chobani taught him what’s required to build an entirely new category, and at Tommy John he relaunched the brand and, he said, drove more than five times’ growth over four years. A centerpiece of his work there was a 22-episode video series with Kevin Hart. A CMO’s responsibility, he said, is to create an enduring brand with “purpose and soul.” Now at S’well, he is building out marketing capabilities and spotlighting the brand’s sustainable mission through partnerships such as one with New York’s Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to extend its Million Bottle Program and student advocacy programming to distribute 323,000 S’well bottles to help displace 54 million single-use plastic bottles.

Eric Edge, SVP of Marketing & Communications, Postmates

After realizing that he didn’t want to go into politics, Eric Edge worked on marketing teams for social-media companies including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, where he learned the importance of being nimble. “Yearly planning cycles, monthlong work on creative briefs, months of creative reviews …these are all things that simply didn’t exist,” he said. “That created a shift in the way I thought, the way I worked with teams and the output that we had.” That mindset has been front and center in his role at Postmates, which has rolled out a fleet of robotic delivery vehicles, attracted a variety of unpaid celebrity clientele, and expanded from being about delivering food to becoming a vessel for everything from alcohol to designer clothing. In fact, Second Measure says Postmates is now growing faster than even two of its top competitors, Grubhub and Uber Eats. 

Deirdre Findlay, CMO, Stitch Fix

After more than a decade on the agency side at Digitas, Dierdre Findlay spent five years marketing Google hardware products ranging from Google Home and Chromecast to Google Wifi before becoming CMO of Stitch Fix. At the online personal-styling service, she’s focused on bringing personalization and inclusion to the brand’s marketing while managing the rest of the marketing funnel. In February, she led the brand’s first campaign, which debuted during the 2019 Oscars. Stitch Fix also launched two size-inclusive clothing lines with Katie Sturino and Rebecca Minkoff along with a podcast in the U.K. All that’s paying off too, with the company on track to make $1.5 billion in revenue during 2019.

Kevin Frisch, CMO, Wag!

The MIT grad began studying astrophysics but later switched to economics. With a marketing-analytics background, Kevin Frisch soon came to realize that “just because something was hard to measure or quantify, did not mean it had no value.” Before assuming the post as CMO at Wag!, Frisch worked at Uber as head of acquisition, CRM and analytics U.S., where his work uncovered $100 million in mobile-acquisition fraud. The CMO role in tech-driven companies is often ill-defined, but Frisch embraces its inherent opportunity. “Nearly every area that touches the customer is in marketing’s scope,” he said. But vital to success is having the CMO and CEO “in lockstep.” At Wag!, he manages the companywide analytics/data-science function, in addition to traditional marketing responsibilities.

Melisa Goldie, CMO, Yeti

After a 15-year career at Calvin Klein that culminated in the CMO role, Melisa Goldie launched her own agency for a few years before joining Yeti early this year. Coolers and clothing might be very different in form and function, but Goldie’s goal is to turn Yeti into somewhat of a holistic brand of its own, reaching global markets through communities of influencers and fans while also creating new categories of coolers and other products like the new Hopper M30 and the cargo-style LoadOut GoBox. She believes the modern CMO “needs to be equal parts artist, scientist and operator, who understands the importance of delivering compelling content in personal ways for brands.”

Mayur Gupta, CMO, Freshly

Mayur Gupta is an engineer turned marketer. He earned his master’s degree in computer science in India and in 2002 moved to the United States to work for Sapient. Later, at Kimberly-Clark, he realized that brands had to be always on and that data and technology are fully intertwined with marketing: “With the proliferation of channels, touchpoints and an ever-evolving world of consumer expectations, I realized the value of ‘systems thinking’ in every aspect of the business including marketing.” Previously he served as VP of growth and marketing at Spotify. “You market to grow, and that growth happens when you converge the irrationality and serendipity of marketing with data and science.” Freshly is now in the midst of its “brand rethink,” something that goes beyond a redesign of aesthetics, he says.

Jenna Habayeb, Chief Brand Officer, Ipsy

As many lifestyle-brand marketers are making their way into cannabis, Jenna Habayeb has done the opposite, leaving the luxury cannabis brand Canndescent earlier this year to head up marketing for the beauty brand Ipsy, which now has 3 million members. Since joining Ipsy five months ago, Habayeb has helped launch a rebrand, roll out a new portfolio of products, and release its first brand campaign focused on “self-discovery and self-expression.”

