Insider’s most innovative CMOs of 2023

Appealing to Gen Z’s tastes

Under Brandt, Chipotle has driven impactful business results by becoming an early adopter of new technologies — from TikTok to Roblox to Web3. Brandt and his team have positioned Chipotle as a lifestyle brand by quickly tapping into popular cultural trends with creative campaigns and commerce options that cater to changing consumer habits.

Last August, Brandt’s team created a lemonade-scented candle that looked like one of Chipotle’s water cups. It was a hat-tip to Chipotle customers who were filling their free water cups with lemonade at the chain’s beverage stations — something Chipotle’s social team has acknowledged on Twitter several times over the years.

“When they see these lighthearted tributes to social chatter and fan behavior, they feel even more connected to Chipotle,” Brandt said in a press release announcing the limited-edition candle. The company said the candle sold out in four minutes and generated 2.1 billion PR impressions.

In late 2022 Brandt quickly mobilized his team to take advantage of the steak-quesadilla menu hack, which the TikTok creators Keith Lee and Alexis Frost popularized. Realizing its potential, Chipotle added the Fajita Quesadilla to Chipotle’s digital menus and quickly trained 100,000 employees across more than 3,200 restaurants on how to create the item. Chipotle leaned into the TikTok origin story, and the launch doubled Chipotle’s quesadilla business, resulting in three of its top digital-sales days of all time. It also increased Chipotle Rewards sign-ups by 37% that week.

Marketing activations like these have solidly positioned Chipotle as a loved brand among Gen Z consumers. A recent Morning Consult study showed that the brand’s favorability among responding Gen Z consumers increased by 15 points between December 2022 and February 2023. 

Chipotle’s market cap stands at $56 billion at the time of writing, up from $8.2 billion in early 2018 when Brandt joined the company. Digital sales now account for 40% of all sales, thanks in part to Brandt’s efforts. And, under Brandt’s leadership, Chipotle has achieved a growth of more than 35% in return on ad spend, the company said.

Maximizing Geico’s digital impact

Burrell joined GEICO a year ago, bringing more data and analytics to the insurance giant.

GEICO has long been one of the largest TV advertisers. Burrell told Insider that he’s increasingly interested in digital ads that get people to take action — such as filling out a form to get a quote. GEICO’s digital investments also help find people who are in the market to buy insurance instead of targeting a broad group, he said. Burrell cited Google, Amazon, and Snapchat as a few of the platforms where GEICO is increasing its ad budgets.

“I’ve always been a marketer that focused on data and analytics and how marketing drives business, and being able to quantify that to show impact,” he said.

Burrell is leaning into AI to crank out ads faster. An upcoming campaign called “Real Time Gecko” lets people interact with GEICO’s gecko mascot on social and digital platforms.

Earlier this year, Burrell shook up GEICO’s agency contracts to consolidate its budgets with the holding company IPG, which owns GEICO’s longtime creative agency, The Martin Agency. IPG’s agency, Mediabrands, handles paid media, and Octagon handles sports marketing.

Burrell said that he likes to work closely with agencies to develop big strategies. “I view agencies as an extension of my team,” he said.

Before he was at GEICO, Burrell was the CMO and SVP of North America for The Estée Lauder Companies. He’s also worked in marketing roles at Viacom.

Maintained a pandemic bump in sales

While some brands saw their pandemic-driven sales boosts land back to earth with a thud, Crocs has continued from strength to strength. The company’s stock has risen by more than 130% over the past year, and annual sales are up some 200% since 2019.

“We are very confident being ugly,” Cooley said in an interview with the National Retail Federation last year. The brand has taken on an irreverent voice on social media, which has helped it climb up the footwear rankings to No. 5 on Piper Sandler’s biannual Gen Z survey.

In the past, Crocs has benefitted from the cachet of partnerships with brands, including Palace and MCM, and partnerships with celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Post Malone. Riding high from its elevated cultural status, Cooley shifted the company’s approach last year to focus more on its own mainline releases, such as the hiking-focused “All Terrain” range and its Crush sandals, Hypebeast reported.

Last October, Crocs marked its 20th anniversary with a monthlong Croctober event, which included digital activations and prize giveaways. That month, Crocs sponsored a virtual concert in Roblox by the K-pop band Aespa. The concert notched more than 2.5 million visits, and the post-show meet-and-greet with the group led to 225,000 purchases of virtual Crocs on Roblox. Keeping with the gaming theme, last month, Cooley’s team collaborated with Minecraft to launch a pair of physical shoes inspired by the game, which granted access to an AR experience.

Late last year, Cooley appointed Digitas to help grow the brand in both the US and Asia — and in particular, China, where it has lower brand awareness than other markets — as part of the company’s plans to reach $5 billion in revenue by 2026, up from $3.6 billion last year.

