What makes a great workplace? A company that knows what it is and where it’s headed is a good start, but all the goals in the world are nothing without a robust culture that inspires creativity and deepens belonging on the way to better business outcomes.
ADWEEK’s inaugural Architects of Culture award celebrates senior leadership across the marketing, advertising, and technology industries who are actively creating environments where talent can learn, thrive, and make an impact.
Whether through a traditional humanresources role or as an executive who leads by example, these professionals are building resourceful, empathetic workplaces that value the employees helping them rise to the top.
Ted Alcarez
For more than 25 years, Ted Alcarez has been shaping workplaces where people can truly thrive. One of Fig’s earliest hires, he built a people-first model anchored in trust, flexibility, and shared success that motivates people to do their best work. Employees receive standout benefits such as free health coverage, unlimited PTO, 401(k) matching, and FitCoin, a $1,500 annual wellness stipend. Individualized long-term career plans and profit sharing tie personal growth to agency performance. In 2025, Fig hit its diversity goal to mirror broader U.S. demographics and maintained an 83% retention rate. Alcarez’s formula can be described simply as: Invest in people, and they’ll invest right back.
Emily Barron
At Basis, flexible frameworks—not rigid rules—have created a high-performance culture. A 20-year company veteran and mother of three, Emily Barron rose through operational roles to CPO, bringing a perspective that understands how both the business and its employees thrive. She introduced Flex Fridays and Lifestyle Spending Accounts after digging into how work actually felt for employees. She’s expanded paid parental leave to 16 weeks, added adoption and surrogacy support, and revamped benefits, helping Basis reach just 5.3% voluntary turnover and a 92% return-to-work rate. With trust and performance rising together, Basis earned more than 20 best workplace awards in 2025 alone.
Nicole Brown
Over her 20 years at Mediaocean, Nicole Brown has built a scalable system for nurturing and retaining top talent. Her five global development programs are delivering 50 hours of learning per employee each year through more than 700 instructor-led sessions, plus a mentorship track that boasts over 85% retention. Besides traditional DEI benchmarks, Brown has championed returnships to support women reentering the workforce. Brown also ties ESG directly to people strategy, specifically through a companywide Green Dream Team that turns sustainability from a vague concept into actionable insights both internally and through commitments such as Ad Net Zero.
Pam Buyers
Pam Buyers joined PMG when it was a 13-person startup in 2012, working out of a windowless Fort Worth office. More than a decade later, PMG spans 11 global hubs and over 1,000 employees, with retention above 90% guided by excellence and belonging embedded side-by-side in daily decision-making. The company’s eight ERGs foster connection through listening and inviting challenges; employees also came together to support 70 nonprofits last year through PMG’s Days of Giving program. Buyers’ efforts have earned PMG a place among Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing three years in a row.
Lisa Chang
Joining The Coca-Cola Company in 2019 was a change of pace for Lisa Chang, whose previous experience spanned financial services and broadcast television. Making such unconventional moves has been codified at the beverage giant under her Thrive program, which fosters self-directed growth for employees that lets them choose their own career path rather than being hemmed in by strict org charts. Then, the beverage giant’s Opportunity Marketplace actually helps them find internal roles to use their new knowledge. In implementing AI across the company, Chang’s human-centric approach emphasized it as a technology that allows people to focus on purpose-driven work, increasing empathy at every level of the business.
Gloria Chen
With a career spanning nearly three decades, Gloria Chen has shaped nearly every dimension of Adobe’s business, from ecommerce and sales operations to corporate strategy and growth. Her leadership has long been defined by her ability to bridge business strategy and human impact, a crucial talent as she stepped into the chief people officer role at the start of the pandemic. Leading with rigor and empathy, Chen is preparing Adobe’s workplace culture for the next big disruption, creating an environment where innovation thrives and championing the responsible adoption of AI, grounded firmly in the company’s core values.
Joey Chowaiki
Since co-founding Open Influence 12 years ago, Joey Chowaiki has prioritized trust, transparency, and shared ownership over churn-and-burn agency culture. Chowaiki’s OI Exchange Program literally brings the agency’s U.S. and European offices closer together, with the goal of sparking collaboration and new creativity. To implement new AI tools, he led the push to invest in training so teams feel confident, not threatened. Open Influence’s 82% retention rate and average leadership tenure of eight years speak to a company culture that makes people feel heard, connected, and motivated to grow their careers for the long haul.
