Creativity has always required bravery, but perhaps never more than in this moment of profound change and realignment.
Striding into the unknown and lighting the way for the rest of the industry is what defines the ADWEEK 50 of 2026. This impressive collection of leaders across advertising, marketing, media, and technology are meeting the moment by being open to AI but not at the expense of their reputation, while ensuring the wellbeing of their teams—and lifting up the next generation of talent.
With strategic dealmaking, operational rigor, and creativity-centric innovation, the ADWEEK 50 have been key revenue drivers for their companies, ensuring that their contributions were tied directly to that rising bottom line.
From winning mergers to impactful Super Bowl ads, daring campaigns and industry-defining tools, the ADWEEK 50 looked disruption in the eye and accepted the challenge.
Tamara Alesi
In just four years, Tamara Alesi has built Mediaplus North America into the fastest-growing arm of the world’s largest independent media group. She delivered 57.1% revenue growth in 2025, beating forecasts by 179%, and landed 10 major clients including TransUnion, Chiquita, Fresh Express, and MillerKnoll. Headcount jumped 50% as employee satisfaction hit 93%, with client satisfaction at 89%. Alesi’s steady hand through the Omnicom/IPG merger kept uncertainty at bay and provided mentorship to affected employees. This year, her team launched a new integrated social offering connecting paid, owned, and creator strategies, with Chiquita leadership hailing the team for “consistently delivering flawless execution.”
Hollie Alexander
Elevated to president of Lucky Generals in 2025, Hollie Alexander took a fledgling New York outpost of the U.K. creative agency and turned it into a business with real momentum, adding five U.S. clients while growing revenue 81% and doubling both profits and headcount in a year. Her leadership brought Universal Orlando Resort out of Disney’s shadow with the destination’s first Super Bowl campaign, driving a 105% spike in web traffic and a 259% search lift. The shop also picked up the WNBA and delivered over 250 press hits for U.K. news outlet The Guardian’s push into the U.S. Within the agency, her “Heart and Hustle” culture puts empathy and performance on equal footing.
Danny Alvarez
A creative force with a track record across Wieden+Kennedy, Gut, CP+B, and David, Danny Alvarez has helped deliver more than 45 global awards, including Cannes Lions, Clios, One Show and D&AD honors for brands such as Budweiser, Popeyes, Kraft Heinz, and Burger King, whose “Bullying Jr.” campaign is in MoMA’s permanent collection. Now at indie startup Mel, he’s driven a 400% revenue surge since the beginning of 2025 while leading work for the NFL, Rémy Martin, P&G, and the Ad Council, and securing AOR duties for BrandsMart and Centenario Tequila. A notable fine artist in his spare time, Alvarez’s culture-shaping campaigns are a feast for the eyes and the mind.
Helen Andrews
Helen Andrews bravely pulled back the curtain on leadership in a way the industry rarely sees, openly sharing her breast cancer journey while continuing to steer Johannes Leonardo through a standout run. In 2025, the agency hit 10% revenue growth targets and boosted new business by 33%, adding Boost Mobile, Roblox, and Google, while growing Kraft Heinz, Volkswagen, and Adidas. Turnover dropped 70% as employee happiness rose 11%. The work delivered, too, from Oscar Mayer’s 6.3 billion impressions for Wienie 500 race to a 10% lifestyle revenue lift for Adidas and the introduction of Philadelphia Cream Cheese’s first brand character, Phillyboy. By leading with honesty and humanity, she’s building both a stronger culture and stronger business.
Sarah Leech Aucutt
Fast-growing nail startup Olive & June has blossomed into one of beauty’s biggest success stories under Sarah Leech Aucutt since she joined the founder-led brand in 2019. After helping to steer the company through its $240 million acquisition by Helen of Troy in 2024, the CCO/CRO scaled the brand to roughly $125 million in revenue in 2025, up 35% year-over-year. While keeping its spot as the No. 1 nail brand at Target and No. 2 in artificial nails overall, her expansion strategy also brought the brand to Amazon and Ulta Beauty. Her tactics drove real change in consumer habits, with Olive & June customers now doing their nails at home more than 36 times a year, versus about three historically.
