Published on October 5, 2020
One constant thread weaves through the stories of those honored on this year’s list of Ad Age’s annual 40 Under 40: the ability to take action in the face of adversity. Some, including Headspace’s Deb Hyun and Houseparty’s Kimberly Kalb Baumgarten, are finding new ways to grow their businesses. Others are building a voice for equality, including HBO Max’s Katie Soo, who mentors underrepresented youths. Many of our honorees are just getting started. Kwame Taylor-Hayford recently left Chobani to start Kin, an agency where he uses brand culture as a force for good. Procter & Gamble vet Tara Morrill earlier this year joined Rare Beauty Brands to grow the label into a cosmetics titan. The list, narrowed down from a record 800 entries, includes executives from well-known marketers including Google, The New York Times, Walgreens, the NBA and Frito-Lay North America, as well as newer brands including Seedlip and Morning Brew. Their backgrounds are diverse, but their passion is the same. Find out more about where they’re headed.
Natasha Aarons
Head of multicultural marketing, Google
Natasha Aarons
Head of multicultural marketing, Google
As the daughter of Jamaican immigrants coming from a humble beginning, Natasha Aarons, Google’s head of multicultural marketing, feels a sense of duty to create opportunities for communities that face systemic disadvantages. Before recently taking up her current role, the 39-year-old YouTube and Verizon vet led Google’s influencer and experiential marketing for its mobile hardware division. She scaled Google’s Pixel influencer team from 29 individuals to a diverse network of more than 500. Among the many activations she’s led, her proudest has been challenging the Latin Grammy’s exclusion of reggaetón artists with the Pixel 4 campaign. She worked with reggaetón star Karol G, who was snubbed despite being one of the highest-streamed stars, on a commercial for the Pixel 4 that aired during the live Latin Grammys in 2019. “I’ve used my position, often as the only woman of color on a team, to be a bold change agent who consistently demonstrates commitment to championing diverse voices throughout every step in my career,” she says.
Ryan Avery
Senior program activation manager, Twitch
Ryan Avery
Senior program activation manager, Twitch
San Francisco-based Ryan Avery has worked with Twitch as a senior program activation manager for the past four years. Avery introduces advertisers to gaming and esports through custom content that takes the form of influencer broadcasts, sponsorships and more. The 33-year-old now has a number of successful campaigns under his belt with brands including Miller Lite and Coca-Cola, often positioning brands as supporters of content creators. On top of actively streaming Overwatch on the platform, Avery is also the co-leader of Twitch’s The Black Guild, an employee advocacy group for Black Twitch employees and creators for which Avery works with Twitch leaders to implement policies and plan events including workshops, panels and speakers to help with professional development. “Team members that are supported and inspired with a shared vision have the ability to make a major impact on the business,” he says.
Luiz Barros
Global VP, data and media, Anheuser-Busch InBev
Luiz Barros
Global VP, data and media, Anheuser-Busch InBev
With the pandemic forcing the closure of bars around the world, Anheuser-Busch InBev had to act fast to revamp marketing normally geared for drinking establishments. No one moved faster than Luiz Barros, 36, who helped launch programs including Tienda Cerca, a free online food and drink delivery platform now used by 400,000 neighborhood shops in Latin America. “There were a lot of small grocery shops, local bars, that were struggling to survive,” says Barros. “They were still open, but people couldn’t go there. They didn’t have a delivery system.” Barros also helped the brewer fill the entertainment gap, putting the company’s brands behind live-streamed concerts, including a country music series in Brazil sponsored by Brahma beer. The brewer has now produced 200 livestreams including ambitious productions that go beyond an artist simply performing in their living room. “Probably nobody in the world produced more shows than AB InBev,” he says.
Chris Bellinger
VP, creative and digital, Frito-Lay North America
Chris Bellinger
VP, creative and digital, Frito-Lay North America
Chris Bellinger was familiar with Frito-Lay North America’s brands before he joined two years ago. His time at The Marketing Arm included Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” and that brand’s gamer push, and even a Cheetos-themed restaurant. Since 2018 the 38-year-old has been building up Frito-Lay’s internal creative shop, which replicates the drive and energy of an external agency. His team of 24 has pulled off plenty of projects in its short tenure. A 2019 music video starring Anna Kendrick singing a snack-filled “My Favorite Things” was a hit that will return this winter. A COVID-19 montage “had people crying from the company saying how proud they were,” says Bellinger. And the NFL star-studded “’ Twas the Night Before Kickoff” came together in eight weeks during the pandemic. Others within PepsiCo, Frito-Lay’s parent company, are taking notice. Cap’n Crunch hired the shop as its agency of record, and more Quaker work is likely to follow.
Melissa Bennett
Co-founder and technology director, Heat Waves Collective
Melissa Bennett
Co-founder and technology director, Heat Waves Collective
Three years after Free the Bid began advocating for women directors to be included in the bidding process for ad shoots, the organization launched Free the Work, a database of underrepresented creators. “It’s a three-in-one product,” says Melissa Bennett of design and technology studio Heat Waves, which handled the branding, strategy, design and product development for the platform. “Companies like Facebook and P&G can track their diversity hiring practices as far as recruiting for creative talent for making ads,” she says. Users can also create playlists of a filmmaker’s work, and a machine learning algorithm recommends content based on a user’s interaction on the site. Bennett, 36, also volunteers as a mentor with Black Girls Code and Hack for LA, teaching young kids and high-school students to program. And she moderated a panel at the Women Impact Tech Conference about women in the engineering field and getting past imposter syndrome last year.