Greg Dolan
Since Keen Decision Systems’ founding in 2010, CEO Greg Dolan has tied hiring, promotions, and rewards to a clear set of values. His EDGE philosophy—Empathy, Directness, Guidance, Empowerment—shows up in coaching, quarterly OKRs, and real-time feedback instead of once-a-year reviews. He also introduced a four-day workweek, which has resulted in measurable productivity gains, as well as remote and hybrid options, unlimited PTO, and paid parental leave long before they were trendy. Between clear internal guidance and trusting employees to balance work and life, Dolan has build a company with faster onboarding, lower churn, and 40% year-over-year growth in 2025.
Agustina Garavilla
One of Gut’s first employees, Agustina Garavilla built the playbook for the agency’s culture, from its values to how leaders are developed, then scaled it globally. She created Gut’s Department of Operations and Culture to ensure growth, creativity, and people development move in sync. As the network expanded to 12 offices and 1,300 new hires in 2025 alone, she kept teams aligned through shared rituals like the annual Beginning of the Year gathering to discuss the agency’s present and future, the internal Gutsy Awards, and cross-office collaboration models. Her focus is simple: Grow fast, stay brave, and protect the culture that got you there.
Grace Hart
Putting people first meant addressing pay equity head-on for Grace Hart. At Forsman & Bodenfors, where Hart worked for nine years until January, concerns over pay disparity were detracting from employees’ ability to do great work, so she led a push to publish salary ranges, audit pay practices, and eliminate questions about prior compensation during hiring. The nearly five-year effort reduced workplace anxiety and led to the agency’s Fair Pay Workplace Certification—the first global creative agency to earn the distinction. By opening up conversations about pay internally and across the industry, Hart helped build a culture founded on transparency and trust.
Lisa Hurst
With nearly 30 years of experience, Lisa Hurst knows you can’t leave culture to chance. As AMP doubled in size through two major integrations, she focused on keeping people connected, visible, and heard—especially difficult across a largely remote workforce. She guided senior leaders through workstyle training (and regularly dedicates time to mentoring emerging leaders), opened up office hours and AMAs, and shifted team meetings into real conversations, not top-down updates. By fostering stronger collaboration and a people-first approach across the agency, AMP has seen client sentiment nearing 90% positive and kept morale steady while scaling to 450 employees.
Hunter Johnson
Hunter Johnson built Xpedition on one concept—respect—that guides how he develops talent, partners with clients, and shows up for the industry. His team of Xplorers is 62% women, 41% people of color, and 30% LGBTQIA+, reflecting his commitment to inclusion. This year, he added the Psychological Safety Initiative, implementing employee-led training, community agreements, and a work from anywhere policy that fosters creative respect. For clients, respect looks like transparency and thoughtful storytelling through a culturally grounded lens. And for the industry, Xpedition earns respect through advocacy and impact. The result is a company where people feel safe taking creative risks and bringing their full selves to work.
Julie Kirkham
People lead better when they feel connected and prepared, an insight that led The Trade Desk’s Julie Kirkham to build Lead Well, a global leadership program shaped by 2,000 insights from managers across 36 offices. These practical, peer-led learning sessions reached nearly half the company in 2025 and met real business challenges head-on, with 90% of participants reporting confidence about applying the takeaways immediately. Her team even turned feedback training into a puppet-powered video series that sparked Slack fandom and real behavior change. With measurable lifts in engagement and career confidence, Kirkham was named among America’s Growth Leaders of 2026 by Time magazine.
Lauren Kushner
Creative agency Kettle runs on a simple belief: Culture drives everything. As it’s doubled in size over the past two years, turnover stayed under 3% under the leadership of CEO Lauren Kushner. She’s built a flexible, distributed workplace with inclusive healthcare, mental health stipends, and real guardrails against burnout. Promotions are frequent and equitable, and her all-women C-suite sets the tone. From cross-disciplinary workshops to pro bono work with The Trevor Project, Kushner prioritizes client-inclusive learning experiences for staff that build knowledge and collaboration. Internally, she also launched the Vision Board speaker series and a robust internship program that leads into full-time roles.
