Elena Alti

Head of Digital Marketing, Santander Group

Money isn't everything. That might sound like an unorthodox take for a bank, but that's exactly the direction in which Elena Alti took Santander, the Spanish bank chain.

When Alti joined Santander in 2012, she had two challenges: The financial services company wanted to court young millennials, and it was doing so during a financial crisis (Spain had officially slid into a recession). So Alti and her team spent months researching and surveying younger consumers about their banking habits in order to fashion the right product offerings and the best ways to package them.

"We discovered that young people don't need or want belongings—they don't want to have a car or a house, physical things," says Alti. "They need to experience things."

The result: the 1|2|3 Smart Account, a product launched in April 2017 that targets consumers 18 to 31 years of age by offering each of them a free account or a premium account that includes some returns from purchases. Under Alti, the bank also introduced its "Beyond Money" campaign last year, which includes a 17-minute film that won the Entertainment Lions Grand Prix at Cannes. The effort also ran digitally and in brick-and-mortar branches. In its first year, the 1|2|3 Smart product exceeded business objectives by 278 percent, Alti says.

Santander worked with MRM McCann on the push, which Alti says helped Santander find a voice for the strategy, and think about marketing in a more entertaining way. "The brand had the courage to say, 'Okay, we're a bank and we work with money, but money is not everything in life. The money is a thing we need in order to achieve what we want,'" says Alti.

It's not exactly the career that Spain-born Alti dreamed of growing up. She aspired to become a chemist and create perfumes before studying in the U.S. at age 16 and discovering marketing and communications. She had stints at global agencies BBDO and McCann, and jumped to the brand side a decade ago at NH Hotel Group. She joined Santander six years ago, and in a manner of speaking, could still be considered a chemist, one mixing up products in the financial realm.

Paloma Azulay

Creative Excellence Director for Central and Eastern Europe, Coca-Cola

Paloma Azulay doesn't hesitate when asked where she gets her inspiration: It's from her dad, Daniel Azulay, a well-known Brazilian artist and child educator. "I grew up in the middle of my dad's studio," says Azulay. "This is pretty much how I developed a passion for creativity."

For the past 14 years, her passion has ignited Cola-Cola, where she started as an intern in Brazil and rose through the ranks to become creative excellence director for central and eastern Europe in 2015.

Campaigns led by Azulay, who currently works out of Vienna (but not for long; more about that in a minute), include one that used the contents of shopping baskets as a storytelling tool to help boost supermarket sales of Coke. In one of the videos, "Shopping Personality Disorders," Coke explored the quirky traits of shoppers including "Ms. Can't Wait," who eats a sandwich before checking out. The takeaway: All shoppers behave differently, but they all love Coke. Azulay was also behind an ingenious effort in Italy in which people could record an audio message on a sound chip inserted into a Coke cap, which would play once the cap was opened. "We just had some challenges to expand it due to cost, but it got a lot of buzz," Azulay says. "It's difficult to innovate in 26 markets at the same time, but I saw it was really a shortcut to make things happen one country at a time."

Before moving to Vienna, Azulay worked for Coke in her native Brazil. There, she contributed to big global campaigns for the Olympics and the World Cup. She also helped lead an effort to integrate Coke into the storylines of Brazilian soap operas.

Now, Azulay is leaving Coke, and Vienna, for a recently accepted a job at Restaurant Brands International as global head of creative for Tim Hortons in Canada. As she takes her career to a third continent, Azulay says she will keep life lessons from her dad, now 70, front of mind. "Whenever I'm afraid of doing something, he says, 'Listen Paloma, the boat was not meant to be at the port, the boat was meant to navigate.' He's pretty much my guru."

Sophie Blum

VP-Global Brand Innovation and Brand Building Europe, Procter & Gamble Co.

Sophie Blum could have played it safe when she returned to Procter & Gamble Co. from maternity leave in 1999. But instead of choosing to work on a big-name brand, she became P&G's shopper marketing director for Western Europe—a new position that put marketers on teams with big retailers.