Integrating Lego into the digital world

Goldin has been Lego’s top marketer since 2015, and today, she’s got a huge purview that includes marketing, product development, managing the in-house creative agency, licensing, and more. 

Her contributions have helped Lego continue to perform. Like many companies, it got a tremendous boost during the pandemic as shut-in consumers snapped up Lego sets. But while other brands saw their businesses tail off once consumers started to return to their pre-COVID lives, Lego continues to grow.

In 2022, its sales were up by 17% over the year prior, it opened 155 new stores, and 48% of its products were new. 

But one thing that makes Goldin so innovative is how forward-looking she is. On a KidTech podcast last October, Goldin described how her team deals not only with solving challenges that are happening today or ones that will happen over the next two years but also tries to influence what will happen “in the longer-term future.”

“We’re talking about things that will happen over the next three to seven years, and how we shape them, how we invest in them, and how we develop them,” Goldin said on the podcast.

One of her big initiatives has been integrating Lego — famous for being a hands-on, physical toy — into the digital world. 

“The kids that are growing up today aren’t growing up in the physical world and then a digital world,” Goldin said on the podcast. “It’s seamless to them.” 

Lego has massively expanded its digital presence in recent years.

In 2022, Lego’s Builder app, which has instructions on how to assemble sets, notched 13.6 million downloads, a 42% increase over the previous year. And the company announced a partnership with Epic Games to help create a metaverse experience safe for children.

Lego has also been at the forefront of diversity and inclusion — earning the ire of right-wing activists. Nevertheless, Goldin is marching forward to help Lego shape a safer future for all children. 

The company’s most recent campaign, “Play Unstoppable,” launched in June and partners with female role models, including the star athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sunisa Lee, journalists such as Elaine Welteroth and Jazlyn Guerra, and others. The goal of the campaign is to empower young girls to explore their interests freely.

Helping the travel industry rebound

After rebranding Weight Watchers in 2018 and helping rebuild its subscriber numbers, Priceline hired Klein in April 2022 to give its brand a recognition boost among younger consumers. Priceline had lost a lot of consideration among that audience because its marketing strategy had focused on direct response. 

Knowing that young people were especially keen to travel as pandemic restrictions have eased, Klein spearheaded a data-driven campaign called “Go to Your Happy Price” that started as a marketing initiative and has since influenced Priceline’s promotional and pricing strategy. 

It included a social-media sitcom starring Kaley Cuoco to showcase how easy it was to book trips, and Klein made sure each episode had an interactive element where viewers could find hidden travel deals.

Moving the brand forward is a complex task, Klein told Insider, because marketers have to attract new customers without alienating old ones. 

“It’s very easy to swing the pendulum too far, and you have to strike the right balance between retaining the customers that have really been by your side while opening up the aperture to invite customers that have not considered your brand in a long time or maybe never have,” she said.

During this time, Klein also had to deal with an influx of competitors, with some outspending Priceline five-to-one in an effort to capitalize on consumers’ lust for travel. Klein made sure to activate the new brand campaign during the Super Bowl, securing spots during the big game and subsequent press coverage. 

Since Klein joined Priceline, she has helped shepherd a roughly 300% increase in new customers and has helped drive engagement across online-ad activations, including a 300% increase in click-through rate and a 700% increase in video completions.

Klein told Insider how Priceline is looking to use generative AI to speed up its marketing. “Consumers move faster than marketers do, and for years we’ve been talking about how we can generate creative content and move it in and out of the marketplace at that same speed,” she said. “And generative AI allows us to start experimenting and doing that.”

Making the burger chain a national name

Livingston became Shake Shack’s first CMO in 2019 and has helped the burger chain punch above its weight compared to its giant fast-food competitors.

Most recently, he’s worked to promote Shake Shack’s expansion in cities beyond its roots in New York City. Late last year, Livingston rolled out Shake Shack’s first branding campaign in Seattle, which played up the company’s ingredients and customers’ love for the brand. Most of Shake Shack’s previous campaigns focused on promotions and limited-time offerings. 

Livingston is also marketing a new line of shakes made with the food-tech company NotCo’s dairy-free milk.

This year, Livingston has spearheaded a partnership with Tennis Channel to sponsor pickleball events in 10 cities to tap into the growing popularity of the sport. People in cities such as Chicago, Denver, and Las Vegas could sign up for clinics to learn the basics of the game and compete in tournaments.

Shake Shack has also partnered with shows including “Hot Ones” to promote its mobile-ordering app. And the company is working to integrate itself into the gaming community. The chain created virtual stores and menu items within the video game “The Sims 4” that creators, including the Twitch streamer Kelsey Dangerous, promoted.

Livingston previously worked in marketing roles at Bark and Bank of America.

Helping the nonprofit punch above its weight

Maltin seeks to amplify Sesame Workshop’s small nonprofit budget through partnerships to reach wider audiences. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit production arm of “Sesame Street.”