Lara Balazs
In her second year into the CMO role at Adobe, Lara Balazs has already reshaped how the company talks about creativity in the AI era. Rather than sticking with Adobe’s longstanding strategy, she championed a new direction centered on “empowering everyone to create,” positioning creativity—not technology—as the company’s organizing principle. She also turned her marketing team into Customer Zero by having them use the company’s own GenAI tools to speed ideation, scale production, and rethink workflows. At a moment when marketers are navigating AI’s role in creative work, Balazs has built a way forward not just for her team, but for all of Adobe.
Melissa Berger
Melissa Berger helped turn Digitas’ biggest industry priorities—AI, social, commerce, loyalty, and inclusion—into products clients could actually use to grow. As chief solutions officer, she drove 27% growth across CRM, social, and commerce in 2025 while launching partnerships with Fetch, Reddit, Her Campus Media, and Attain. Her team supported more than 40 new business pitches, while Berger advanced industry-leading tools such as Digitas AI and Connect IQ. She also scaled real-time cultural marketing efforts with S.W.A.T. (Share Worthy and Trending) and Loyalty Lite with Fetch, connecting CRM and commerce to purchase behavior. Berger also advances inclusive work through the Digitas Multicultural Center of Excellence with projects such as Sephora’s celebrated documentary The Beauty of Blackness, and shares her insights as co-host of the Spilling the LoyalTea podcast.
Eric J. Bertrand
Mod Op became one of advertising’s fastest-growing independents by pairing aggressive expansion with a deep investment in AI. Since co-founding the agency in 2017, Eric J. Bertrand has helped grow revenue from roughly $18 million in 2022 to $128.5 million in 2025, while winning 40 new brands in a single year. Over the past year, he led a $10 million AI investment that rolled out proprietary tools across 10 offices, acquired Ascend Marketing, and pushed cross-sell revenue to $38 million, with a notable campaign for Gerber that featured a TaskRabbit integration, taking parent support beyond food. Just as impressive is Mod Op’s 97% retention among acquired employees across 11 acquisitions since launch.
Sean Cohan
If you’re going to reshape Canadian media, it’s a gutsy move to do it by producing a gay hockey drama series. Sean Cohan made the call for Bell Media to fully finance Heated Rivalry, which launched on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the U.S. The result was one of Bell Media’s most widely licensed series, proving Canada can put out premium, competitive content. That and other strategic moves by Cohan, such as acquiring a majority stake in U.K.-based distributor Sphere Abacus and a strategic partnership with Tubi, have accelerated Bell Media’s transformation from a legacy broadcaster into a global content and advertising powerhouse.
Jacqueline Corbelli
As one of the first female founders in adtech, Jacqueline Corbelli built an industry before it even had a name. She launched BrightLine in 2003, putting her at the forefront of engagement-led, interactive CTV advertising. Today it’s impossible to watch streaming without seeing Corbelli’s influence. Brightline’s tech underpins interactive ads for Peacock, Roku, HBO Max, and, as of this year, Disney+ and Hulu. She’s also brought BrightLine to Europe, securing a partnership with Paramount’s international team as preferred technology partner. Outside of the office, Corbelli published her third book, Changemaker: A Modern Playbook for Creating Personal Impact and Transformational Change, in December.
Alex Dahan
Standards and measurable outcomes are more important than ever for influencer marketing as it comes under intense scrutiny. Alex Dahan is making sure creator agency Open Influence meets the moment and is seeing successes with breakout campaigns such as The Assassin Academy for John Wick: Ballerina with 20 million organic views, and “Subaru Loves the Earth,” which exceeded goals with 18.9 million impressions. Work like this has seen Open Influence deliver double-digit year-over-year revenue growth while expanding platform partnerships by 317%. Within the agency, Dahan’s belief that culture is a true competitive advantage shows in initiatives like mentorship programs and blind resume reviews.