Blum who has been with P&G for over 25 years—she's also been a global sales and commercial leader with responsibility for 26 countries in Europe, and VP-general manager for Israel—has gone on to blaze new trails at, and for, the world's biggest marketer.

Now VP global brand innovation and brand building Europe, she notes that "on top of taking care of the brand-building organization, I'm leading the transformation ... to hopefully a very successful tech company and organization."

It was in Israel, she says—where Blum worked for 10 years starting in 2003—that she learned about brand innovation, specifically while working with that country's deep pool of marketing-tech start-ups. "I created the first open-innovation ecosystem and center [a first for P&G and for Israel], which was multidisciplinary," Blum says. Along the way, she built a business largely from the ground up, doubling P&G's sales and tripling the company's employment in Israel.

None of Blum's assignments were exactly the safe choice or calculated to move her up the corporate ladder. Going to Israel, for instance, made her a general manager, but one over a country of 10 million people that did little business with P&G.

"All these blocks of experience have led me to a very holistic profile," Blum says. "My bias is tech, start-ups and innovation."

"Sophie is the driving force behind a wide transformation of P&G's brand management," says Taide Guajardo, brand director for the company in Switzerland. "She's breaking the chains of the large corporation and unleashing P&G's brand-builder's talent."

Not surprisingly, Blum is interested in creating what she calls "ambidextrous leaders" for P&G in Europe and beyond. Such people, she says, can "deliver today with success while being able to navigate tomorrow."

Cristiana Boccassini

Chief Creative Officer, Publicis Italy

Under Cristiana Boccassini, Publicis Italy has gone from being a small Milan outpost to an international powerhouse. Publicis, rare for an agency in Italy, now has an incredibly diverse staff made up of people from over 20 countries, including South Africa, Brazil, Sweden and Syria.

"We're getting applications from all over the word," says Boccassini, who has been with the shop, along with her husband, Global Chief Creative Officer Bruno Bertelli, since 2011.

Raised in Rome, Boccassini had studied architecture with plans to become an interior designer, but switched to advertising by chance. She believes her design training brings a "curiosity for a new and fresh aesthetic expression" to her career.

She first met Bertelli at JWT Milan, which she joined in 2008. They worked together on an anti-drinking and driving campaign for Heineken that featured a blind man driven by a drunk dog. The pair made an impression: Heineken moved its global account from Wieden & Kennedy to their shop in 2015.

Boccassini describes herself as the more "analytic" part of the partnership, adding that the she and Bertelli have complementary skills.

Despite Italy's conservative attitudes toward working women, Publicis Italy is 52 percent female, with many women in senior roles. "I have always tried to create a meritocratic structure," she says. Her own experiences in the industry, she adds, have been positive, although she admits this may be "down to luck."

Publicis' creatives have been hit by the company's decision not to enter Cannes this year, and Boccassini admits that "the news was a shock" to her creatives. But, because her department believes their campaigns are now appreciated worldwide, she says, it makes up for the lack of a presence on the Palais.

Besides, Boccassini says she's focused on the future, including "the best way to match data with creativity."

Helen Calcraft

CEO and Co-founder, Lucky Generals; CEO, TBWA Group

In February, Lucky Generals became the first U.K. agency to create a Super Bowl campaign. Not only that, the ad was for Amazon, an example of the caliber of client the agency has attracted since being co-founded by Helen Calcraft in 2013 as a "creative company for people on a mission."

Other clients of the 70-strong agency included a one-time project for Twitter, and ongoing work for Hostelworld—for which it recently made a global ad starring Mariah Carey that went viral—and Unilever's Pot Noodle.

Last year, the shop's success drew the attention of TBWA, which acquired a majority stake in Lucky Generals and made Calcraft CEO of TBWA Group in the U.K. Lucky Generals retains its separate identity, but benefits from the wider TBWA network under the deal.