Alex Bennett-Grant
Founder and CEO, We Are Pi
Alex Bennett-Grant
Founder and CEO, We Are Pi
Alex Bennett-Grant left what he describes as the “stiff” environment of the U.K. ad industry for a role at Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam in 2007. As a man of Jamaican and Greek descent, the 38-year-old says he felt “overwhelmingly energized” by the agency’s more welcoming, diverse environment. In 2010 he opened his own agency, We Are Pi, where he and his partners have made “radical diversity” a priority. That sentiment plays out in the agency’s cultural makeup—the shop strives to have 50% diversity across all social segments as well as “the most international team we could possibly have,” Bennett-Grant says. Previously honored as Ad Age’s International Small Agency of the Year, the company is also known for ideas that don’t fit the typical advertising mold, spanning the development of Lego’s “Ninjago” brand, to ongoing thrill-fests in unexpected places—such as in zero gravity—for Heineken’s fast-growing Desperados brew. As one of European advertising’s few Black CEOs, Bennett-Grant is also on a mission to ensure the industry becomes more equitable for all. “Maybe it sounds a bit naive, but we ask ourselves, can we set our sights on being the most progressive agency in the world?” he says. “We’ve got to move forward, so we’re putting things in place to try to get there.”
Ben Branson
Founder, Seedlip
Ben Branson
Founder, Seedlip
Ben Branson was at a restaurant in London in 2013 and had a taste for something non-alcoholic. He was served “this disgusting pink, sweet, fruity, childish mocktail,” he recalls. “It didn’t really match the food or the ambiance.” Branson, 37, had already been tinkering with making more sophisticated non-alcoholic drinks using a small copper still and herbs from his garden. But that moment convinced him there was a market for what became Seedlip, whose drink recipes are based on a 17th-century book called “The Art of Distillation.” The fast-growing brand founded in 2015 has tapped into the rising sobriety movement that has led to events like Dry January. Liquor giant Diageo bought majority ownership in Seedlip last year, and the U.K.-based brand is now sold in 35 countries. Branson’s mother’s family has been farming in England for 320 years, while his dad is in the design business. “I worked with my mom on the ingredients...and I worked with my dad on the design,” he says. “I literally poured part of them into this bottle.”
Zach Bruning
Global lead, programmatic video, Amazon
Zach Bruning
Global lead, programmatic video, Amazon
Zach Bruning is leading one of the most important advertising segments in one of the fastest-growing ad businesses in the world. “When I arrived at Amazon in 2018, we had just launched our first OTT advertising product,” Bruning says. “Coming from a video and OTT sales background, it was fortuitous timing.” That’s an understatement. Amazon’s ad platform is growing more than 40 percent year over year, and in the first half of 2020 Amazon generated more than $8 billion in the part of its business that includes advertising. Much of that growth is coming from the push into programmatic, self-serve advertising technology that Bruning, 37, has been part of selling to the ad world. Now, he’s focused on the over-the-top TV ad boom, which has been characterized by the rise of services including Amazon Fire TV, IMDb TV and Twitch, which Amazon also owns. Amazon is competing with media companies in this space like NBC Universal’s Peacock app, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and Disney-owned Hulu. Roku is also a formidable rival. Bruning hails from Madison Avenue, where his first job was a media planner at DraftFCB. His next challenge is to incorporate Amazon’s audio ad business into the automated video platform he helped develop.
Rony Castor and Anthony O’Neill
Associate creative directors, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Rony Castor and Anthony O’Neill
Associate creative directors, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Rony Castor (right), 35, and Anthony O’Neill, 39, specialize in coming up with off-brief ideas that don’t just respond to events, but are ahead of them. Case in point: their “Not a Gun” campaign for Courageous Conversations Global Foundation, which graphically depicted how an innocent candy bar could look like a gun in the hands of a Black person in order to highlight that Black people in America are three times more likely to be killed by police. The work came out in February; just four days later, Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead by police, and later, after the murder of George Floyd, its significance looms even larger. Other campaigns by the pair, who worked at agencies including FCB and Havas before joining Goodby two years ago, have included BMW’s “Calm Wash,” letting viewers meditate to a car wash during the lockdown, and “Beyond 28” for the Golden State Warriors, encouraging people to celebrate Black history beyond the 28 days of February.