Carina De Blois
The problem: Ogilvy NA lost momentum. The solution: Carina De Blois. The chief operating officer instigated a massive operational and cultural reset that shook off the agency’s post-pandemic malaise while protecting the culture that made it unique. After restoring momentum in New York and Chicago, De Blois tackled the larger structural issue with the region: four offices functioning as separate businesses. Her reorganization broke down silos to enable a talent-first way of working, letting small teams move quickly while still being supported by the full network when needed. With all the changes in place, Ogilvy NA is delivering double-digit new revenue, a close rate of 80%, and the highest year-over-year client satisfaction scores.
Greg Dolan
A decade as a CPG marketing executive left Greg Dolan wanting more insight into how his investments drove business growth and shareholder value. So he co-founded Keen Decision Systems in 2010 to help other marketers do just that. In 2025, he developed the Keen Planning Module that helps agencies forecast outcomes and recommend media plans without needing brand data, with 15 media partners so far. Now, Keen oversees more than $42 billion in marketing for brands including Church & Dwight, Athletic Brewing, and Poppi, has brought predictive AI insights to decades of data, and boosted revenue by 40% in 2025, aided by a 52% increase in client expansion.
Kamya Elawadhi
Disruption is no good if you can’t make something of it, and Kamya Elawadhi is making sure the AI era isn’t just hype. As co-founder and president of Doceree, an AI-powered operating system for healthcare marketing, Elawadhi has built a system to directly embed artificial intelligence into physician workflows and scaled it across more than 25 international markets. The system has improved campaign efficiency by more than 30% through real-time optimization and performance measurement. Elawadhi also serves as a juror for the Young Lions and New York Festivals Health Awards, and speaks at major industry forums to help shape how AI is evaluated, governed, and applied in regulated industries, ensuring that business results don’t come at the compromise of trust.
James Fenton
After the largest merger in advertising history, James Fenton oversees 15 companies as CEO of Omnicom Advertising Collective, where he balances operations and scale against the cultures that give each agency a distinct voice. Known as the adland version of Moneyball’s Billy Beane for his ability to surface overlooked opportunities, Fenton established “discipline-based rings,” which connect leaders across agencies to collaborate and unlock new capabilities throughout the network. An advocate of non-traditional payment models, Fenton helped pioneer a “cents per room night booked” for Airbnb at TBWA, directly tying agency compensation to outcomes. With his quiet, results-focused ethic, Fenton is building a new kind of opportunity at Omnicom that protects creative ideas while advancing client objectives.
Luis Fernández
Telemundo has become the fastest-growing broadcast network in the U.S., and NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises Chairman Luis Fernández did it without sacrificing culture and authenticity. Under his leadership, Telemundo delivered its first-ever No. 1 Sunday primetime season; Noticias Telemundo earned a Walter Cronkite Award for political journalism; and Hoy Día became the only U.S. morning show to grow its audience. Fernández also reinvigorated key franchises while expanding into streaming—Dinastía Casillas became the top Spanish-language drama among the 18-49 demographic and the network’s top-performing title on Peacock. Fernández’s work to expand both cultural and economic influence of the U.S. Hispanic market has helped define the future of multicultural media in America.
Crystal Foote
As AI reshapes the industry, Crystal Foote is leading the development of new tools to keep pace. She believes that cultural context is a predictive business driver, and she’s built the Audience Resonance Index at Digital Culture Group to prove it. The AI-powered platform quantifies emotional, cultural, and behavioral alignment before campaigns launch, replacing demographic guesswork with a precision-based strategy. Campaigns powered by ARI delivered an average 40% lift in ROI and engagement rates 125% above industry benchmarks. Under her direction, the platform helped DCG reach 195% revenue growth in 2025 as average deal size increased by 46%.
Elizabeth Golden
Health communications pose unique challenges. At NYU Langone Health, Elizabeth Golden’s role integrates reputation, growth, and policy, a broad remit that she has used to shape healthcare dialogue, advance funding priorities, and build trust across communities. She’s the architect of the hospital system’s 2025 institutional brand campaign, “Better health starts with a better health system,” which has boosted favorability by more than 15%. She’s also scaled storytelling, expanding Behind the Breakthrough, a longform YouTube series elevating the voices of scientists and clinicians, and partnered with Venus Williams to launch the new Mignone Women’s Health Collaborative center. Applying her experience from Pfizer, Golden has brought emotional resonance to a notoriously boring and reactive category.