Retaining some independence is important, says Calcraft, whose previous start-up agency, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, was merged into Dare in 2010 after being acquired by Canada's Cossette. The process wasn't a happy one, she says, and Calcraft left shortly afterwards. She was working as a consultant when she was approached by now-co-founders Andy Nairn and Danny Brooke-Taylor about starting Lucky Generals. (The name is based on a quote attributed to Napoleon, who when asked how he would win a war said, "Bring me your lucky generals.")

Calcraft's experience previous experience on a start-up—MCBD was a breakaway from AMV BBDO, founded when Calcraft was just 30—was valuable, she says: "We knew that the work you did on your first two or three campaigns would inform the entire journey, and that we wanted to do bold work from the start. Sometimes it's about having the courage to say no."

Courage is something she has plenty of; a single working mother, she's risen to the top of the industry while battling breast cancer twice. She was the youngest-ever president of Women in Advertising and Communications London (WACL), an industry networking association that brings together senior female leaders in marketing and advertising, and is a founding member of "timeTo," a new initiative from WACL, the Advertising Association and industry charity NABS aimed at ending sexual harassment in the industry. Calcraft has spoken openly about being harassed herself as a young executive and says making work safe and equitable for women should be an industry priority. "We want women to know that they are safe and that if they complain, it won't be them who has to go," she says.

Karen Corrigan

Co-founder, CEO, and Strategic Director, FCB Happiness

A bad ad drew Karen Corrigan into advertising. In 1987, the former teacher was working in Nike's sponsorship department when she sat in on a presentation of the first "Just Do It" campaign in Belgium. It was a print ad featuring the Air Max shoe floating in the clouds. "I remember thinking, 'Isn't this obvious? Can't we find a better idea?'" she says.

Though unimpressed by the work, Corrigan was captivated by the business. She went to ad school and then became an account director at Y&R in Belgium working under creative director Guillaume Van der Stighelen, who later went on to co-found Duval Guillaume. "He was my mentor and guru, and taught me the difference between strategy and a creative idea, and how you can manage creativity," she says.

Corrigan carried those lessons into subsequent posts, including as managing director at Ogilvy & Mather. She also led strategy at DDB, where she became a VP. Then, in 2005, she partnered with DDB creatives to open her own agency called Happiness Brussels. "Agencies then carried names of owners, like law offices, and we wanted to disrupt everything and become a brand," she says. "We didn't want to be an ad agency. We wanted to go beyond, to embrace technology."

Early on, the shop—which now has offices in Brussels and Vietnam, and recently purchased a virtual reality studio—caught the attention of Interpublic Group of Cos., which in 2011 purchased 20 percent of shares of the company. It's now considered an IPG innovation hub in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Along with her creative partner, Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Hantson, who joined in 2014 from Duval Guillaume, Corrigan strives for a balance of creativity and strategy. "Too many agencies go for creativity for the sake of creativity, without really caring about the client's business," she says, "or too many strategists go for intellectual strategy without really trying to make it work for creatives."

That philosophy has yielded groundbreaking work like the "resurrection" via hologram of J.C. Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg beer, so he could give a TED talk. The agency has also created heart-shaped bandages for Beiersdorf's Hansaplast brand designed to help heal kids' emotional, not physical, ailments. And it was behind an ambitious idea for mobile game "Slotomania," which involved creating a new video for every single minute of the day (that's 1,440, of them, to be exact). As for new business, in 2017 the agency won a big pitch for telecom Voo.

Corrigan's entrepreneurial efforts extend beyond the agency. Last year, along with her daughter, a data scientist, and her best friend, Corrigan created Homeyz, a peer-to-peer app that connects users to people who can help with household tasks.