Aminah Charles
North America head of sports marketing, Beats by Dre
Aminah Charles
North America head of sports marketing, Beats by Dre
At just 33, Aminah Charles heads up North American sports marketing at Apple’s Beats by Dre. There, she was a key figure in establishing and now nurturing the brand’s largest partnership to date, with the National Basketball Association. Her role sees her juggling relationships with teams including the L.A. Lakers, the Golden State Warriors, the Houston Rockets, the Philly 76ers and New Orleans Pelicans, as well as various NBA stars. But her hand extends across the entire expanse of the sports world—in July she helped seal the deal on Beats’ partnership with NASCAR’s sole Black driver, Bubba Wallace, and she’s now in the trenches with the team thinking up how to tell his unique story through the Beats lens. Prior to Apple, she earned her B.S. in sports management at top-tier HBCU Hampton University, leading to internships at the New York Knicks and Nike. After, she spent seven years at Gatorade. Even with such broad experience, “I don’t want them to put me in a box,” she thought, so Charles went on to earn her MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School “to get a whole new toolbox,” she says. “It’s about hustling, doing the work and putting yourself in a position so people can’t tell you ‘No.’”
Kim Clark
VP of international marketing, National Basketball Association
Kim Clark
VP of international marketing, National Basketball Association
Kim Clark—who normally trots the globe as VP of international marketing for the National Basketball Association—has been stuck working from her New Jersey home since the pandemic struck. But she is plenty busy overseeing efforts that are expanding the league’s reach and furthering its social justice mission. Clark, 39, led the “The Truth is #BlackLivesMatter” campaign that included blunt lines like “The truth is racism is everywhere,” alongside footage of NBA players taking part in street protests. The ad, created in-house, scored higher than any other previous NBA ad, according to ad-scoring firm Ace Metrix. “We knew we had a responsibility … to create a spot that spoke truth to the moment,” she says. Clark has also kept the NBA’s Basketball Africa League top of mind after the league was forced to delay its inaugural season in March due to the coronavirus. Moves include a social media content series called “Hang Time” that spotlights African basketball, culture, lifestyle and art.
Kyle Dropp
Co-founder and president, Morning Consult
Kyle Dropp
Co-founder and president, Morning Consult
Kyle Dropp, 34, is a scholar in every sense of the word, with a resume impressive for people twice his age. After receiving his PhD from Stanford University in 2013, he moved from Milwaukee to New York to co-found data intelligence company Morning Consult, where he served for the past seven years as chief research officer and recently became president. He saw an opportunity to develop a way brands could better understand their customers beyond superficial metrics like clicks and social impressions. Dropp created the brand’s flagship product—Morning Consult Brand Intelligence (MCBI)—which tracks consumers’ perceptions of nearly 4,000 brands and products around the world. Since the start of the pandemic, Dropp has also driven a study to assess CEO reputation during this unprecedented time in history and led the company to launch Economic Intelligence, which details consumer spending habits during COVID-19.
JP Gomez
Creative director, Terri & Sandy
JP Gomez
Creative director, Terri & Sandy
At 16, JP Gomez moved from Colombia to New York. He learned English in six months and applied to the School of Visual Arts. “It was a scary thing, being alone and not knowing what you’re going to do,” he says. That experience led him to create “What About Us,” a program that provides free makeovers to homeless LGBTQ youth preparing for job interviews or school. “It’s interesting how such a simple thing as a haircut can change the way they think about themselves,” Gomez adds. A creative director at Terri & Sandy, the 33-year-old has worked on campaigns for Phonak and Twinings, and he leads the work for Barba men’s salon, which he also owns with his husband, Xavier Cruz. As the client too, he can let the creatives loose. “I tell them, ‘Come on, I won’t say no. Go crazy, go wild,’” which led to work like “Quarancuts,” Zoom haircut tutorials on Instagram Live that featured celebrity Billy Porter as the first “student.”
Jill Hazelbaker
Senior VP of marketing and public affairs, Uber Technologies
Jill Hazelbaker
Senior VP of marketing and public affairs, Uber Technologies
Jill Hazelbaker compares herself to a duck: “Smooth on the top and paddling hard on the bottom.” Currently on maternity leave with her third child, all of whom are under 5, she has scarcely had a moment’s rest since joining Uber’s marketing team in 2015, but the resilient 39-year-old has never shied away from a hectic routine. “I started my career in politics, and I think politics is actually a great training ground for working in tech companies, because the pace is so fast,” says Hazelbaker. During her nearly five years with Uber, the company’s moral standing and trustworthiness has been paramount. Hazelbaker was a key proponent of creating the ridesharing app’s Safety Report, and she also had a hand in campaigns that discouraged customers from using Uber during the height of the pandemic and telling racists to delete its app; decisions that may not be the most financially strategic, she concedes, but ones that will place Uber on the side of public good. “At the core of your reputation is integrity,” she says.
Deb Hyun
VP of global marketing, Headspace
Deb Hyun
VP of global marketing, Headspace
Little did Deb Hyun know when she joined Headspace in late 2019 that 2020 would be the year millions of stressed-out consumers would flock to the meditation app’s relaxation methods as a balm for their pandemic-induced anxiety. When she came on board nearly a year ago, the California-born marketer, a Headspace user since 2017, was looking for a way to marry the data-driven marketing she gained from working at Uber with the consumer-connecting strategies she learned as a psychology major at University of California Los Angeles. “Nowadays, you hear everyone saying mental health is just as important as physical health, but six or eight months ago, that wasn’t a concept,” the 35-year-old says. During COVID-19, Headspace has seen downloads increase 20 percent. Through a partnership with Sesame Street, the brand is exploring ways to connect with all ages. But as Headspace becomes more mainstream, Hyun is working at communicating the “value of practiced meditation” as helping customers build resiliency to future stresses. “As crises happen around you, you’re equipped using meditation and mindfulness almost as a preventative measure,” says Hyun. “We’re thinking about how to introduce that language as part of some upcoming campaigns.”