Marc Hazan
Spotify fans are getting a spotlight of their own courtesy of Marc Hazan. The SVP of marketing and sponsorships is giving dedicated listeners even more to cheer about with campaigns like “Fan Life,” which showcase the streaming platform’s vibrant communities, and Billions Club Live events that reward artists’ biggest streamers with exclusive access to performances by the likes of The Weeknd and Bad Bunny. Hazan also led this year’s Best New Artist campaign, which saw billboards celebrating the artists pop up in their hometowns. Combine all this with Hazan’s team launching a lossless audio campaign last year, and being a fan has never sounded so sweet.
Courtney Hirsch
What started as a baseball fanatic tweeting is now a full-fledged media company, and Courtney Hirsch helped it happen. She joined Jomboy Media in 2020 and spent five years convincing the industry that creators are key to reaching new fans. She’s now CEO of a media company that’s home to the three biggest baseball podcasts, the Breakdown series, and its own league, the Warehouse Games. Under Hirsch’s leadership, Jomboy Media has tripled profitability and grown its audience to over 35 million, up 53% year-over-year. And last year, Hirsch did the seemingly impossible: secured an equity deal with Major League Baseball, a first for a creator-led media company with any pro league. Talk about a home run.
Kelsey Hodgkin
Through a leadership style rooted in empathy, Kelsey Hodgkin has transformed Special US into one of advertising’s fastest-rising independent agencies. The CEO’s breakout year included the agency’s first Emmy win, a client roster expansion that brought on Instagram, Target, Audible, and Bumble, and 68% revenue growth to $31 million. Special US doubled headcount across New York and Los Angeles while maintaining an 85% retention rate and prioritizing diverse hiring. Her people-first, principled, and ambitious leadership has helped make Special US the network’s largest office and one of the country’s most-awarded independent creative agencies.
Laura Huftless
Entertainment marketing and creative agency FlyteVu was built around one belief: Pop culture and purpose can shape the world. That guiding principle has led co-founder and CEO Laura Huftless to grow her business by 20% year-over-year for more than 10 years before finding a partner in Driftwood Music Group to assist in the agency’s global expansion and the development of AI tools in July 2025. Since then, the agency has opened three new offices and doubled in size, delivering work such as the Humane Society’s rebrand and a Christian Siriano collaboration at New York Fashion Week. And with a generous family-oriented benefits package crafted by Huftless, it’s no surprise that 82% of the staff are women.
Marnie Kain
Strategic ability and focusing on the consumer can beat better-resourced rivals. Just ask Grubhub’s Marnie Kain. She drew up a dual-growth strategy that let Grubhub be the national brand while Seamless became the hyper-local app for New York City. That blueprint turned the metro market into a proving ground where successful tactics were rolled into Grubhub’s 2026 national expansion. Kain also consolidated in-house teams into a unified Brand team, shifting from reactive support to proactive creative, and for the first time took Grubhub to the Super Bowl with “The Feest” to announce fee-free delivery for orders over $50.
Kevin Krim
Brands, agencies, networks, streamers: Everyone wants to know the fair value of their media investments, and Kevin Krim helps them get it. As CEO of TV measurement software firm EDO, Krim has led a period of rapid growth by positioning the company as a reliable source of truth for an ever-adapting ad industry. Among recent innovations is the cross-platform measurement solution Always-On that delivers data directly to media partners’ proprietary platforms. He’s also grown EDO’s Amazon partnership beyond football to include measurement across Prime Video, Twitch, and Fire TV, as well as NBA and NASCAR programming. Most recently came ChatEDO, a conversational AI agent for TV ad outcomes data for surfacing insights and understanding performance.
Jose Lozano
The trajectory of Gravity Global changed when Jose Lozano stepped into the CEO role in October 2025. The independent agency network is on a win streak, posting 56% YoY revenue growth and securing 10 new AOR relationships by combining operational agility, AI-driven innovation, and strategic expansion. Lozano also spearheaded acquisitions including Marketing Doctor and LEE Branding, leveraging their healthcare and performance marketing capabilities to launch Gravity Health. New hybrid human-AI workflows cut campaign development timelines. Within the agency, he’s prioritized the development of rising talent and female leaders across the network, with 40% of the executive level made up of women.