Brianne Ehrenkranz

Senior Director of Marketing for Europe and the Middle East, NBA

Here's something you don't usually see at an NBA game: the president of Poland beaming a video message to fans. But that's what the Washington Wizards pulled off earlier this year for its "Polish Heritage Night," as Andrzej Duda saluted the fans attending that night's game against the Brooklyn Nets in Washington, D.C. The event, centered around Wizards player Marcin Gortat, who's from Poland, is just one example of how the U.S. league is strengthening ties with Europe as it grows its global fan base.

The woman leading the charge is London-based Brianne Ehrenkranz, the NBA's senior director of marketing for Europe and the Middle East. She and her team are using events, social media and other methods to take the league's outreach to the next level. Because the games are played in the U.S., "over 99 percent of people I'm talking to will never see a game live," she says. So the NBA must get creative, using tactics like the Polish night in D.C., in which the broadcaster showing the game in Poland aired content like Gortat addressing the audience directly on camera.

In a land where soccer is king, spreading hoops hysteria is no slam dunk, but Ehrenkranz's efforts are working. Audiences for live TV broadcasts of prime-time Sunday games across Europe are up 58 percent, and the NBA counts 5 million followers on its seven Facebook and Twitter accounts across the continent.

A key part of the social media strategy is connecting the NBA to local celebrities or customs. So if Spanish soccer star and renown NBA fan Héctor Bellerín Moruno is tweeting about watching a basketball game, the NBA amplifies that across its social channels. And if the league shares a highlight on social, it might be overlaid with the iconic "Goooaaalll" call that soccer fans know so well. "We're talking the talk. We're trying to make connections there," Ehrenkranz says. Other content has included off-the-court activities like a video of former player John Amaechi taking NBA greats Isiah Thomas and Dikembe to afternoon tea in London.

Ehrenkranz, a New Jersey native who played high school basketball, can empathize with the challenge of following a team from afar. She loves the New York Yankees, she says, describing herself as "that struggling fan" that has to rely on mobile apps and other means to keep abreast of her team.

Nilufar Fowler

CEO, Mindshare Worldwide Central Team

Nilufar Fowler is "all too rare in our business: someone who has both vision and the discipline to deliver," says GroupM Chief Transformation Officer Lindsay Pattison. "For Nils, it's all about the work, the results and not the politics."

As CEO of Mindshare Worldwide Central Team, Fowler is responsible globally for managing client teams and services. Now based in Sussex, her background, she says, "is really mixed"; her parents are from India and Sri Lanka, and she was born in England. That broad worldview has also informed her career. "It's meant I've spent a lot of my time traveling around the world to different places," says Fowler.

Fowler joined Mindshare in 2007 as a strategist, then moved to Southeast Asia to lead the Unilever account in Thailand. She later became Mindshare's Thailand CEO. In 2014, she returned to the U.K. to run the Unilever account globally, and shifted into the Worldwide Central CEO role last year.

Fowler has been outspoken about gender and diversity issues in the industry, speaking, for instance, at Cannes about the portrayal of domestic violence in advertising. She's also a proponent of getting young women into STEM, and mentors teenagers who aim to be the first in their families to go to college.

Roshni Goyate

Co-founder, The Other Box

The founders of The Other Box met at a pro-diversity event that didn't live up to its promise. "There were no women of color on the panel—there were more women than men, but there were no women of color in the conversation," says Roshni Goyate, a copywriter based in London, who founded The Other Box with Leyya Sattar to encourage more inclusivity and diversity in creative industries.

Within a week of their initial meet, they had set up social accounts for their project and were hashing out the mission statement. The name they chose "refers to the idea that if you're from a minority or underrepresented background, you tend to be pigeon-holed or put in a box," Goyate says. "It also refers to forms where you have to tick that you're 'other.'"

Goyate, born in London to immigrants from India, has always been drawn to creative pursuits (she also plays drums in a Brazilian samba band). After she discovered copywriting and became a freelancer, she says shen often visited agencies where she was the only woman of color in the room. "Eventually that started to wear me down," says Goyate. "I really felt the imposter syndrome."