When COVID-19 vaccinations became political and controversial in 2021, Maltin worked with the Ad Council to create a series of public-service campaigns squashing the skepticism. She also worked with the early-learning company BEGiN to create an app, Learn with Sesame, that helps young children develop emotional and academic skills, including identifying colors, shapes, and numbers.

Maltin has also integrated recognizable characters from “Sesame Street” into other brands’ ads. So far this year, Oscar the Grouch has been United Airlines’ Chief Trash Officer in an ad, Count von Count has been a spokesperson for NerdWallet, and Cookie Monster helped Fox Sports promote its pregame Super Bowl show.

In April, Maltin’s team launched a new website for Sesame Workshop. The website includes information for parents on everything from how to teach kids to brush their teeth to how to support kids who split living between separated parents.

Under her leadership, Sesame Workshop has expanded into new platforms. “Sesame Street” launched a TikTok channel in August 2022, which now has over 500,000 followers, with 40 videos. Maltin’s team also developed a branded metaverse game for Roblox to promote the spin-off show “Sesame Street: Mecha Builders.”

Maltin is a former Viacom and A+E marketing exec who joined Sesame Workshop in 2019.

Making a Japanese tech company into a US shopping destination

When Marineau landed at Rakuten in 2020, she took on the responsibility of transforming the Japanese technology company into a household name in the US. Her vision was to establish Rakuten as a leading shopping destination that provides benefits for both consumers — through cash-back opportunities and savings — and retail partners by increasing their sales.

In 2023, the company returned to the Super Bowl for the second time. The internal creative team produced a nostalgic ad featuring Alicia Silverstone reprising her role as Cher from the ’90s movie “Clueless” to reach Rakuten’s target audience of millennial women. 

Rakuten then expanded the “Not So Clueless” spot, which generated more than 14 billion impressions and 80 million views across different platforms, into New York Fashion Week, or NYFW. The brand partnered with designer Christian Siriano to design the iconic yellow-plaid suit Silverstone wore in the Super Bowl ad, as well as three “Clueless”-inspired outfits for his NYFW runway show.

The company said that combined, the Super Bowl and NYFW campaigns drove a 213% increase in search traffic, a 70% lift in member sign-ins, and a 12% increase in new members. What’s more, Rakuten marked a record first quarter in the three months to the end of March, generating a 9.3% revenue boost to 475.6 billion yen, or $3.4 billion.

Marineau has also worked to help the brand overcome a big challenge: Research showed that consumers were skeptical that cash-back platforms deliver value. Rakuten’s in-house creative team, which Marineau created shortly after joining the company, utilized the important holiday shopping season to launch an ad campaign and pop-up store in New York City. The event, which celebrity entrepreneurs such as Kate Hudson of INBLOOM and Jonathan Van Ness of JVN Hair attended, scored heaps of media coverage — nearly half of which came from outlets that had never previously covered Rakuten.

Keeping the CPG giant innovative

Martin helps General Mills stay ahead of newer disruptor food-and-beverage brands.

He runs an internal team, Gworks, that works across the marketing, research-and-development, and consumer-insights units. The group’s goal is to find new insights and trends. Martin and his team saw that people with diabetes wanted snacks that tasted good but were low in sugar, leading to the 2021 launch of a snack brand called Good Measure that doesn’t spike consumers’ blood-sugar levels. Later this year, Good Measure will begin rolling out nationally in the US.

Martin also finds ways to tie General Mills’ core brands to culture. In 2022, he helped promote a line of limited-edition boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal featuring emojis with a campaign starring the Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, the singer and actor Leslie Grace, and SpongeBob SquarePants. For Reese’s Puffs, Martin worked with the luxury-fashion brand Ambush to create a handbag that doubles as a cereal bowl.

He is also focused on stamping out misinformation on social platforms where General Mills runs ads. This year, he signed a deal with the adtech firm Zefr that uses a fact-checking engine to find and defund misinformation. Yoplait was the first brand to test Zefr’s tools in January, and General Mills is currently rolling out the program to other brands.

Martin is involved in General Mills’ sustainability efforts, too. He’s worked with Larabar on a partnership with the American Farmland Trust that helps find solutions to water-drought issues in California. The $80,000 program helps women-owned farms that grow almonds with regenerative-agriculture practices.

Reinventing Barbie

KcKnight, a Mattel veteran, was promoted to her current role in April last year and has successfully reinvigorated the iconic Barbie brand. Not only is Barbie so culturally relevant that the term “Barbiecore” was coined last year, but McKnight and her team have evolved Barbie to become what Mattel calls the world’s “most diverse doll line.”

This year, Barbie released its first doll with Down syndrome, its first doll for preschool-aged children, and a Chelsea doll with scoliosis.