Kristin Harrer, CMO, Dollar Shave Club

Before becoming CMO of Dollar Shave Club in June, Kristin Harrer had a range of marketing success on both the agency and brand side. As a strategic planner at the Portland-based advertising powerhouse Wieden + Kennedy, Harrer worked on a number of iconic campaigns such as “Go Forth” for Levi’s Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit.” She also helped Nike pivot from focusing on athletes to consumers before joining Samsung to oversee the launch of nine phones and two brand platforms. And while she’s still new at DSC, Harrer now oversees not just brand and product marketing, but R&D, creative and design, and all aspects of media. She believes “the role of a CMO is to set a north-star vision for the future of the brand and then inspire, empower, coach and support a team as they forge a path to get there.”

John Harrobin, CMO, Audible

Before joining Audible as CMO to further growth in this golden age of audio, John Harrobin spent 15 years in a variety of roles at Verizon helping the wireless provider usher in a number of new technologies and pricing models. Now, as the Amazon-owned company seeks to get more “share of ear,” he’s tasked with creating more reasons for customers to listen in. That’s primarily through quality content—which Harrobin has helped both create and distribute—while also leading media buying, all creative and brand work. Last year, the company made a unique marketing play at the Kentucky Derby with a horse named Audible.

Melissa Hobley, CMO, OKCupid

Melissa Hobley graduated from Fordham University with a degree in political science then started her career as a celebrity publicist. “Whether we like it or not, we live in a celeb-obsessed society,” she contends. “Understanding how that world operated and being a ‘gatekeeper’ made me extremely level-headed about that world.” At the dating app, owned by Match Group, she is “head storyteller, growth driver, cultural-relevance captain, champion of the customer.” Maintaining cultural relevance is key, and OKCupid has not been afraid to lean in politically. Hobley launched the brand’s first campaign in its 15-year history, the “DTF” campaign, which quickly went viral and ignited app downloads. Under her watch, the app also created a “Trump Filter” that enabled daters to filter based on political beliefs.

Joy Howard, CMO, Dashlane

The former CMO of Sonos and VP of marketing at Converse spent ten years in a rock band before moving to marketing-leadership roles. A political science degree coupled with an M.B.A. are Joy Howard’s educational foundation as she now heads Dashlane, a password-management platform, where she is working to “build the brand, ignite demand and maximize lifetime customer value.” A brand, she believes, “is simply the culture of your product—both inside and outside the company.” And, notably, brands should be platforms for social change, she contends, “and this means the best marketers will think and act like activists.”

Cari Jacobs, CMO, Unison

Working with brands like Lexus, Ritz-Carlton and Coca-Cola in the 2000s during her time with various parts of Publicis, Cari Jacobs gained valuable insight early on into data-driven marketing and attribution before spending years marketing residential solar electricity at Sunrun. (She also took a two-year gap in the middle of her run with Team One and Saatchi to travel the world solo.) Now, at Unison, she’s focused on creating a new category of home ownership called “co-investing.” Since joining last year, Jacobs has helped make marketing the core of a business tasked with evolving the standard mortgage model. 

Soyoung Kang, CMO, eos Products

Soyoung Kang has a powerhouse education: She earned her M.B.A. from the Wharton School with a dual major in finance and marketing, and she holds a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in architecture. She spent time at Boston Consulting Group and most recently was senior VP of brand development at Bath & Body Works. Now at innovation-centric eos, she’s leading through industry change. She leans into design-centric thinking, she says, and “all marketing must start from great product.” Since joining eos as CMO last June, she launched a reboot of the core brand, including creative identity, strategic vision, product pipeline, messaging strategy and content, and she debuted innovation platforms #eosflavorlab, powered by co-creation, and the Microbatch program, a test-and-learn initiative. 

Kevin Keith, Chief Brand Officer, Orangetheory

Kevin Keith’s goal is to make people feel something differently about the Orangetheory brand than any other fitness brand—hope, excitement and self-empowerment. As chief brand officer at the eight-year-old company, he’s driving brand awareness and growth: He helped grow system revenue to $1 billion in 2018 and increased retention among current members by 2.7% from 2018 to 2019. And he developed a loyalty program that uses predictive data captured by heart-rate monitors to spur members to stick with the fitness program, furthering brand engagement. Early-career agency experience as well as stints at UPS and Coca-Cola inform his current role.