On its social accounts, The Other Box champions minorities doing great work. It's also a community that offers talks and events for creative people from diverse backgrounds. "Being able to share experiences, talk about things, celebrate each other and understand that they aren't alone really makes a big difference," she says.

Goyate is also getting an MA in Culture, Diaspora and Ethnicity, which feeds into her work for The Other Box. Goyate and Sattar—also a Women to Watch Europe honoree—run workshops in agencies to help people understand their unconscious biases, and to recognize language or behavior that isn't inclusive.

For example, "in the U.K. you still have a big drinking culture, and agencies here boast about their fridge full of beer for drinks every Friday," Goyate says. But people might be in recovery, or might not drink for religious reasons, and "that's the kind of thing we can get people thinking about. … The goal is to give people from all backgrounds a chance to talk about things they wouldn't ordinarily get a chance to talk about in a very open, judgement-free space."

Ulrike Handel

CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network Germany

Ulrike Handel is a fixer.

But Handel, the first woman to run an ad agency network in Germany, didn't find too much that was broken when she joined Dentsu Aegis Network in Germany as CEO, running the network's entire operations and activities across agencies including Carat, Isobar, MKTG, Posterscope and Vizeum. Previously, she was responsible for the turnaround of Ad Pepper Media International and worked at Welt Group and Axel Springer.

The challenges Handel says she has now are balancing internal and external efforts — getting face-time in with clients and also making time for internal operations and employees. M&A is another challenge, she says.

"I'm always pitching against all the other competitors, which are not just Accenture but also private equity companies, companies from China wanting to enter the German market … this is really a big challenge to get companies into our group and at the same time be competitive with price," she says.

Though the business model was "robust," as she says, it needed some help -- including on the seven-person executive team, which has three new members.

Handel wanted a team that was more diverse in its makeup, with people from both its traditional media brands and its digital companies. Then she got to work instilling a "digital-first mindset" in the group, which has been accomplished in part by implementing agile work methods like allowing employees to have flexible hours or work remotely.

Handel says the company is now growing in revenue and profit and has better culture and retention.

"That just shows how fast you can change people businesses," she says. " We don't have a development cycle like car companies…"

Handel has also worked to improve gender diversity and encourage employees to be innovative and entrepreneurial in their thinking. She has her Doctor of Philosophy in communication and media studies, a degree in media management from Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, an economics degree from Universtität Hannover and a master's degree in arts, entertainment and media management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cathy Ibal

VP of Ad Sales, Eastern and Southern Europe, the CIS, Africa and the Middle East, CNN International

Cathy Ibal persisted.

Ibal, who leads ad sales for CNN in more than 100 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, started her career there as a research analyst on audience and media, "with nothing to do with sales," she says. But the idea appealed to her and, in 2006, Ibal applied for an account manager job in the department. She was turned down.

"I had a VP at the time who said, 'You're a research person, you cannot be a good salesperson, they're two different profiles,'" she recalls. "I was very discouraged. I thought about it and came back and said, 'Let's make a deal. I can take the lowest position in sales for six months as a trial."

She was confirmed as a sales manager the following year.

Today Ibal, who is French and based in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, oversees a team of 20 frontline sales staffers plus 10 reps covering a complex and geopolitically diverse swath of the world, such as Italy, South Africa, Abu Dhabi and Russia. She helped lead her regions to double-digit growth in 2017, her first full year in her current position, after a promotion that had her one of CNN's four advertising leads globally.

CNN offers a range of ad products, from TV commercials to digital products on CNNStyle to integrated ad content on Great Big Story, its social video network aimed at younger viewers. Ibal's team boosted its business after a 2016 transformation strategy that put more focus on multiplatform efforts. Now, over 70 percent of campaigns at the company are multiplatform, spanning a mix of TV, digital, mobile and social, she says.