McKnight has also led the Barbie Dream Gap Project, its multiyear initiative that has raised more than $1.5 million for nonprofit organizations that empower girls. The effort has directly impacted more than 25,000 girls. 

McKnight also steered Barbie’s “Pink is the New Green” initiative as part of Mattel’s goal to achieve 100% recycled, recyclable, or bio-based plastic materials in products and packaging by 2030. Barbie also introduced a doll of the conservationist Jane Goodall, made of recycled plastics, which made Time magazine’s list of the best inventions of 2022.

McKnight’s marketing expertise has also helped to build up anticipation for the upcoming “Barbie” film. Working closely with Warner Bros. Pictures, the director Greta Gerwig, and LuckyChap Entertainment, McKnight has been seeding content over multiple months. From the first images of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken to the viral Barbie Selfie Generator, McKnight’s team has positioned the “Barbie” movie to be a box-office hit.

Outside of Barbie, McKnight has also worked to relaunch the Monster High and Polly Pocket franchises. Mattel said that during McKnight’s time as head of Barbie and dolls, the portfolio has achieved retail sales exceeding $3 billion.

Making an old-school brand accessible to everyone

Milligan was an executive at E-Trade when Morgan Stanley acquired it in 2021. She was soon appointed the banking giant’s CMO with a daunting directive: To modernize the bank’s brand, which meant changing her own preconceived notions about the company.

“I was a newbie and had certain perspectives about the firm,” Milligan told Insider. “That it was my dad’s firm, or a firm for rich people, or people who have arrived.”

But she soon learned that giving back to the community, diversity, and inclusion were among Morgan Stanley’s core values, which influenced her marketing strategy going forward.  

In January, Milligan launched Morgan Stanley’s first global brand campaign since 2019: “Old School Grit. New World Ideas.” It aimed to bridge the gap between people’s traditional perception of the brand and its core values and to show it could cater to a younger generation. 

As part of her efforts to modernize the brand, Milligan is leaning into partnerships with notable women entrepreneurs and athletes. Those include the fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff, who launch a banker bag, and the 20-year-old tennis player Leylah Fernandez on a program called “Racket Drop” to bring tennis gear to underserved communities.

The goal is to make sure everybody has access to as many opportunities as possible, which ultimately extends to making sure Morgan Stanley’s banking services reach a greater number of people.

“There’s heightened awareness overall about women in financial services, where traditionally they have not felt as connected because there wasn’t a lot of transparency and a lot of jargon,” Milligan said.

She’s also investigating how generative AI can boost engagement with young audiences, especially given their notoriously short attention spans. Milligan said Morgan Stanley could use the tech to quickly build different creative variations for individual platforms and purposes.

“We can mix and match headlines and a variety of options in terms of content length and test them against each other,” she said. “You might need a version that’s great for Instagram Live, but might need a soundbite for marketing texts or a version for newsletters.”

Disrupting the car-rental industry

Mok wants Turo to challenge traditional car-rental companies.

He got his start at the car-rental platform 11 years ago as a business-intelligence analyst, handling analytics, data, and finance before moving into the CMO role. 

Mok used those left-brain skills to build out Turo’s performance-marketing expertise and acquire new customers. He’s now investing more in brand marketing to make Turo a mainstream name. “Ten years ago, it was very novel to do performance marketing — nowadays every company does it,” he told Insider. 

In November, he launched a campaign called “Open the door to extraordinary” that emphasized the memorable experiences that take place during road trips.

Mok also worked on a campaign that let people rent the car featured in the hit Netflix show “Wednesday” — a 1950 Cadillac hearse. Influencers including Vanessa Hudgens promoted the partnership on social media, helping Turo reach more than 13,500 Instagram accounts.

“These are the types of stunts that I think you would not see traditional rental-car companies do because they don’t really put much emphasis on the actual car or the experience,” he said.

Turo also runs ads on TikTok and Twitch, harnessing user-generated creativity to target younger audiences, he added.

In addition to marketing, Mok oversees Turo’s 80-person team that works with car owners, who the company call “hosts,” who rent their cars on Turo’s platform.

Combining in-store and e-commerce sales

Peterson leads brand marketing and e-commerce for Kendra Scott, the billion-dollar jewelry brand that Gen Z college students on TikTok and celebrities including Taylor Swift, Camila Cabello, and Gwyneth Paltrow love.

Since joining the company in 2022, Peterson has focused on the in-person customer experience, using campaigns based on physical destinations to drive earned media, social-media chatter, and cater to its philanthropic initiatives.

For this year’s Valentine’s Day push, Kendra Scott partnered with the Museum of Ice Cream. The pair created a pop-up experience at Kendra Scott’s flagship store in Austin, Texas. It featured interactive magnet-letter boards, a letter-writing station, Instagrammable photo locations, and free tastings of the limited edition “Kendra’s Sweet on You” ice cream. Kendra Scott and the Museum of Ice Cream also threw ice-cream parties for schools, where classes could create their own Museum of Ice Cream truck.