Jeff Lucas
Tubi has matured into one of streaming’s fastest-growing advertising businesses under Jeff Lucas. Since joining as chief revenue officer in March 2024, the former Amazon Ads and Viant executive has expanded Tubi’s ad offerings from a handful of formats to nearly 15 outcome-driven products tailored to Tubi’s coveted young, multicultural, and incremental audience. In the past year, Tubi surpassed 100 million monthly active users, delivered record streaming engagement, and achieved profitability for the first time in Q1 2026. Lucas also spearheaded partnerships with Amazon DSP, Moloco, and Kochava, while launches like Tubi Moments and Tubi Wrappers helped drive a 35% increase in upfront advertising commitments.
Petula Lucey
A company restructuring brings many challenges—but also plenty of opportunities. When Petula Lucey joined WeWork in November 2024, she immediately set out to rebuild both perception and performance, successfully repositioning the coworking company as a credible real estate platform. Lucey launched a full-scale overhaul of the go-to-market engine with “WeWork for Business,” the company’s first global B2B campaign post-restructuring, introduced a more confident and modern visual identity, and built a performance-driven marketing organization with clear revenue ownership. The next year, WeWork achieved positive and sustained EBITDA and cash flow for the first time since its founding in 2010, with marketing delivering significant YoY growth across all key delivery metrics: wins, desks, and annual contract value.
John Ludeke
After spending years dismantling men’s grooming category conventions for Dr. Squatch, John Ludeke took his streak of absurd and culturally savvy marketing to the next level with “Bathwater Bliss.” The soap featuring Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater sold out in under a minute, earned over 5,500 press placements, 86 billion earned media impressions, and over a million giveaway entries. It was a radical demonstration of Ludeke’s deep understanding of the internet’s psyche and how to mobilize it. Under his leadership, Dr. Squatch expanded its retail presence to more than 45,000 locations, taking it from a challenger brand into a serious competitor that would be acquired by Unilever in one of the largest beauty and personal care deals of 2025.
Nikita Malhotra
Smart investments that yield maximum returns are Nikita Malhotra’s specialty, and this disciplined oversight saw Giant Spoon’s revenue scale by 12% year-over-year. In 2025 alone, as Malhotra ran the financial department, the company’s top clients by revenue were earned or renewed. Her high-impact skills were seen in work with Walmart, Google Play, and Lucid Motors, which set the stage for the company to join forces with digital marketing agency Wpromote. Malhotra played an instrumental role in facilitating the partnership every step of the way, guiding and shaping the deal from start to finish to create a full-funnel offering that aligns with modern marketing expectations.
Alex McCord
Since joining Flywheel in 2016, Alex McCord has integrated 14 firms to build one of the most capable connected commerce platforms, creating a company that even after being acquired by Omnicom endures as a standalone practice. He’s taken the business to a new level in the past year by bringing TPN, Omnicom’s flagship retail and commerce agency, into Flywheel, becoming one of the industry’s pioneering total commerce offerings that unifies retail media, retail strategy, in-store activation, and creative execution. He’s leading on measurement too, combining Acxiom’s identity data with clean room environments to connect advertising exposure to verified purchase behavior and long-term consumer value, and championing the development of Flywheel’s Return on Consumer framework, a new way to evaluate performance based on consumer health and lifetime value.
Alexandra McInnis
At only 30 years old, Alexandra McInnis scaled advertising collective Murder Hornet from two people to a sought-after shop that serves Fortune 100 clients including Lipton and Amazon Fire TV—with zero outside investors. Her “Nest & Swarm” structure keeps the company lithe, with 20% full-time employees to 80% flexible freelance network. In 2025, she launched Media Hornet with fast casual chain Nando’s as a founding client, and will launch Studio Hornet, a production arm, this year. Her fingerprints are on everything the agency does, from building enterprise infrastructure for New York Life to Murder Hornet’s Swarm community programming.