Kimberly Kalb Baumgarten
Head of marketing and user experience, Houseparty; marketing director, Epic Games
Kimberly Kalb Baumgarten
Head of marketing and user experience, Houseparty; marketing director, Epic Games
Kimberly Kalb Baumgarten has always been passionate about entertainment. An L.A. native, she found her early-career footing in the TV industry but, seeking something more fast-paced, a pivot to the tech sector wasn’t far behind. In 2015, she helped create live-streaming app Meerkat, which transitioned into video chatting app Houseparty the following year. Yet it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic took hold that the app’s explosive potential became clear—in one 30-day period during March and April 2020, Houseparty added more than 50 million new users. In just a few months, the adaptable 33-year-old has created and managed a range of Houseparty experiences from a virtual prom for the class of 2020 to the “In the House” campaign, featuring in-app performances from dozens of celebrities. And since the app was acquired by Epic Games last year, Kalb Baumgarten has been twice as busy holding marketing roles with both entities, but “it’s fun because [Epic Games] has that same chaotic startup energy that we had at Houseparty,” Kalb Baumgarten says.
Tagu Kato
Head of X-Brand Design and UX, direct-to-consumer and international, Walt Disney
Tagu Kato
Head of X-Brand Design and UX, direct-to-consumer and international, Walt Disney
If you toggle from ABC’s app to Disney Now to FX, you will see a unified consumer experience. Tagu Kato, 39, oversees the group that ensures design consistency across Walt Disney’s direct-to-consumer and international product portfolio to enhance the overall consumer experience. In June, he spearheaded the launch of Prism, a design system that unifies the way platforms including ABC, ABC News, Disney, ESPN, FX, Marvel, National Geographic and Star Wars work together. The creation of Prism allows thousands of designers, engineers and product managers to work as one unit and connect current and future fans to their favorite shows, characters, sports, and information every day globally. Before joining Disney three years ago, Kato, who was born and raised in Japan, served as senior director, global brand at Nike and held various roles at creative agencies like TBWA and Hakuhodo. Through all of his various roles, he’s been driven by the desire to solve consumer problems, he says.
Barry Katz
Former group creative director, Translation
Barry Katz
Former group creative director, Translation
When the pandemic canceled live sports, ESPN pushed up the release of the Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” to fill the void. Barry Katz, who at the time was group creative director at Translation, watched the lead time on his campaign for State Farm shrink from four months to one. Fortunately, “there was still an appetite from a lot of the clients for work that could resonate with sports fans,” says the 33-year-old. Sportscaster Kenny Mayne shot footage with his laptop camera, and the spot became an eerily accurate prediction of the future using “facial mapping” tech (the family-friendly term for deepfakes). Another client, health care company Kaiser Permanente, also had to rethink a campaign when Klay Thompson tore his ACL in the 2009 NBA Finals. Instead the Translation team created a documentary of Thompson’s physical and mental recovery. It was the first fans had heard from Thompson since the previous year. “No one had really talked to him about the injury since the injury,” says Katz, who recently left Translation to pursue a freelance career.
Megan Lally
Managing partner, Highdive
Megan Lally
Managing partner, Highdive
Megan Lally’s title at Highdive may be managing partner but, as her agency will attest, she wears many hats—chief operating officer, account lead, strategist, chief financial officer, new business pitcher and sometimes contributing creative director, to name a few. She’s credited by the Chicago shop as being “the driving force” behind the impressive growth it’s seen in its only four-year infancy. In 2019, Highdive delivered two of the most talked-about ads in Super Bowl LIV: Jeep’s “Groundhog Day” and Rocket Mortgage’s “Comfortable”—the agency says that’s thanks to Lally “running point.” Lally takes it all in stride, saying her day “is filled with meetings” that, outside of client business initiatives, include going over “employee happiness and general business needs like making sure everyone has what they need to do their job.” Lally, 35, is also always thinking up new ways to provide a better work-life balance for Highdive’s employees.
Alex Lieberman
Co-founder and CEO, Morning Brew
Alex Lieberman
Co-founder and CEO, Morning Brew
Alex Lieberman, 27, started what is now the Morning Brew in 2015 while studying at the University of Michigan, with the goal of making business news more digestible for younger readers. He ultimately quit his job in finance to focus on building the company at a time when other established publications were shuttering and bleeding revenue. Fortunately, his gamble paid off. Morning Brew, a daily focused email that digests the news, has grown rapidly. It now boasts over 2 million readers with revenue on track to increase nearly 50 percent to $20 million this year. Morning Brew has gone from a single, daily newsletter to a multi-product and multi-platform business. It recently launched several business-to-business products, creating content for industry professionals in the retail, technology and marketing spaces; it also debuted a new podcast division. And amid the pandemic, Morning Brew debuted a pop-up newsletter featuring content on how to survive quarantine.