Collaborations have been key to Kendra Scott’s success under Peterson. Late last year, Kendra Scott partnered with Mattel to create the pink-hued “Kendra Scott x Barbie” jewelry collection, leaning into the so-called “#Barbiecore” trend. 

Peterson also steered Kendra Scott to target its male customer base for the first time in its marketing; men represent about 20% of its customers. For the holidays in 2022, Kendra Scott released an ad that poked fun at the awful gifts men have bought their partners, friends, and family members. 

The “Buy Better Gifts” push was so successful that Kendra Scott launched a second ad for Valentine’s Day. The company said the campaign helped drive a 252% increase in revenue during the Valentine’s Day shopping period, compared with the prior year, and that it resulted in 23 million impressions.

Within the marketing and e-commerce team itself, which Kendra Scott calls “BrandX,” Peterson has ensured brand and performance marketing are not treated as separate silos because they both drive sales from brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce.

Building social activism into marketing campaigns

When Diageo’s longtime CEO, Ivan Menezes, died in June, it hit the company with a sudden, unexpected tragedy. 

But the spirits giant has a strong executive bench who steadied the company through upheaval. On that bench is Pilkington, who oversees marketing across Diageo’s numerous brands in North America, including Crown Royal, Bulleit Bourbon, Guinness, and many others. 

Under his leadership, which began in 2018, each brand has maintained a unique platform, almost all of them centered around sustainability and social awareness. Crown Royal’s marketing initiatives spin off of the idea of generosity and giving back. At last year’s CMA Music Festival in Nashville, the whiskey brand encouraged attendees to give donations to a veterans’ organization and to send care packages to military members via its Purple Bag Project. 

The Purple Bag Project continues to be a mainstay for Crown Royal’s marketing platform. “In the last year, we smashed our way through one million bags full of goodies we send to the military and other people in need, and we communicated that quite broadly,” Pilkington told Insider.

Crown Royal also launched its first Super Bowl ad this year with Dave Grohl, the frontman of the Foo Fighters and a fan of the brand, after their rival Anheuser-Busch didn’t buy out all the big game-ad slots. The international market-research and data-analytics firm YouGov ranked the ad in the top three of the night based on increases in ad awareness, buzz, and consideration.

It was a big year for other Diageo brands as well, such as Bulleit Frontier Whisky, which launched a new multiyear campaign with the Grammy Award-winning spoken word artist J. Ivy to encourage underrepresented voices to continue to innovate and push into new frontiers.

Diageo is also integrating AI in its social and search marketing via the company CreativeX. At the moment, Diageo is using AI to inform which images get the best results for campaigns on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.

“It’s about content optimization, not to write the next Super Bowl ad,” Pilkington said. “I can see us using it for more content development, and I think we’ll start to move in that space.”

Pushing the marketing discipline into new technologies

Rajamannar has been the CMO of Mastercard for 10 years and helps keep the brand on the edge of innovation.

In April, he launched a Web3 program called Mastercard Artist Accelerator that helps consumers discover new music creators, who then monetize their work using Web3 and AI tools. Musicians also get access to resources, such as learning how to resell their work. More than 100,000 people signed up for the program, Rajamannar said.

“There has been a rollercoaster in terms of Web3 technology — we’ve been trying to see the relevance of it within the context of our business,” he said.

In May, Rajamannar launched a loyalty program in the Asia Pacific region called Mastercard Gamer XChange that gives consumers gaming points in exchange for unspent rewards points. Rajamannar said that the program is intended to reach consumers beyond the younger, male audiences that are typically considered gamers. 

“Gaming is a growing passion point,” he said.

When Ukrainian citizens fled the country due to the Russia-Ukraine war, Mastercard rolled out a platform called “Where to Settle” that gives people who fill out a form data and insights about the cost of living in Poland. The idea is to help people understand whether they are financially able to relocate, and Mastercard said that more than 100,000 forms have been completed. Poland’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has also promoted the program.

Supercharging e-commerce sales

Since stepping into Kind’s global CMO role in December 2021, Solomon has built up the brand’s e-commerce business. In 2022 compared to the previous year, Amazon purchases of Kind Snacks were up by 21%, and sales across other e-commerce platforms, including DoorDash, FreshDirect, and Gopuff were up by double digits.

While Solomon brings e-commerce expertise to Kind, having previously spearheaded online sales initiatives at Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, and Samsung, she has also successfully made sure the company spreads its message on topics gripping the national consciousness, such as sustainability and wellness. To do so, Solomon has built unique activations on channels including Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok.