Rich Lehrfeld
Cultivating a high-performing work culture happens in the small moments—how leaders listen, how teams experiment, and how people feel when they log on each morning. At Walmart Connect, Rich Lehrfeld pairs big ambitions with a steady hand, creating space for smart risk-taking and honest dialogue. Under his watch, sentiment is high and belonging is more than a buzzword through initiatives such as the Associate Belonging Experience, which empowers workers to design internal and community programs that would ordinarily be scripted by management. Lehrfeld’s leadership proves that when people feel trusted and prepared, performance follows.
Anna McMurphy
Over more than 15 years at MNTN, Anna McMurphy has grown alongside the CTV performance marketing platform, with leadership roles across finance, accounting, and HR. That end-to-end perspective has helped her shape a culture that expects high performance underpinned by a focus on health, belonging, and growth. Despite the company being fully remote, McMurphy has built a connected culture through initiatives that drive impact such as MNTN Cares, which supports the local communities where MNTN stages its annual gatherings, and Summit to Success, a direct link between current staffers and the future of the industry.
Lisa Nadler
When fairness and well-being are the starting points, the only way is up. At Integral Ad Science, Lisa Nadler introduced an AI-powered pay parity program to address compensation gaps and build trust, as well as targeted career development programs, cutting attrition by 50% and boosting internal promotions by 24%. Her Well on Your Way initiative spans physical, mental, and financial health, helping to stabilize healthcare costs, saving $500,000 annually that went to expanding benefits. Accolades have followed: Nadler was honored as HRO Today’s Leader of Distinction for 2025, and recruitment platform Built In named IAS one of its Best Places to Work in 2026.
Kerrie Peraino
Elevating talent to meet the moment has defined Kerrie Peraino’s career across two fast-changing industries. Beginning at American Express, where she spent 20 years in various senior HR positions culminating in her role as chief talent officer, Peraino has been with Google since 2017. Among her accomplishments was leading people strategy at Alphabet’s life sciences arm Verily once it was spun off as its own company. Now at Google Cloud, she coordinates hiring, leadership development, and succession planning amid fast business growth. Known for pairing operational rigor with a people-first mindset, Peraino focuses on organizational effectiveness that supports innovation at scale.
Kim Range
Talented people are still too often guessing their way to success. Kim Range has seen the same problem caused by different systems across the healthcare, banking, HR, marketing, and creative industries. She took the mystery out of growth at The Martin Agency through The Public Library, an in-house L&D ecosystem that democratizes learning and collaboration. Its flagship program, CAKE, pairs real client work with coaching and feedback, with 20% of its first-year cohort earning promotions. It’s driven stronger engagement, clearer futures, and a workplace where people feel supported, not left to figure it out alone.
Justin Roberts
Like any other business strategy, Kepler’s Justin Roberts approaches culture as intentionally designed, measured, and reinforced. He has embedded equity into hiring, compensation, performance reviews, and leadership expectations—backed by real transparency such as publicly shared salary bands and bonus levels, setting a high bar for trust as the agency scaled past 600 employees globally. He also helped launch Kepler U, a free public training program for aspiring marketers with a 75% job placement rate, giving employees a chance to mentor and pay it forward. It’s a framework that ensures accountability, access, and shared purpose.
Eric Rojas
Six+One founder Eric Rojas’ Disruption for Good ethos shapes both client work and the employee experience, giving staff real opportunities to create social impact. Through his nonprofit For The Greater Hood, the agency turns vacant storefronts into free boutiques for families in need—serving over 17,000 people to date—and employees help bring it to life. Alongside regular client work, Six+One pursues projects that give employees a shared sense of purpose and offers perks such as a monthly Culture Champion award and a work-from-anywhere for a month policy, which have nearly doubled the industry’s average tenure.
Nathalie Scardino
Crafting the workplace culture at a company dedicated to improving working relationships is a tall order. Nathalie Scardino has been doing just that at Salesforce for over 14 years, building a culture that encourages employees to constantly grow their careers. To drive AI adoption, she created the Global Employee Success program to boost engagement while keeping equality front and center. Reskilling programs such as Career Connect help current employees keep pace with new business prerogatives. Her people strategy supports Salesforce’s broader stakeholder mission of ensuring that performance and purpose move in lockstep.
Elisa Silva
When Elisa Silva joined 3Headed Monster five years ago, she brought structure without stripping away heart. Hired during a period of profound loss but also rapid growth for the agency, she led with empathy while building the systems—project management, onboarding, HR and financial frameworks—that fostered creativity and brought structure where there had been informality. She pairs profit-sharing, four weeks’ PTO, a 7-Year Ditch sabbatical, and strong benefits with monthly all-agency meetings that keep transparency front and center. Her work is reflected in the agency’s over 90% retention rate (100% in 2024) and being named the AAF’s President of the Year in 2025.