Saket Mehta
Saket Mehta doesn’t want more ads. He wants better moments of discovery. It makes him a perfect fit for Nift, which helps brands and restaurants find new customers by offering app-based thank-you gifts. Since he joined the company less than a year ago, revenue is up 86% year-over-year through February with more than 14,500 brands launched on the platform and over 50 million gifts selected each month. Nift has also expanded internationally, now live across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia, with continued growth across APAC and EMEA. Leading with rigor and trust that quickly aligns cross-functional teams, Mehta has helped Nift build a new kind of growth engine for brands that’s seeing 10-12% conversion rates, well above traditional digital channels. These results are a credit to Mehta’s focus on shifting advertising from interruption to experience-driven discovery.
Isabel R. Muñoz-Cadilla
When you’re grounded in the idea that great work starts with people, you can do incredible things. Isa Muñoz-Cadilla of creative innovation agency Sounds Fun believes that when people feel trusted and empowered to be themselves, work becomes more original, relevant, and impactful—proven by more than tripling revenue in 2025. Muñoz-Cadilla’s philosophy has also built sustained relationships with major brands including Microsoft and Coca-Cola, and led the launch of Lenovo’s Make Space platform, which connects young creatives with education on emerging technology while giving the device maker cultural credibility. Her deep understanding of Sounds Fun’s clients, their ambitions, pressures, and cultural context, has been instrumental in fueling the agency’s growth.
Drew Panayiotou
Meet the Data-Driven Sip, the proprietary AI-powered marketing engine architected and scaled by Drew Panayiotou that fuses demand space insights with retail, media, and behavioral data to guide product, packaging, and creative decisions in real time. Within six months of its launch, Keurig Dr Pepper delivered double-digit improvements in marketing performance. It’s a perfect example of Panayiotou’s work in the past year, transforming one of the largest CPG marketing organizations in the U.S. with infrastructure, data, and AI-driven systems. Among the results: Green Mountain Coffee Roasters gained nearly 2 million incremental buyers and Snapple brought in over 2 million new households. And he achieved all of this by eschewing immediate conversion in favor of adaptive, story-led brand building that changes alongside consumer trends.
Sandi Preston
Combining cultural intelligence with discipline and precision, Sandi Preston led the strategy behind Translation’s landmark McDonald’s African American Consumer Market win, helping fuel a 25% increase in agency revenue and delivering a measurable lift in AACM foot traffic. Drawing on Translation’s UnitedMasters Insights Panel of more than 2 million artists, she brought the intended audience into the process to shape culturally resonant campaigns including the return of Snack Wraps and the “Unc” platform. Preston also guided award-winning work for Beats, AT&T, DeLeón, and the NBA—23 industry honors in all in 2025—while overseeing Translation’s internship program and serving as an LIA Creative LIAsons mentor.
Tyler Price
One of sports media’s most influential digital storytellers, Tyler Price is reshaping how younger audiences engage with live sports across platforms. The head of content at Bleacher Report spearheaded the company’s landmark NFL partnership, unlocking official footage and access to marquee events to enable true insider storytelling, which drove an estimated 50% increase in sponsorship revenue. He also enhanced Bleacher Report’s NFL Draft coverage by turning it into an athlete-led experience, producing hundreds of player interviews that take fans inside life-changing moments. Elsewhere, B/R Women’s Sports surpassed 100 million quarterly views across TikTok and Instagram, while AI-powered workflows scaled production across the company’s always-on platforms.
Suresh Raj
Taking a culture-first approach has helped Suresh Raj transform M+C Saatchi North America. Since becoming the agency’s first regional chief growth officer a year ago, Raj has helped the agency exceed its annual growth target by 300%, with more than half of new business driven through its Cultural Power positioning. He played a central role in securing landmark accounts including the U.S. Soccer Federation and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, delivering integrated, data-driven campaigns shaped by his team’s diverse lived experiences. Beyond client work, Raj has become a prominent industry voice on inclusive marketing and mentorship.
Michael D. Ratner
Kendall Jenner’s Fanatics Sportsbook Super Bowl spot, Tom Brady’s return to football with Fanatics, and Kevin Durant getting a viral assist from CeraVe? All the work of Michael D. Ratner, whose sixth sense for alchemy between brands and talent makes for ads that engage well beyond the screen. With his past work as a filmmaker, Ratner knows what a good story feels like, and has spun that into a global company spanning creative development, production, brand strategy, social and experiences. OBB’s branded content studio Bolded is the strategic engine behind its brand partnerships, with hits such as Justin Bieber’s Our World tour documentary. This year, Fanatics Studios began bringing the same unified content, commerce, and community approach to sports.