By 2030, Kind wants to source all of its almonds from orchards that practice “regenerative agriculture,” or farming techniques that preserve the health of the land. It’s a difficult topic for the average consumer to understand, so Solomon used an AR activation via a Snapchat lens to educate consumers.  

Kind also used TikTok and YouTube to drive awareness around the importance of bees as pollinators, which ensures the growth of the world’s food supplies. Kind collaborated on its message with the TikTok creators Jeff and Julie Russell, who specialize in bee removal and rescue. The TikTok campaign garnered 19.2 million views, and Kind furthered its online reach with a YouTube video that has since accumulated 2.5 million views.

And earlier this year, Kind partnered with Padma Lakshmi — who just stepped down from a 17-year stint hosting “Top Chef” — to come up with recipes at a pop-up kitchen in line with KIND’s nutritional philosophy.

Increasing streaming subscribers

This year, Warner Bros. Discovery kicked off its biggest marketing campaign ever: The launch of the Max streaming platform, which combines programming from HBO Max with Discovery’s reality shows and documentaries.

Spagnoletto, who had previously launched Discovery+ and helped triple subscribers during his four-year tenure at Hulu, was primed for the task. He and his team launched a TV, social, radio, digital, and out-of-home campaign using Warner Bros. Discovery’s media channels to draw awareness to the new platform and its programming library.

“We felt there was a lot of equity in the Max part of HBO Max that was built over time, and we wanted to lean into that equity as we go into this new version of the product,” Spagnoletto told Marketing Brew. 

Around 70% of the HBO Max customer base switched to the Max platform during launch week, JB Perrette, Warner Bros. Discovery’s global streaming and games president, told The Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Spagnoletto’s team introduced another first for HBO Max: a Black Friday promotion. The push helped convince a new audience that hadn’t previously considered subscribing to HBO Max to try the service at a lower price. The company said the promotion drove the fourth-highest week of HBO Max and Discovery+ sign-ups. HBO Max and Discovery+ grew their total subscriber base to 96.1 million — an increase of 1.1 million — in the fourth quarter of 2022. Spagnoletto also buoyed HBO last year with the biggest marketing campaign in its history for “House of the Dragon,” its “Game of Thrones” prequel. 

Spagnolett0 is also responsible for HBO’s multicultural marketing team, prioritizing community-focused multicultural initiatives, including HBO Max’s Scene in Black, recognizing Black creators, the HBO Max Pa’lante! Latino program, and Human By Orientation for the LGBTQ community. At this year’s SXSW, Spagnoletto’s team hosted a coffeehouse that leveraged the cultural significance of the coffeehouse as a space for multicultural and counterculture communities to meet and exchange ideas.

Making business software a big name

Taite wants to make the email-marketing firm Mailchimp a mainstream name by using a playbook of sponsorships and activations that big brands typically use.

She joined Mailchimp two years ago, around the time Intuit acquired the company. Since then, Taite has hired 100 people, doubling the size of the marketing team.

She created two Super Bowl campaigns featuring small-business owners — Mailchimp’s core clients that use the firm’s marketing tools to run their businesses. In September 2022, she created Mailchimp’s first global campaign targeting marketers, including a sponsorship at New York Fashion Week that showed how emerging designers use Mailchimp’s tools. The campaign led to a 64% increase in brand awareness and a 50% increase in site visits, according to Mailchimp.

Elsewhere, an August 2023 partnership with the singer-songwriter Björk promoted Mailchimp in a podcast series that has been streamed 1.2 million times, according to Mailchimp.

Taite is also expanding Mailchimp’s creative investments to appeal to the masses, partnering with agencies such as Kin. She is also building out an internal creative agency, Wink Creative.

In addition to zeroing in on small businesses, Taite plans to broaden Mailchimp’s marketing to target more sophisticated marketers in campaigns over the next few years.

Making baseball cool

Timpone, a marketing veteran, joined Major League Baseball in 2021 as its first CMO in five years as it prepared to overhaul the sport with new rules designed to make gameplay faster and more efficient.

Since introducing the pitch clock and other rule changes on its March 30 opening day, almost every team has seen stronger attendance this year compared to 2022. As of June 13, attendance averaged 27,283 per game this season, up by 6.8% from last year, according to MLB. TV viewing and MLB.TV streaming was also up in April compared to last season.

Ahead of opening day, Timpone led a campaign the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy created, designed to appeal to viewers’ senses and nostalgia. From the smell of a freshly mowed field to the clink of a turnstile, sizzling hotdogs, an Aaron Judge tribute, and plenty of outsized mascots, the marketing effort aimed to remind fans that “baseball is something else.”

Individual MLB teams also aired their own ads, part of a Timpone-led strategy to increase both communication and efficiency across the MLB’s assets.

“There is a lot of fresh energy to the spots that is matching the vibrance we’re seeing on the field and in the stands,” Timpone told The Drum in April.