Andrew Lincoln
Director of integrated marketing, creative director, Charlotte’s Web
Andrew Lincoln
Director of integrated marketing, creative director, Charlotte’s Web
From co-founding startup creative shop WorkInProgress to raising a newborn daughter, Andrew Lincoln’s life has had its fair share of anxiety. But where others may have struggled, he found refuge in using cannabidiol, or CBD. Now, the award-winning advertising pro is brandside with Charlotte’s Web, creating an in-house agency and using his marketing know-how to make the hemp product manufacturer “the first household name in CBD.” At the outset of 2020, he’d already been working on an industry-leading campaign titled “Trust the Earth” and had rolled out the brand’s debut retail experiences. But with the outbreak of COVID-19, 9-year-old Charlotte’s Web didn’t falter; it simply switched course to an education-based marketing strategy. “We know people need calmness,” says Lincoln, 37, who hopes CBD will become an increasingly large part of peoples’ lives once the pandemic gets under control. And he has wasted no time during this year’s lockdowns, speaking at virtual cannabis conferences, launching the brand’s informative “Searching for Answers” video series, and creating a 3 million-square-foot art installation for the second iteration of “Trust the Earth.”
Jovan Martin
U.S. head of beauty and personal care media, Unilever
Jovan Martin
U.S. head of beauty and personal care media, Unilever
Jovan Martin followed her father into finance and did well. But she found that while it worked for her analytical side, it didn’t for her creative side. So she got a Wharton M.B.A., became a WPP M.B.A. fellow rotating through consulting, strategy and communications planning, then landed at Mediacom before Unilever recruited her in 2016. “I’ve always enjoyed learning about people and what makes them tick,” and media lets her do that, says Martin, 39, head of Unilever U.S. beauty and personal care media. She’s helped make the company’s digital innovation framework global, leading more than 70 pilot projects, including adding shoppable e-commerce overlays across digital media. And when Unilever quit Facebook advertising just before a planned July 4 Facebook Live event celebrating Dove’s work in passing Crown Act laws against hair discrimination, Martin led a 36-hour effort to create a new creative and media plan that heavily involved Black-owned media. And one of Martin’s priorities now is to make Unilever’s media partnerships “as diverse as the consumers we serve,” she says, noting it wants to increase investment in Black-owned and Black-targeted media.
Ava McDonald
Founder and CEO, Zfluence
Ava McDonald
Founder and CEO, Zfluence
When Ava McDonald scrolled through social media in high school, she came across influencers hyping up all sorts of products—but something seemed off. “I noticed that brands were trying to reach Gen Zers using ‘pay-to-say’ influencers, but it was so clear to technology natives like myself that these were disingenuous endorsements,” McDonald recalls. So in her junior year, she founded Zfluence, a digital startup aimed at connecting social influencers with brands they’re genuinely passionate about to cultivate authentic, engaging endorsements. As Zfluence rolled out last year, some naysayers told her that she was too young to start a business, but the platform’s exponential growth over the past 12 months speaks for itself. Zfluence has grown to a network of more than 1,000 “Zfluencers” who represent 50-plus different brands. Now a 19-year-old freshman at Georgetown University, McDonald—who is Ad Age’s youngest 40-Under-40 honoree this year—has no plans to part ways with the company she created. “A lot of people ask me if I want to do Zfluence [after college], and I always say yes,” she adds.
Scott Mercer
Founder and CEO, Volta Charging
Scott Mercer
Founder and CEO, Volta Charging
Scott Mercer is a self-proclaimed car and motorcycle “geek” with a fascination for macro technology, behavioral change, environmental sustainability and finance. By the time he was 22, he’d already figured out how to combine all his passions into a business. Mercer started Volta Charging to build an infrastructure that would offer drivers free charging for electric vehicles through advertising and real-estate partnerships. “It’s really focused on how you inspire people to make choices,” says Mercer, now 34, who expects an increase in business in coming months as more consumers regard electric vehicles as a less-expensive option. “And how you get businesses to anchor around that in a way that connects them to the community.” Advertisers include Porsche, Rxbar and Hulu, at locations like Whole Foods, Amazon and Walgreens. In true startup fashion, “I was building the stations in my garage, selling the ads, and riding around on a motorcycle, fixing them,” Mercer says, recalling that one early investor even challenged him to a motorcycle race to see if he “had the guts to make it work.” (Spoiler: He did).
Jane Metcalf
Partner, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler
Jane Metcalf
Partner, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler
Jane Metcalf, who maintains a diverse commercial litigation practice with an emphasis on false advertising work, was drawn to law because she likes to argue, “by which I don’t mean that I like to fight,” she says. “What I like is the challenge of developing the best argument that gets my client where it needs to be.” Metcalf, 35, is a rising star in the false advertising and class action practice realm, representing clients in the cosmetics, pharmaceutical, pet care and tech sectors. Her victories include dismissal of a class action lawsuit alleging that a product was misleadingly advertised as all-naturally flavored, and another alleging that product packaging contained unlawful empty space. “It’s gratifying,” Metcalf says, “because I get to help the companies resolve their legal issues and get back to focusing on the substance of what they do.” Metcalf is also a co-founder and supervisor of the State Central Register pro bono project, representing low-income parents who have been placed, without due process, on a register of individuals suspected of child maltreatment—depriving them of important employment opportunities.