The job involves working with a diverse range of advertisers, too. Many are European luxury brands, including Bulgari, Gucci and Brioni. But travel is also a big category (airlines like Emirates and tourism boards like Dubai Tourism) along with corporate advertisers, such as the Italian energy group Eni and Nigerian industrial conglomerate Dangote Industries. The last is coming on board as the first African brand partner for the Great Big Story network.

"These are dynamic markets, Africa and the Middle East," Ibal says. "A lot of things are happening in that part of the world, and they want to get their brands more exposure."

Eilidh Macaskill

VP of Creative and Media, Asda

Eilidh Macaskill had a promising career in fashion, including fashion journalism, before she made a surprise move to Walmart-owned Asda, the long-struggling U.K. version of the budget retail chain, as VP-creative and media in 2016.

The veteran of Monsoon Accessorize—she was global marketing director of the 1,400-store fashion chain—and former editor of Time Inc.'s InStyle U.K., says she's pleased so far with her choice. So is rival Sainsbury, which agreed earlier this month to take a majority stake in a combined enterprise that will preserve both the upscale Sainsbury's and Asda brands. Macaskill is expected to continue her work on the Asda side of the house after the merger closes later this year or next.

"I really engage well with turnarounds when there's a challenge to hit the ground running," Macaskill says. "I'm quite curious. I was very familiar with George [Walmart's and Asda's high-end fashion brand] and the fashion element. But I loved the idea of being so relevant to so many people in a business that actually can impact people's lives."

When Macaskill arrived in 2016, which was the company's second quarter of fiscal 2017, Asda's same-store sales had hit its nadir of a drop of 7.5 percent. Asda's sales started growing again in the first quarter of last year for the first time in 10 quarters, and same-store sales started growing in the second quarter, breaking an 11-quarter slump.The chain now boasts four straight quarters of sales growth and three of same-store sales growth.

At the same time, Walmart's U.S. business looks to Asda for guidance in key areas, such as omni-channel retailing, given Asda is well ahead of the U.S. business in store pickup and delivery. And as Walmart looks to up its fashion profile, George, Asda's fashion brand, is also getting more prominence on both sides of the Atlantic, including, this summer, the brand's first standalone TV ads in many years.

"Eilidh is an inspirational leader who elevates the work and the people at every interaction," says Asda Chief Customer Officer Andy Murray, who Macaskill reports to. "All the metrics we use to measure creative and media impact have truly stepped up under her leadership, and as a result, we have returned to growth. What makes Eilidh a stand out in this industry is she refuses to believe in false choices. She shows you can be creative and business savvy, nice and hold high standards, devoted to family and have an ambitious vision for her career."

"We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to turn Asda around," Macaskill says. "It's a big ship, and there's a lot of work we have to do. I'm really proud of the team that Andy and I have, and the agencies we work for and how we have moved the dial with the customer in reducing the leaky bucket."

Vicki Maguire

Joint Chief Creative Officer, Grey London

Vicki Maguire, a Brit with a reputation for frankness, never worries about vocalizing her views. She often calls the homogeneous London agency world, for instance, "pale, male and stale."

It's not surprising that Grey London's joint chief creative officer started her career in less-corporate circumstances. Her first job was selling vintage clothes from her parents' market stall, and then she worked in fashion for the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Paul Smith. When she moved into the agency world, she says she was shocked by the lack of women in senior positions.

"One agency tried to change my name from Vicki to Micky so as not to put the client off," she says. "And once I had to go two floors down to borrow a tampon as there were so few other women. … In fashion, I saw strong women with their names about the door who weren't afraid of anyone."