Austin Smith
Austin Smith believes agencies should invest in their people with the same rigor they bring to clients. At VML, he applies brand strategy thinking to employee experience for 26,000 staffers worldwide with a focus on three pillars: coaching, career, and craft. Through executive coaching, AI-powered tools, a global Career Hack to jumpstart professional development, and transparent career frameworks that demystify growth, Smith fueled 100,000 hours of voluntary learning in 2025, a 68% year-over-year jump, and 94% employee engagement. Smith’s approach has led to sharper managers, faster AI adoption, and recognition on Fast Company’s Best Places to Work for Innovators list.
Jason Sperling
Besides leading the creative work at Innocean USA, Jason Sperling makes a point to know as many of the agency’s over 650 employees as possible and works closely with People & Culture to tailor hybrid schedules and roles around real lives. That flexibility, paired with high creative expectations, has helped drive a 93% retention rate underpinned by trust, care, and empowerment. Through initiatives like his weekly Top of Mind note, which mixes cultural insights with reflections on mental health, and the internal Excuses Executions project to bust through creative blocks, Sperling invites teams to drop complacency and chase braver ideas.
Kwame Taylor-Hayford
Throughout his career Kwame Taylor-Hayford has built workplaces where differences are valued as a creative advantage and alternate perspectives generate positive friction that improves the work. After leadership roles at Anomaly, Sid Lee, and Chobani, he co-founded Kin to center co-creation, mentorship, and lived experience in the creative process. The agency partners with early career and community-rooted talent to shape platforms like Intuit Mailchimp’s Bloom Season and Delta Locals, ensuring the work reflects real perspectives. As 2025 D&AD President, he also launched Shift Studio, connecting emerging creatives to paid, real-world briefs that launch careers at a time when entry-level opportunities are vanishing.
Alexa Tonner
Guided by the principle that there’s no “I” in team, Alexa Tonner leads Collectively with empathy, transparency, and what staff affectionately call a “Don’t Panic” calm. Since co-founding the creator marketing agency in 2013, she’s spent more than a decade proving that an agency can grow without grinding people down. Her weekly all-hands meetings set a human tone, while initiatives like peer-nominated awards, seven ERGs, a Diversity Council, and a six-month mentorship program turn values into action. She also champions Camp Collectively, an annual three-day summit that brings all 160 employees together IRL. With 20% headcount growth and 25% promoted in 2025, it’s no wonder 90% say they’re proud to work there.
Dominic Tremblay
Tux Creative House was built on a simple idea: Great work starts with how people work together. Co-founder and CEO Dominic Tremblay keeps strategy, creative, production, and emerging tech under one roof, cutting down handoffs and keeping teams aligned from brief to final frame. In 2022, he led Tux to become the largest creative agency in Quebec to adopt a four-day workweek at full pay, rebalancing workloads to protect energy and focus. An independent B Corp and LGBTQ+ certified shop, Tremblay backs Tux’s values with action, making well-being, inclusion, and sustainability part of the everyday experience.
Natalia Vassilieva
With a vision centered on the belief that culture is not a set of perks, but an operating system for how a company hires, develops, and supports its people, Natalia Vassilieva has built and scaled a people-first framework designed to support rapid global expansion without sacrificing employee trust. Her steady hand helped guide StackAdapt through its fast-growing startup phase into a distributed organization with a People Experience program that ties feedback, mental well-being, and career development into one clear system. A champion of remote-first flexibility, Vassilieva pairs autonomy with transparency and strong support, and ensures continuous listening by using data, employee feedback, and open dialogue instead of one-size-fits-all solutions.
Randi White
Rooted in a multicultural upbringing in Los Angeles and refined through leadership roles at top agencies (Razorfish, FCB, AKQA), Day One Agency’s Randi White operates on the philosophy that great work is only possible when people feel safe, seen, and empowered to contribute fully. In this newly created role, she owns both client leadership and culture/DEI strategy, most notably evolving traditional ERGs into Employee Impact Groups that drive mentorship, leadership visibility, and client value. With 98% of employees participating in at least one EIG, this change turned engagement into a competitive advantage that fuels retention, recruiting, and creativity.
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