Tom Klein, CMO, Mailchimp

In a few short years, Tom Klein’s helped bring Mailchimp from a little-known email company to an omnichannel marketing powerhouse. Some of that can be traced to the early adoption of podcast advertising when a campaign to sponsor the hit show Serial helped make Mailchimp a household name beyond their small and midsize business target market. (This year, Mailchimp debuted a content studio for podcasts, short-form videos and longer original films aimed at entrepreneurs.) Before joining Mailchimp, Klein and his twin brother cofounded and ran the agency Digital Scientists, and also spent a few years at Chanel managing strategic planning for Asia and the Americas. Under Klein’s watch, the company’s revenue jumped from $280 million in 2015 to $600 million last year.

Don Lane, CMO, Saucony

With more than two decades of agency work on his résumé—he spent 21 years at Arnold Worldwide, working on iconic campaigns such as Volkswagen’s “Drivers Wanted”—Don Lane made the move to the client side when in 2016 he joined DraftKings as senior VP of brand and creative. That experience supercharged his learnings as a marketer, including the power of performance marketing. Now at Saucony, in his first CMO role, Lane is leaning heavily into the sneaker-and-apparel company’s “Run for Good” positioning, launched five months after he joined. Under Lane’s leadership, the niche brand creates buzz-worthy initiatives such as the Run For Good Relay, the first-ever Instagram relay race on Global Running Day. And its Saucony Originals shoes have captured pop-culture attention, including the launch of an Avocado Toast shoe organically picked up by Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon.

Roberto Lobetti Bodoni, CMO, Moleskine

It’s not easy to iterate innovation with the almighty simplicity of pen and paper, but that’s what Roberto Lobetti Bodoni has helped the Italian brand to do. From marketing the analog-digtal Smart Writing System to creating user-driven communities and experiential retreats and cafes to a variety of cross-promotional partnerships, he has helped turn the Moleskine into a lifestyle brand focused on productivity and creativity. (It also won an Apple Design Award for the note-taking app, Flow.) He says it’s important to not forget that the brand as “born out of an idea, that of bringing back beloved notebooks used by memorable artists in the 19th and 20th centuries that had gone out of production.” (Before becoming CMO, he also had marketing stints at beauty and skin-care brands like L’Oréal and Beiersdorf—not to mention a number of years in branding and entertainment at the Italian satellite TV company Sky Italia.) 

Kirsten Lynch, CMO, Vail Resorts

After marketing stints at Pepsi, Ford and Kraft, Kirsten Lynch has helped turn the slopes into a digital-marketing machine. Leading a team of 550 of marketers, she’s brought data-driven modeling to the company’s advertising efforts while also bringing in innovative new tools for customer service. (For example, Emma, a  “Digital Mountain Assistant,” uses natural language processing and AI to answer questions about Vail’s ski resorts.) Since she joined in 2011, revenue has quadrupled, with Vail estimating fiscal-year 2019 revenue of around $2.3 billion. 

Aaron Magness, CMO, Brandless

At Brandless, Aaron Magness is bringing together the experience he gained heading marketing for some of the most progressive brands: Zappos, Betabrand and Coastal.com. Being a successful marketer requires relentless curiosity, he says, about who the customer is and what he or she wants, and marketing is what customers “see, read and share”—and, most important, feel. At Brandless, the goal is to let the product “shine” and customers tell the brand story. With a community of more than 1 million, Brandless has amassed 80% of revenue through organic channels, and the marketing team is integral to new-product launches, including, recently, CBD.

Andréa Mallard, CMO, Pinterest

She’s been a journalist and a designer and has overseen product innovation. Now as CMO of Pinterest, Andréa Mallard is living the role of a modern-day chief marketer, which must “be equal parts rabbi and scientist”—taking leaps of faith while having a clear rationale for why a vision is not “needlessly risking the business.” At Pinterest, Mallard—hired as the company’s first-ever CMO—is helping to define marketing where it hadn’t really existed. In her first nine months, she reorganized the team, established the company’s mission and core brand principles in anticipation of its IPO filing, and soon will launch its first campaign—all in service to the belief that “great marketing shapes culture, it doesn’t merely respond to it.”

Kenny Mitchell, CMO, Snap

Kenny Mitchell, who joined Snap in April as its first CMO, has been an early adopter when it comes to using emerging storytelling formats like augmented reality for McDonald’s and branded content at Gatorade. While he led Snap’s first global ad campaign this summer, he’s been experimenting on the platform for other brands for years. For example, at Gatorade, he created a viral seven-minute animated video with Usain Bolt and an AR lens for the Super Bowl featuring Serena Williams.