Hira Mohibullah
Executive creative director, BBDO Pakistan
Hira Mohibullah
Executive creative director, BBDO Pakistan
Hira Mohibullah, 34, specializes in using the power of advertising to push for social change in Pakistan, where she’s executive creative director at BBDO. With #BridalUniform, a campaign for UN Women, her team shockingly highlighted child marriage by hijacking a bridal couture fashion show and putting a little girl in a school uniform on the catwalk. Mohibullah says she knew it had worked when she saw the image used on a placard during a women’s rally a few months later, and then subsequently used in a news report about a change in the law. Another campaign, “Beat Me,” drew attention to domestic violence by challenging men to “beat” women at the things that women excel at. A mother of two, Mohibullah helped set up a day care facility at the agency so more mothers can join the workforce. “It’s helped me to retain more women, because they know there’s a path for growth here,” she says.
Tara Morrill
General manager, brand director, Rare Beauty Brands
Tara Morrill
General manager, brand director, Rare Beauty Brands
Tara Morrill picked a bad time to leave Procter & Gamble Co. in February and join skincare marketer Rare Beauty Brands. Four weeks later, the pandemic struck, and Rare Beauty laid off a quarter of its people. But Morrill, 38, quickly learned to pivot. The general manager and brand director helped a marketer whose biggest customers were brick-and-mortar department stores and Ulta Beauty shift online. From March through July, Rare Beauty and its flagship Patchology brand nearly tripled direct e-commerce sales and built a business nearly from scratch on Amazon. Morrill led a stepped-up content and social-media effort that increased Instagram followers 61 percent—including enlisting her brother’s girlfriend, who is fluent in Russian, to do an Instagram Live event with Sephora Russia. She also forged marketing alliances with direct-to-consumer brands Away luggage and Splendid apparel. “I just felt like I was nonstop, trying to do marketing like I was running out of time,” Morrill says. “It was this equalizer. If I could be more clever, make email more productive, increase our conversion rate, partner with Ulta or Sephora Russia,” then bigger marketers had no edge.
Allison Murphy
Senior VP, ad innovation, New York Times
Allison Murphy
Senior VP, ad innovation, New York Times
As the industry faces heightened scrutiny over data privacy, Allison Murphy, senior VP, ad innovation at the New York Times, is instrumental in the publisher’s efforts to stop using third-party data. And before a cookie-less future even took shape, Murphy, 35, led the team to launch the Times’ first cookie-less product in early 2018. She has also been at the forefront of building out the Times’ audio business, leading the development of ad products and marketing around “The Daily” podcast and its recently acquired Serial Productions. Murphy is surprised she works in advertising because, “at the end of the day I think of myself as more oriented around consumers,” she says. Murphy sees her job as carrying over the trust the Times has built with consumers to working with brands. Amid the pandemic and fight for social justice, Murphy has been working with advertisers to utilize insights gleaned from the newsroom and readers to figure out the best ways to take action on these issues.
Tyler Murray
CEO, North America, Geometry
Tyler Murray
CEO, North America, Geometry
Tyler Murray had a front-row seat to the world of shopper marketing at a young age. His father, Andy Murray, a Procter & Gamble veteran, founded ThompsonMurray, an earlier pioneer in shopper marketing, and it wasn’t long before the younger Murray built his own career in the space. “I’ve always known exactly what I wanted to do,” says the 39-year-old. After majoring in retail marketing and psychology at the University of Arkansas, Murray worked at agencies Visonaire Groupe and TracyLocke before joining WPP-owned Geometry in 2018 where he rose to CEO of North America last year. During his two-year tenure, he’s tried to infuse the agency’s transaction-driven strategies with a creative thread. He hired a new chief creative officer and chief talent officer and helped bring on new clients such as 3M and American Greetings. “Most shopper agencies have never been known for creativity, so that’s been the big focus,” Murray says. “How do we create the first creative commerce agency that’s known for creativity, not just known for great strategy and great conversion.”
Sherine Patrick
Manager, digital investment, Mindshare
Sherine Patrick
Manager, digital investment, Mindshare
After Mindshare deployed a private marketplace to drive media dollars to LGBTQ+ publishers, Sherine Patrick, 32, saw an opportunity to do the same for Black-owned and -centered outlets. So, as manager of digital investment for Mindshare, she did just that. Patrick says she developed the Black Community PMP this past spring at first “to drive intentional investment” to publications and partners serving Black audiences, but Patrick then realized she could take it “beyond that” and into culture. She did this by driving intentional investments “in Black content creators and musical artists as well.” She says the “marketplace has lacked thoughtful curation and understanding of the cultural and contextual nuances of the Black community. “Where the industry, for the most part, was talking to ‘African Americans,’ I wanted to talk to the Black Diaspora,” Patrick adds. Her efforts led Mindshare to become the launch advertiser for Kimberly-Clark’s U by Kotex earlier this year.