Tony Rogers
Chasing every new channel won’t win the digital marketing game. Dollar General’s Tony Rogers is modernizing commerce while staying deeply connected to customers through welcoming experiences across touchpoints. As leader of the fast-growing DG Media Network, he has expanded omnichannel initiatives like myDG Delivery and digital couponing to underserved rural markets, helping millions of value-conscious shoppers access affordable essentials. Rogers has also led campaigns including “Switch to Save” to promote house brands and “Days of Savings” on common essentials, reinforcing the retailer’s affordability positioning as economic pressures mount. His work has helped transform Dollar General into a data-driven retail media and commerce operation rooted in community access.
Anthony Romano
Anthony Romano’s data-driven, tech-enabled approach to creative leadership has led Laughlin Constable to three consecutive years of revenue growth, a gross billings increase of over 165%, 22 new client wins, and the agency’s most profitable year in nearly a decade. In 2026, Romano made the bold decision to form an equity partnership with AI startup Universal Agents and invest in creating Interplay, an agentic AI operating system that combines insight, audience personas, media learnings, creative signals, performance data, and institutional knowledge. Romano’s love of data has created market-moving work for clients including True Value, Nordic Naturals, and QuikTrip.
Liz Rutgersson
In two years as CEO, Liz Rutgersson scaled iProspect North America into the largest performance marketing agency in the U.S. and, according to RECMA, the fastest-growing agency network of the past three years. Under her leadership, iProspect dramatically improved its new business win rate, strengthened client retention, and maintained full senior leadership continuity through a period of major organizational change, including the merger of Merkle and iProspect. Beyond business results, Rutgersson has emerged as a respected industry voice through leadership roles with the IAB and Ad Council, while also championing women through her Breadwinners Breakfast initiative. A leader who wields humor and heart to inspire those around her to embrace innovation, Rutgersson’s tenure boasted a 100% retention of her senior leadership team, an increased new business win rate from 20% to 51%.
Ana Sabarots
A first-generation immigrant from Argentina and one of the youngest CMOs in the business, Ana Sabarots has brought game-changing strategy to Uncommon Creative Studio. In just nine months, she led the agency on its largest new business run, winning clients including Meta, Spotify, Byoma, Merrell, K18, Google, and Chobani. For Guinness, she championed a documentary that drove the brewer’s largest-ever U.S. market share and volume increase; a 14-hour single-take BritBox film that exceeded all KPIs and won a Grand Clio; Instagram’s largest campaign to date featuring Tyler, the Creator, Cole Bennett, and Rosalía; and bold work challenging the $700 billion beauty industry through radical transparency for The Ordinary. And she’s building it all while fostering a “Play Freely” philosophy of flexibility, collaboration, and creative excellence.
Karen Saltser
Karen Saltser has guided Bloomberg Media through a period of global growth by pairing premium journalism with audience-first digital expansion. The CEO has overseen gains across subscriptions, advertising, streaming, and live events while strengthening Bloomberg’s position as a global business media powerhouse. In FY25, Bloomberg Media increased total revenue 6% year-over-year, with subscription revenue up by 10% and live events sponsorship revenue rising by 30%. The company expanded distribution through YouTube TV and JioTV, as well as launching a redesigned streaming video experience with live and on-demand content available globally. Alongside boosted engagement, Bloomberg Media sits at over 710,000 paying subscribers, which saw double-digit percentage growth in 2025.
Wes Schroll
When rewards are the advertising, it’s win-win for both customers and brands. At leading consumer rewards platform Fetch, Wes Schroll is running an outcomes-based ad platform: Consumers earn rewards for things like shopping and dining, which CPG titans including General Mills, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble incentivize. Those brands then get an unmatched view of over $212 billion in annual purchase data, can target actual buyers, and fully account for incremental outcomes. In 2025, Fetch added new reward categories such as local dining and fuel, increased its number of brand partners by 27% year-over-year, launched a credit card with American Express, and ran a Super Bowl ad that gave away $1.2 million.