Minjae Ormes, CMO, Visible

She received her undergraduate degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, but visual-culture buff Minjae Ormes later found herself in the cinema studies master’s program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an education that honed her love of storytelling. Ormes spent seven years at YouTube, where she ran various parts of global consumer marketing before joining Verizon-owned Visible as CMO. Her experience at YouTube taught her to be resilient and that “radical solutions for big problems don’t come with incremental changes or conservative approaches.” She oversees brand strategy, creative, social, community and influencer engagement, press, marketing and brand partnerships, media and analytics, affiliate marketing, product marketing, and consumer insights, in addition to member and employee experience and engagement, for the digital wireless carrier. She introduced the new consumer brand to U.S. consumers with the “404 Store Not Found” campaign, which was shortlisted for a 2019 Cannes Lion.

Jann Parish, CMO, Green Growth Brands

To use a worn tech phrase from the tech world, cannabis is still in its early days, but the brands that stick out now have the power to shape an entire industry. Jann Parish, who left her role as CMO of Victoria’s Secret in 2018 and in June joined the Ohio-based cannabis brand as CMO, said a CMO’s job is “to harmonize the tug between living in the past, present and future.” That’s what she’s tasked with now while navigating the regulation-heavy realm of THC and CBD. But in less than a year, Green Growth Brands has managed to launch 100 CBD shops in nearly every state.

Jane Prior, CMO, Vita Coco

Having started her career as a brand ambassador in Ireland, Jane Prior understands the importance of having a one-to-one relationship with customers. This summer, Vita Coco launched an unconventional campaign that began with an algorithm that claimed to find the brand’s biggest haters before offering to send a jar of urine to one of them. But the organic stunt is just one of the ways the brand has been boosting its visibility during the latest coconut-water craze. Last year, Prior helped the brand debut a new flavor, and this year she helped parent company All Market Inc. release a new aluminum canned-water brand.

Mike Raffensperger, CMO, Fanduel

Before heading up marketing for the fantasy sports company, Mike Raffensperger learned about e-commerce as head of marketing at Amazon after mastering the OTT space as director of digital strategy and marketing for DirectTV. And as more states continue to legalize mobile sports betting, FanDuel’s customer base of 8.5 million is poised to grow rapidly. (The company is already valued at more than $1 billion.) As CMO, he’s tasked with overseeing new customer acquisition, go-to-market campaigns, media strategy and a variety of other tasks for a company likely to hit more regulatory hurdles along the way to growth. But Raffensperger’s been through choppy waters before: He helped lead a boutique ad agency through the 2008 financial crisis before working with some of the biggest tech brands like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Nick Ragone, Exec VP and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Ascension

Nick Ragone is part of the leadership team that drives strategy and vision for Ascension, a $24 billion hospital system based in St. Louis. An outspoken proponent of “a world-class consumer experience in healthcare and the importance of data in better understanding the consumer journey through our system,” he is working to create an integrated brand experience to go along with a now-national Ascension brand following the rebranding of 2,700 care sites over the past five years. The national brand has enabled the organization, under Ragone’s leadership, to create national service lines for its children’s and military/veterans’ capabilities.

Karuna Rawal, CMO, Sustainable Bioproducts

After a decade in marketing at Procter & Gamble and nearly another between the Publicis agencies, Karuna Rawal took her marketing skills to the protein-based biotech food manufacturer. The firm has already raised $33 million in Series A funding from 1955 Capital, which Rawal describes as “a fund that invests in companies with the potential to solve the most pressing problems in the developing world.” Her big priority for this year is to ready the brand next for commercial launch sometime in 2020. “Marketing is a strategic driver of value at our company, especially at this stage of our journey,” Rawal said. “Our CEO highly values the importance of building an enduring brand with all of our various stakeholders including consumers, investors, employees and partners.”

Pri Shumate, CMO, World Surf League

Pri Shumate previously served as VP of brand marketing for global running at Nike, where she was focused on telling the stories of athletes—a priority for her now at World Surf League. At Nike, she also was the marketing lead for the Rio Olympic Games—great background for powering the marketing behind surfing’s debut at the 2020 Olympics. Meanwhile, a stint as CMO for Nike’s surf brand Hurley provided for her “an incredible opportunity to learn about the surfing community from both the brand and industry side. Diving deeper into the consumer journey allowed us to reset the strategy for the brand to focus on the next generation of consumers based on those insights.” In her first ten weeks at WSL, “we’ve helped to sharpen our product marketing offering across WSL Events and WSL Studios … and landed an Olympics plan to leverage what could be the biggest moment for the sport to date.”