Denée Pearson
Senior VP of innovation, Nyx Professional Makeup, L’Oréal
Denée Pearson
Senior VP of innovation, Nyx Professional Makeup, L’Oréal
Denée Pearson started with L’Oréal as an intern while at Rutgers University in 2001, learning the beauty industry by working Bloomingdale’s Lancôme counters. “That’s basically where I fell in love with beauty,” Pearson says. “Hearing what people need, like and don’t like was really the foundation of what made me a strong marketer.” Pearson, 38, has spent the nearly two decades since working her way up through L’Oréal before last year assuming her new role as senior VP of innovation at NYX Professional Makeup based in Los Angeles. Along the way she’s navigated the transformations wrought by retailer Sephora and influencers, including leading last decade’s launch of EM Cosmetics alongside YouTube influencer Michelle Phan. Pearson oversees marketing, social media and product development for NYX, whose massive combined following of 30 million on Instagram and Facebook is taking the place of those beauty counters. While her original work at Bloomingdale’s meant arranging meetups with the late celebrity makeup artist Ross Burton, the pandemic has meant bringing NYX makeup artists to people via social media.
Alyssa Raine
Group VP, brand and creative, Walgreens
Alyssa Raine
Group VP, brand and creative, Walgreens
When Alyssa Raine was growing up, dinner table conversation revolved around brands and consumers’ cheese preferences—her father was a marketer for companies including Kraft. It was no surprise that the Chicago-born Raine became a marketer herself. The 39-year-old attended the University of Richmond with a major in economics and a minor in history. “I loved the idea of using data to understand what human behavior is and how to influence it,” she says. Since joining Walgreens two years ago, she’s helped to spearhead campaigns like the chain’s annual flu-shot push, as well as an effort that helped patients with cancer connect with pharmacists. During the pandemic, she’s digitized the chain’s Red Nose Day charity for children in poverty and created a series where consumers can get pharmacist answers for COVID-19 questions. She’s also worked on Walgreens’ rebranding, which will be released next month.
Andrew Rajanathan
Global business director, Zenith Worldwide
Andrew Rajanathan
Global business director, Zenith Worldwide
Behind Zenith’s successful onboarding of several major clients in the past 12 months—including RB, Luxottica, LVMH, Coty and Walt Disney Co., totalling $1 billion in billings—is its global business director, Andrew Rajanathan. The agency credits Rajanathan, 32, with leading the onboarding of each client “in 90 days or less with no slippage in delivery or quality.” During that time, Rajanathan also coordinated and activated Dettol’s TikTok #HandWashChallenge, which persuaded consumers to stay safe during the COVID crisis and generated 24 billion video views. He’s a key member of the Publicis Imagine team that oversees the hiring and development of talent, as well as a driving force behind the agency’s diversity and inclusion council. Another trait of Rajanathan seems to be humility. “Firstly, the most important thing to note [is] this is a team sport; I am proud to work with a talented team of adtech and martech specialists,” he says.
Lindsey Slaby
Founder, Sunday Dinner
Lindsey Slaby
Founder, Sunday Dinner
A typical day for Lindsey Slaby might start with an emergency call with a top marketer about a scope of work contract with an agency, followed by a two-hour plus meeting reviewing holiday marketing campaigns with a client and a coffee meeting with a global head of procurement for a major advertiser. And that was just the morning. Slaby, founder of consultancy Sunday Dinner, has been called a fixer, a CMO whisperer and even Olivia Pope—the crisis manager protagonist of the popular TV series “Scandal.” But Slaby sees her role more simply. “My north star from day one has been about building better marketers. My job is to set them up for success,” says the 39-year-old Slaby, who works for clients including Campbell Soup, Target, MassMutual, Vistaprint, Stitch Fix and Equinox. Now that chief marketing officers have more on their plates than ever, Slaby thrives on helping them be on the cutting edge of everything from agency relationships to performance marketing. “What I’m really attracted to is being curious and learning,” she says.
Katie Soo
Senior VP, growth marketing, HBO Max
Katie Soo
Senior VP, growth marketing, HBO Max
Katie Soo, 35, was the first and youngest member of a core team tasked with developing the marketing strategy for the launch of WarnerMedia’s streaming service HBO Max in May. With the pandemic sidelining many of the in-person tentpoles HBO Max had originally planned to utilize to market the platform, Soo and her team leveraged social media and pop culture moments and struck a more playful tone in marketing than sibling HBO is known for. There was the Facebook Watch party for Saturday morning cartoons like “Looney Tunes” and influencer-driven campaigns. Soo’s efforts helped HBO Max bring in more than 3 million subscribers. Soo, who is Asian, is passionate about mentoring those entering the startup world to help pave the way for future underrepresented leaders. “I want people to know that it doesn’t matter what your upbringing is, if English was your first language, or if you were born into an immigrant family; it’s possible to break down doors and blaze a path forward for underrepresented leaders like myself,” she says.