After working at agencies in Sydney and Amsterdam, Maguire joined Grey London in 2009. There, she has created work including a multiple award-winning campaign for the British Heart Foundation. Now, she and her joint chief creative officer Caroline Pay—also a Women to Watch Europe honoree—see themselves as role models for women in the London ad scene. And they run a successful department that hasn't lost its step despite the high-profile departure of the agency's senior management team in 2016.Appointed shortly afterwards to run the creative department, Maguire was instrumental in winning Marks & Spencer, one of the U.K.'s most prestigious retail brands—a vote of confidence in an agency under new leadership. Pay joined her the following year.

"It helped that I was Marks & Spencer's biggest fan and fiercest critic," she says. "I had bought [its popular] pink coat, worn the tights and could be very eloquent about the brand."

Her partnership with Pay works, she says, because "we both have strong bullshit radars, respect for openness and honesty, and treating people like human beings.

Outside of work, Maguire owns a own sweet shop where she says she held "confectionery confessionals" with customers who come in and bare their souls, much like people do with bartenders. Inside the agency, she takes a similar approach, saying she doesn't want to be the kind of creative chief who has people "queueing at my door while I'm off lunching at the Ivy. … I've learned more from the assholes I've worked with on how not to treat people and do a good job."

Cat Paterson

VSenior Brand and Commercial Director, Future Brands, PepsiCo

Cat Paterson is studying to become a yoga instructor—fitting since she has exhibited extreme flexibility in her career. After graduating from the University of Oxford with degrees in philosophy and theology, Paterson has held jobs spanning strategy, M&A, finance, business development, marketing and innovation at companies including Deloitte, Bacardi and eBay. Now at PepsiCo, she's helping the food and beverage giant operate more like a start-up as it seeds new products across Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

Overseeing a small and nimble team in London, Paterson played a critical role helping PepsiCo roll out Drinkfinity, a so-called "personalized beverage" system that includes liquid ingredients in a pod that, when combined with cold water, creates a 20-ounce beverage. It's the kind of innovation PepsiCo is banking on as it diversifies away from cola.

To straddle the line between corporate behemoth and spunky startup, Paterson says her team takes advantage of PepsiCo' heritage, data and retail relationships, while also embracing the "drive and entrepreneurialism" of a newcomer. "If we start getting a load of feedback on social or direct from customers, we are really open to saying, 'Have we got it right? … We should be prepared to adapt and learn and change."

"Change" is a Paterson mantra. "I've always tried to get out of my comfort zone and try something very new, either function-wise or industry-wise," she says. That attitude led her to a previous role at eBay, where she learned the ins and outs of e-commerce—knowledge that is at a premium as major marketers, including PepsiCo, sell more goods online. "If you haven't actually been in [e-commerce] you will never really get just how complicated and vast it is," she says. "So that was something I wanted to challenge myself to do."

Paterson's well-equipped for her role overseeing sub-Saharan Africa after recently taking a six-month honeymoon/sabbatical driving across the continent. As for her career adventures, she says, "I've never said I want to to do a particular thing within five years. It's always been, 'I have no idea what's out there.' The job I have now didn't exist three years ago. The job I have in 10 years might not exist now. So it's always a willingness to try new things and be open to opportunities."

Caroline Pay

Joint Chief Creative Officer, Grey London

Ask Caroline Pay why she left Mother—where, as creative director, she won and led the Boots account—to go to BBH in 2013, and you get an insightful answer: "I wanted to be scared," she says.

Her former creative partner at Mother, Kim Gehrig, now a high-profile director, encouraged her to go into directing, but Pay knew it wasn't for her. At BBH, she was deputy executive creative director working on turning around marketing for the U.K.'s biggest retailer, Tesco, when longtime friend Vicki Maguire brought her on to help run the Grey London creative department in March 2017.

Maguire praises Pay's "pace and energy," and says she's great at bringing qualities out in other people that might otherwise have been overlooked. Pay describes their partnership as a "two-headed monster," and says they're both fixers and like-minded about what works.