Shiv Singh, CMO, Eargo

No stranger to the marketing world—he has been a high-profile marketer for decades, with key digital and innovation roles at Visa and PepsiCo—Shiv Singh recently made the move to a CMO role at a direct-to-consumer company—and is set to help revolutionize hearing-loss solutions. At Eargo, with funding of more than $135 million, he’s driving awareness and growth and “building the first truly consumer brand in the med-tech space” to serve the millions of people who suffer from hearing loss with wearable technology that’s “as straightforward and acceptable as wearing glasses.” His goal as CMO? To inspire “an entire company to be customer obsessed, to drive the business forward, to motivate a team to do their best and most fulfilling work, and to serve in a small way as a moral compass for business, industry and society at large.”

Brooke Skinner Ricketts, CMO, Cars.com

She earned her undergraduate degree in politics and art history, and she went on to work at creative agencies for brands in categories as diverse as bourbon and beer, bug spray and household cleaners, technology companies and fast food. As head of brand strategy at Twitter, she “designed innovative ways for brands to connect” with customers. Now as CMO of Cars.com, Brooke Skinner Ricketts is moving forward with the consumer squarely in her sights and in “lockstep” with the product team, relaunching the brand in August as “an entirely new way to experience shopping for cars.” She’s also led a move to an agile-marketing model, which “pushed our team to challenge existing modes of operation, collaborate toward fresh solutions to perennial challenges, and extend team and individual reach cross-functionally. Marketing is a team sport that depends on bright, bold ideas, and I believe agile has strengthened our teams and emboldened our outcomes.”

Chris Stadler, CMO, Tonal

Chris Stadler earned a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology and a minor in marketing from Duke University, and later went on to earn an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. From there he spent eight years at Procter & Gamble and four years at Equinox, where he honed his understanding of the “high-end fitness customer.” As CMO at Ironman, he gained global experience. Now at connected-fitness company Tonal, one of his most important roles is being a “thought partner” with other company leaders—representing customers but also “listening, identifying opportunities and solving problems collectively” as the lines among functions blur. He’s built a robust marketing team in the highly competitive Bay Area with hires from Facebook, Google, Uber, FitBit and ClassPass, and he’s introduced a virtual showroom. Tonal’s total funding to date is $90 million with investors such as Serena Ventures and Mayfield.

Ben Steele, Chief Customer Officer, REI Co-op

With an English degree from the University of Puget Sound, Ben Steele is a “firm believer there’s more insight to be gleaned about human dynamics, leadership and decision making from a great novel than from any business book.” He started his marketing career working for the Seattle Mariners and REI, to which he later returned. A creative thinker, he initially resisted the “numbers side” of business, but “over time I’ve found that the aspects of the business I’d spent years avoiding are the parts I now find most interesting and important.” Having a chief customer officer rather than a CMO reflects REI’s “belief in a holistic, integrated approach that goes beyond the traditional silos of marketing or digital channels,” Steele explains. With initiatives such as the famed #OptOutside and the Force of Nature fund, an open-submission grant for female entrepreneurs in the outdoor space, REI is, under Steele’s guidance, actively serving its co-op membership.

Duke Stump, CMO, Lime

More than 15 years at Nike taught Duke Stump the power of purpose in building brands. Meanwhile, a stint at Seventh Generation solidified his belief in “the role of soul in business— corporate responsibility leadership shaped how to do well and do the right thing—and that they are not mutually exclusive,” and heading brand and community at Lululemon showed him how impactful a decentralized brand model can be. Now as the first CMO at two-year-old Lime, which has raised $777 million in funding and has 700 employees worldwide, Stump is driving the shift from awareness to “effortless loyalty” for the brand. Under his watch Lime launched “Unlock Life,” a series of videos created with Anonymous Content and their creative incubator The Lab telling the stories of real Lime users and how the service has changed their lives.

Chris Thorne, CMO, Beats by Dr. Dre

In the decade since he was general manager of the social gaming platform FanIQ, Chris Thorne has had a varied marketing career. He learned creative storytelling while leading consumer marketing and media inside of Electronic Sports before becoming growing his skills in e-commerce and data-driven marketing as CMO of The Honest Company. Before joining Beats earlier this year, he was chief growth officer of tech-driven medical startup Forward—a company that fits in nicely with the wearable health tech ambitions of Beats’ parent company, Apple.