Danilo Tauro
Global director of media, tech and data, Procter & Gamble
Danilo Tauro
Global director of media, tech and data, Procter & Gamble
Danilo Tauro, 35, has bridged the gap from engineering to marketing, and now he’s trying to help Procter & Gamble do the same. Tauro started his career in his native Italy with an engineering Ph.D, consulting on artificial intelligence and machine learning. But since he wanted an international career, he joined P&G in Geneva in 2011. After a few years working on the general supply chain, Tauro followed a colleague’s suggestion he apply his interest in data and analytics to media. “I so fell in love with the space that I moved from a regional to a global role,” where as Boston-based global director of media, tech and data he leads a team that helps the world’s biggest advertiser improve targeting, manage how often the same people see the same ads, automate media buying and fight ad fraud. “P&G has people with strong marketing backgrounds,” Tauro says. “People who build technology companies are mostly engineers. So sometimes it’s two worlds talking past each other. People like me try to be the translators.”
Kwame Taylor-Hayford
Kwame Taylor-Hayford, Co-founder, Kin
Kwame Taylor-Hayford
Kwame Taylor-Hayford, Co-founder, Kin
Having been raised across Africa, Europe and the U.S. as a son of a diplomat, Kwame Taylor-Hayford says he “grew up with cultural and social issues very much at the dinner table” but he didn’t always see how he could incorporate “purpose” into his work as an advertiser. That is, not until he joined Chobani, where he helped develop its rebrand, launched its 10-year anniversary strategy and transitioned the company from a yogurt business to a food-focused wellness brand—all reasons why Chobani was named Ad Age’s 2019 In-House Agency of the Year. Taylor-Hayford, 37, has since left to co-found his own agency, Kin, to further his mission of tapping “into the culture of a brand to use it as a force for good.” Kin leaned on this purpose to develop a digital stream, #SupportTheShorts, for SXSW 2020 that gave small filmmakers a critical platform to debut their work when the festival was canceled.
Nick Tran
Head of global marketing, TikTok
Nick Tran
Head of global marketing, TikTok
Nick Tran almost studied to become a doctor, then a lawyer. Luckily for brands, he pursued a career in social media marketing. “I pivoted 180 degrees and went into marketing full-on,” Tran, 38, says. “I took every class I could.” It paid off because he was recognized as an early innovator in branding on social media on apps like Instagram and Snapchat. In 2014, Tran pulled a J.J. Abrams-level mystery with Taco Bell’s social media accounts by orchestrating a “blackout.” To launch its own app, Taco Bell went dark on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, basically writing the playbook for how to use social media by not using it. “Social was so new and we were able to come up with breakthrough concepts that had never really been done before,” Tran says. Now, after joining TikTok earlier this year, Tran is back at doing what’s never been done before. He’s guiding TikTok’s brands at a critical time, while the company is in a fight to save its existence in the U.S. His job is to show the world why the revolutionary app is worth fighting for. This year, Tran launched TikTok’s global “It Starts on TikTok” marketing campaign. “For me, personally, I know my focus is still going to be on growing the brand no matter what happens,” Tran says.
Nola Weinstein
Global head of culture and brand experiences, Twitter
Nola Weinstein
Global head of culture and brand experiences, Twitter
In 2009, Nola Weinstein was early joining Twitter as a user—just not early enough. The city of New Orleans beat her to what could have been an epic username, @Nola. Instead, she added her middle name and went with @NolaBeth. Now, as global head of culture and brand experiences, she is one of the foremost experts in onboarding new users to Twitter. When she joined Twitter in 2014, Weinstein helped develop the company’s “executive briefing center” in San Francisco, which served as a welcome mat for people with high-profile accounts. “To help them learn to better leverage Twitter and to drive their own thought-leadership perspectives and, in turn, have an impact, not just on their brands but on the world,” Weinstein says. Weinstein’s Twitter bio lists all one needs to know about her: She’s a bibliophile. “I love the mark of a book well-worn,” Weinstein says. She’s a Pilates enthusiast, “certified,” she says. And she loves piano bars. Weinstein, 37, also has a degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. “I realized the landscape was changing, primary sources can be sourced through tweets, who gets to tell stories is changing, how history and records will be preserved is much more democratic and accessible,” Weinstein says. “And I became obsessed with Twitter.”
Pranav Yadav
CEO, Europe and U.S., Neuro-Insight
Pranav Yadav
CEO, Europe and U.S., Neuro-Insight
A decade ago, Pranav Yadav realized there is a “fundamental disconnect” between what people say and what they do, particularly regarding advertising. The India-born Yadav left a lucrative financial career at Goldman Sachs to try to fix that separation, getting a job at Neuro-Insight, which uses electrodes to track brain electrical activity in how consumers respond to an ad. “The truth is we’ve seen enough ads that are highly emotional and great stories but don’t impact behavior, whereas there’s highly transactional ads that impact behavior,” says the 35-year-old, whose clients include Anheuser-Busch, T-Mobile and Samsung. Now, with marketers scrambling to attract consumers during the pandemic, Yadav says his business is busier than ever as brands try to make coronavirus-sensitive ads: “If I show people on the street, are they distanced from each other, does that make a difference? All those big-picture things, like how far [away] people have to be, are things people need to solve for.”Share this story
Web production by Corey Holmes. Photos courtesy of subjects.