Timpone has also shifted MLB’s marketing toward a new generation. Her team has identified influencer fans and content creators, and she’s introduced events for fans to experience baseball and its stars beyond the league’s in-season games. MLB’s All-Star week last year included a free event at the Santa Monica Pier, which Capital One sponsored.

To reach avid fans, Timpone has leveraged first-party data to power programmatic advertising while also maximizing reach across national broadcasts on ESPN, Fox, Turner, Apple TV+, and Peacock.

Timpone has also been focused on developing an MLB-loyalty program, which she said will be more “experiential” than traditional loyalty programs.

Building new ways to engage with the gaming community

Under Tinson, marketing at Electronic Art, or EA, isn’t just about selling video games; it’s also about selling the communities that exist around each of its many franchises. 

The cover for the deluxe edition of Madden NFL 24, which comes out in August, features Josh Allen, the star Buffalo Bills quarterback. “That’s a visual representation of the concept of putting our fans right on the cover of the game,” Tinson told Insider.

EA’s marketing team has a lot of other ways of working with its fanbase. In 2021, it launched its Creator Network, where users can share gaming-related content. That program continues to thrive with thousands of creators, and on some occasions, their content even winds up in actual EA games. For instance, its battle-royale-style shooter “Apex Legends” celebrated its fourth anniversary last year with in-game items that fans created. 

One of the biggest challenges for Tinson happened last year when EA lost the right to use FIFA’s name for its mega-popular video-game series. While EA retained the licenses to use the names of prominent soccer clubs, it had to rebrand its FIFA series to EA Sports FC. 

“Our FIFA soccer business is one of the biggest video games in the world, and it’s one of the biggest entertainment IPs in the world,” Tinson told Insider. His biggest challenge over the last year was generating awareness of that transformation, and he did so with an aggressive PR initiative that got coverage in Forbes, Fast Company, Bleacher Report, ESPN, and others. In all, stories about the rebrand nabbed 10 billion impressions.

Whether that translates to business results will soon be put to the test. The company is releasing its first soccer game with the new branding this September.

Despite the stakes, Tinson is also excited about the opportunity. Freed from the FIFA licensing agreement, EA might have lost the right to use the name, but it won the right to work with more partners. “We just announced that we’re working with Nike and, over time, we’re able to collaborate with others in ways we weren’t before,” Tinson said.

Tinson’s efforts to engage with the gaming community have contributed to measurable business results, with EA’s stock up by about 8% over the last quarter.

Bringing a little-known brand into the limelight

While Treseder is relatively new to Autodesk — she came on board as its CMO only last October — she has already had a huge impact. Autodesk is a software company that makes products architects and engineers often use, but its name isn’t well-known beyond the professionals that rely on its tools.

Autodesk hired Treseder to help the brand make a bigger splash in the public eye, and she’s already pulled the company into the spotlight. Within 30 days of joining the company, Treseder worked with Ryan Reynolds’ agency, Maximum Effort, to launch the company’s first TV ad in over ten years. It was an early test to see if TV could actually drive business results for a company that sells design software, and the conclusion was that it could — Autodesk decided to incorporate TV more aggressively into its media planning.

The company’s next TV-related success was the “Otto Desć” campaign during the 2023 Oscars, which got over 25 million views. Autodesk increased the reach of that campaign by working with influencers for the first time.

Treseder has also been aggressive in making sure people know about Autodesk’s contributions following world-rocking events. When fire ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral four years ago, Autodesk’s software was instrumental in its restoration. Treseder worked with the French government to launch a campaign on the Autodesk website to make sure consumers knew of Autodesk’s contribution. The campaign got two million organic views and, after lots of media coverage, netted 21 million unique visitors per month, which helped with demand generation. 

“By telling these stories, we’re working to develop a robust content engine for Autodesk that will broaden our reach, help our customers – new and existing – envision what’s possible with our platform, and deepen the emotional connection and in turn loyalty they have for our platform,” Treseder told Insider in an email.

Treseder’s contributions have gone beyond TV and video ads. She implemented fresh new tactics at Autodesk, making sure all of its marketing disciplines — from press, demand generation, paid media, and more — laddered into the same strategy.

Her efforts helped contribute to fourth-quarter revenue of $1.32 billion, up by 12% from the same period prior. And in the first six months of Treseder’s leadership, the number of educators and students using Autodesk products increased from 55 million to 65 million.

Leading fast-food sales

Taco Bell continues to fuel Yum! Brands’ revenue.

It relaunched the Mexican Pizza as a permanent menu item in September, which helped increase the restaurant’s same-store sales by 11% during the fourth quarter of 2022.

While Tresvant holds the title of global chief brand and strategy officer, his marketing prowess deserves credit for Taco Bell’s growth. He helped develop a Super Bowl campaign to promote the return of the Mexican Pizza with the musician Doja Cat, netting 45 million sales of the item throughout 2022.

