Today, chief marketing officers play a far more active role in the C-suite than ever before.
They don business hats in the boardroom, chart out innovation strategies and ways to integrate technology at scale, and drive measurable results.
With marketers emerging as stewards who steer organizations forward at a time of great disruption, Business Insider is celebrating the global marketers rising to the occasion.
Here we present the third installment of our annual ranking of the world's most innovative CMOs. The list is a little different from last year's as we have 25 honorees this time instead of 50.
Scroll on to see the marketers who made the cut.
Methodology
We relied on our reporting but also solicited nominations from readers. We tapped an advisory council for their suggestions too.
We then put the names up to a vote, with the council giving each nominee a rank between 1 and 25. We based the final rankings on the average scores.
We tried to cast our net wider than most other similar lists, acknowledging leaders from emerging companies as well as countries outside the US, for instance, whose brands have made a global mark.
Our advisory council of independent experts comprises Vivaldi Group CMO Agathe Blanchon-Ehrsam, former 360i executive chairman and comScore CEO Bryan Wiener, Deep Focus founder Ian Shafer, and R3 cofounder and principal Shufen Goh.
CMOs were ranked based on a number of attributes, including:
- How effectively they have married art, science, and technology in their campaigns.
- How they're taking their marketing efforts in a different direction than their peers.
- Whether they have mastered the art of storytelling across platforms.
- How they have demonstrated that they can disrupt their industries.
Other factors were the size of the executive's brand and how much the brand's footprint has grown over the past year, the extent of their role and responsibilities, their influence in the marketing and advertising industry beyond their own brand, and whether their marketing efforts have driven their company's performance.