Ed See
The CMO role has expanded dramatically over the past decade, but its ability to show impact hasn’t kept pace. Ed See of consumer intelligence and marketing platform Zeta Global is helping to close that gap by consulting closely with enterprise leaders to rethink how success is defined and delivered. Zeta now works with 51% of the Fortune 100 with revenue of $1.3 billion in 2025, a 30% year-over-year increase. Nearly 90% of that growth was driven by $1 million+ clients, a result of See’s focus on building deeper relationships where he pushes organizations to move beyond fragmented campaigns and into unified systems that connect data, decisioning, and execution to efficiently find and convert valuable customers.
Jenny Storms
The Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the NBA All-Star Game, all in 17 days? Welcome to Legendary February, NBCUniversal’s tentpole event of 2026 with marketing led by Jennifer Storms. The monthlong phenomenon got a marketing leadout that paired celebrities with Olympic and Paralympic athletes, ultimately engaging 225 million Americans, delivering 9 billion impressions, and leading Peacock to its biggest month ever with 16.7 billion streaming minutes. Storms isn’t just about streaming though—she led the marketing strategy for the largest BravoCon yet, welcoming more than 30,000 superfans with immersive, commerce-enabled brand experiences. At the center of her success is Symphony, NBCU’s connective discipline that integrates marketing across sports, entertainment, and streaming. Storms has pioneered a model where major events become force multipliers through strategic alignment, messaging, and planning, which she’ll next put into action for LA28.
Peyton Sutton
Founder transitions can be make-or-break for companies. Since Peyton Sutton stepped into the role of partner and president at Terri & Sandy in 2024, the ad agency has begun an exciting new era. Rather than preserve the status quo after Terri Meyer’s retirement, Sutton leaned into change with a relentless focus on the future and led Terri & Sandy to its most successful year to date, with revenue climbing 15% year over year. It also landed major new clients including Welch’s Sparkling, Gainbridge Financial, and Earth Breeze, while growing its remit with Revlon and Freshpet. Sutton has shaped Terri & Sandy into a destination for serious talent that now boasts a 95% voluntary retention rate.
Michelle Tang
The driving force behind McCann’s impressive momentum in 2025, Michelle Tang had a hand in over 410 wins (among them Kroger, Prudential, and LinkedIn) while pushing the agency into new frontiers in the luxury category and social media. Since joining McCann in 2022 to power American growth, Tang has expanded her remit to span the globe, building AI-enabled growth systems and operational tools that have unified agency resources and knowledge, and transforming how the network pursues business worldwide. Tang is also an influential voice within the industry and at events held by The Female Quotient and Gold House. Inside McCann, she helps foster a culture of diversity, championing the AAPI ERG, The Feast, and bringing programming and activations to the broader network.
Hernán Tantardini
A marketing leader for more than 20 years at companies including Unilever and Bacardi, and now at PepsiCo, Hernán Tantardini is guided by three principles—simplification for growth, consumer-centric innovation, and an elevated approach to design—to transcend category expectations. He led PepsiCo’s 2025 rebrand to better encompass the company’s over 500 brands, transformed a Lay’s packaging update into a storytelling moment about agriculture and family legacy, and took Doritos’ history of tongue-in-cheek advertising to the next level with an ad inspired by ‘70s adult films. He’s also helmed major innovations such as Simply NKD, taking the product from ideation to R&D completion in eight weeks.
Justin Webb
By uniting strategy, creative, production, and fabrication under one roof—and in Wisconsin, at that—Justin Webb has grown his agency from a six-person, $1 million operation into a 100-plus employee integrated marketing machine supporting brands and events including Nike, Puma, the Ryder Cup, PGA Championship, and College Football Playoffs. In 2025, FifthColor posted 30% sales growth and executed activations at 26 professional sporting events. To keep the momentum going, Webb also led a major headquarters expansion while deepening the agency’s community impact through donating his team’s time and effort to craft award-winning nonprofit campaigns and more than $500,000 in charitable giving.
Click for more from this issue