Kerry Tucker, CMO, pocket.watch

The former senior VP at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and CMO at Victoria’s Secret now is leading marketing for pocket.watch, a kids’ content creator. She spearheads the launch and promotion of its franchises, including Ryan’s World, Ryan’s Mystery Playdate and Hobby Kids Adventures, and collaborates with partners Viacom/Nickelodeon, Amazon, Target and Walmart. She also spearheaded the first comprehensive third-party research to explore the impact of Generation Alpha. It follows her belief that “the CMO's role is to protect and promote the brand he/she represents by clearly defining its core values and remaining steadfast in the communication and activation of those values.”

Melissa Waters, CMO, Hims & Hers

Early experience working on consumer package goods and later for app-based businesses Pandora and Lyft prepared Melissa Waters for her current role as CMO at Hims & Hers, a wellness and telemedicine direct-to-consumer company that started 18 months ago selling erectile-dysfunction and hair-loss treatments to men. “We want to normalize the conditions so many of us face, and the tone we take in our marketing is how we invite people to participate in this important conversation,” she explains. Since she joined earlier this year the company has launched eight new products, expanded to Florida where new legislation was passed allowing it to operate, and grown overall customer base. The company has fulfilled more than one million orders since launching less than two years ago and has raised more than $200 million in funding to date.

Jeff Weiser, CMO, Shopify

A self-described former quant, Jeff Weiser got his M.B.A. from Columbia University with a specialization in decision, risk and optimization—the perfect trifecta for a digital marketer. However, he said going into marketing was somewhat of an accident. After spending a few years on the analytics team at a social-gaming company, he led analytics for Beachbody before spending a year as CMO of Shutterstock where he learned to combine “quantitative marketing with brand and creative execution.” From 2017 to 2018, total customers jumped from 600,000 to 820,000 merchants, and Shopify also just released its first integrated brand campaign titled “Let’s Make You A Business” that took vacant storefronts and turned them into out-of-home ads. (The company also just debuted its own CBD platform to harness part of the cannabis craze.)

Jason White, CMO, Cura Partners, Inc. | Select

When the cannabis startup Cura Partners wanted to bring in someone with the marketing prowess to bring it into the mainstream, it chose someone with deep knowledge of music and culture: White. As the former global head of marketing for Beats by Dre, he also spent eight years at Wieden + Kennedy as global account director for Nike and before becoming managing director of the agency’s Shanghai office. Since joining earlier this year, White has already led a rebrand of, developed a new TV campaign debuting this fall, built a diverse marketing team hat’s 53% women and 39% people of color, and helped lead a separate 501c3 nonprofit focused on reversing some of the effects of cannabis’s prohibition era. “We’re inserting ourselves directly into culture,” he says. “So that we can be a part of what is happening now in the world, not just in cannabis.

Hanneke Willenborg, CMO, Seventh Generation

As part of a long career with Unilever that included several years as “great brand mother” of Ben & Jerry’s, Hanneke Willenborg’s job as CMO of Seventh Generation is to market sustainable products as well as a sustainable environment. To raise awareness about climate change, the company donated a week of national broadcast time to 350.org and the climate movement. After all, to Willenborg, being CMO means “taking care of the needs of people in the world of today and the world of tomorrow.” Along with U.S. campaigns, Willenborg is also using her deep experience marketing a range of Unilever products to help launch a new product that eliminates unnecessarily plastic and water waste while also expanding into new international markets.

Deborah Yeh, CMO, Sephora

As a marketer and also member of Sephora’s operating committee, Deborah Yeh wears a combination of hats at the beauty brand to both drive engagement and also real revenue. That’s led to leading a range of new products, services and experiences that improve customer engagement. In addition to creating a two-day immersive beauty experience, Yeh also helped build the company’s in-house subscription service, in-house content studio, a daily YouTube video, a new credit card, influencer marketing program and personalization team.

Jen Young, CMO, Outdoorsy

After spending years building CRM programs for some of the largest brands, Jen Young founded Outdoorsy as a way to connect consumers with the great outdoors with a marketplace for RVs. That mindset has paid off. Outdoorsy said it’s had a 400% increase in booking along with 17 million website visitors in 2018. That’s translated into revenue of $250 million so far in 2019—more than half of the $450 million in transactions it’s reported since the launch in 2015. “Outdoorsy is connecting people,” she said, “using shared resources to make good in the world— and that’s one of the reasons we started Outdoorsy.”

Marty Swant assisted with this list.