Taco Bell also credited its sales to Tresvant’s work with the actor and comedian Pete Davidson to promote its breakfast offerings.

Tresvant also spearheaded a recent partnership with the NBA star LeBron James aimed at its competitor Taco John’s trademark of the phrase “Taco Tuesday.” As part of the campaign, James starred in an ad and signed a Change.org petition challenging the trademark. 

Tresvant is a former Nike marketing exec who joined Taco Bell in December 2021.

Embracing tech to spur deliveries

Trumbull started at Domino’s in 2011 leading a Hispanic marketing program and has risen through the ranks to become the pizza chain’s first chief brand officer.

She is now tasked with keeping Domino’s on the cusp of technology and innovation, finding new ways to deliver pizza. Trumbull helped develop an app for Apple CarPlay, which lets a car’s infotainment screen display the user’s iPhone apps. The Domino’s app also lets people order pizza through the infotainment system.

Trumbull also builds campaigns to reach new audiences. She led a partnership with Netflix’s “Stranger Things” during its fourth season to reach the show’s younger audiences. The campaign encouraged people to download a branded app that lets people order pizza — while exploring items from the show’s fictional Hawkins National Laboratory. The Netflix partnership generated more than 800 million media impressions, 330,000 app installs, and 1.7 million site visits, according to Domino’s.

Trumbull has used advertising to tackle Domino’s bigger business problems. Facing a labor shortage in 2022, she spearheaded a campaign encouraging people to pick up their own orders from stores by offering a $3 discount. As a result, sales for carry-out orders grew by 14.6% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter of 2022. The campaign also netted 2 billion media impressions, according to Domino’s.

And Trumbull has made sure that Domino’s is a part of big conversations that grip the nation. The pizza chain partnered with Chevy last November to use 800 Bolt Electric vehicles as delivery cars in the US as part of an effort to offset carbon emissions.

Reaching price-conscious shoppers

In tough economic times, shoppers are gravitating toward lower-priced products. It’s a time-honored trend that White’s team fully embraced with its April campaign, “If You Walmart You Know.” The multi-pronged push last year highlighted how Walmart customers were making smart shopping decisions and saving money.

The theme continued into the holiday season with marketing that featured real customer testimonials spotlighting the unique traditions and ways customers celebrate the season. It was a different approach for Walmart, which would usually create product-focused campaigns centered around the most-popular gifts of the year. 

This April, White led a rebrand of Walmart’s membership program, Walmart+, to bring greater focus to the savings customers can achieve through the program. The associated marketing campaign to launch the rebrand made 4.6 billion impressions, the company said. Walmart lifted its full-year sales forecast in May of this year, crediting its consistent strategy to focus on low prices.

Outside of the value-driven approach, White’s team has placed Walmart at the forefront of digital-marketing innovation and partnerships. Last year, Walmart became the first exclusive retailer and merchant to partner with Roku to allow viewers to purchase products featured in ads directly from their TV screens. In September, Walmart partnered with Paramount to offer Walmart+ members a Paramount+ subscription.

On the heels of forming a partnership with Roblox to create “Walmart Land” last summer, White’s team launched Walmart Creator, a platform that allows customers to earn money from their product recommendations on social media. Thousands of customers signed up when Walmart Creator launched in beta, and the Creator Instagram page has more than 23,000 followers, the company said.

Winning Gen Z and millennial shoppers

Yarbrough is making J.Crew cool again.

After suffering from sluggish sales and filing for bankruptcy in the past few years, J.Crew is trying to appeal to new audiences, such as Gen Z and millennials — partially leaning on the marketing playbook that Yarbrough created for J.Crew’s sister brand, Madewell. Yarbrough is a longtime J.Crew marketing exec who was tapped to lead both brands’ marketing in 2021.

He helped develop a customer-data platform for J.Crew in 2022 that’s similar to Madewell’s tech stack. The platform collects data on what people buy, which the company then uses to fine-tune how ads are targeted and connect sales from e-commerce with brick-and-mortar stores. Madewell’s e-commerce website and app also use AI to personalize searches and styling.

Yarbrough is also betting on membership programs that offer perks such as exclusive access to sales to win over shoppers. J.Crew revamped its membership program, J.Crew Passport, in 2022 with rewards, including free monogramming and shopping credits for birthdays.

In 2022, he also relaunched J.Crew’s women’s line and zeroed in on denim products to promote Madewell. With Madewell, Yarbrough is investing in influencer marketing, out-of-home ads, and streaming TV to appeal to both Gen Z and millennial customers. A 2022 campaign, “When The Fit Hits,” ran on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram and promoted fall clothing products with ads tailored to each platform. An image-heavy version of the campaign showing the products ran on Instagram, while the TikTok version featured video tutorials of products that stars, such as the actor Lukas Gage, promoted.