Despite her appetite for challenge, Pay, who has never had a female boss, never aspired to run a department—until she had a baby, eight years ago. "I had this fantasy that I would be sitting at home and baking, but I knew about 45 minutes in that I just wanted to get back to work. It was around the time that 'The September Issue' came out, and I felt like I went into motherhood as Grace [Coddington, now American Vogue's creative director at large] and came out as Anna Wintour."

Today, Pay promotes diversity in creative roles. She points out that both she and Maguire hail from a working-class, suburban "High Street" [Main Street, in the U.S.] background of watching ITV and reading Heat magazine, and that they run a very open, "unashamedly emotional" creative department where people are free to share their personal issues and to have a life outside of work.

"The other day, one of our creatives told us he wanted a sabbatical to spend more time with his wife and child," says Pay, and they were so touched, "we both started crying."

Sam Phillips

CMO, Omnicom Media Group U.K.

Sam Phillips wasn't always outspoken. But 15 years ago, when her son was born with Down Syndrome, she realized that while many people know someone with a disability, it's mainly a verboten subject in the U.K.

"I found my voice talking about areas of diversity and inclusion," says Phillips, who is now chief marketing officer of Omnicom Media Group U.K. She was recently invited by the U.K. government to be its inaugural Advertising Sector Champion for Disability, educating the Council of Europe on media's role in increasing awareness of people with disabilities. In May, she will lead a session on disabilities at the Global Festival of Media in Rome, and will do a fireside chat with the U.K.'s Minister of State for Disabled People, Health & Work Issues at Media Week's Media 360 event.

She says these efforts help people see the world in a different way—and that it behooves the industry to understand these perspectives. "You think differently because you've had different life experiences," she says. "Why are we not tapping in to this?"

Phillips also leads overall diversity and inclusion efforts across Omnicom U.K.'s agencies in her role of chair of Omnicom People Engagement Network in the region. WIthin the company, she's a founding member of Omniwomen UK, a global organization dedicated to improving the number and influence of female talent at the holding company, and executive sponsor of Open Pride UK, which launched last year across Omnicom UK to foster an inclusive and engaging work environment for Omnicom's LGBT community.

"We are really at the start still, but starting to get steam," she says of these efforts. But in terms of diversity and inclusion, "until we can honestly say that we reflect our population, we're not there yet."

Roxane Philson

CMO, ONE

No one can accuse Roxane Philson of thinking small: Her goal is to end extreme poverty by 2030.

As chief marketing officer of ONE, a 16-year-old nonprofit co-founded by U2's Bono that fights extreme poverty and preventable diseases, it's her job to mobilize its 9 million members to lobby lawmakers, as well as to create campaigns that engage consumers with the cause.

"The challenge for the sector I work in is, how do you connect to someone you might never meet?" says Philson, a British native who was based in ONE's Washington, D.C., office for six years before her move to the London office last year. "And how do you do it in a way that isn't about pity, or objectifying, but is about empathy?"

One way is through "Poverty Is Sexist," a campaign Philson helped introduce three years ago to tackle gender inequality as part of the larger quest to annihilate global poverty. An iteration two years ago focused on HIV and AIDS; last year and this year, the push has focused on girls' education. Each evolution is planned to fit into current political events, including summits hosted by world leaders. Philson is hoping to offer a women's empowerment package as part of the G7 Summit this June in Quebec, Canada.

Though "Poverty Is Sexist" was created internally, Philson and her team of 25 also work with a mix of external agencies. Additionally, Philson has collaborated with content creators and influencers on YouTube channels to better engage new audiences, such as a recent partnership with beauty blogger Tanya Burr, a British YouTube star.

"It's the greatest honor in the world to be able to be creative about something that's meaningful and, if done well and effectively, will have an impact on people's lives for the better," says Philson.

Meta Redstedt

Global Master Brand and Communications Director, Essity

Meta Redstedt recalls being in a meeting with an alcoholic-beverage marketer struggling to find the brand's purpose. "I don't have any trouble finding purpose," she says with a laugh. "The problem is nobody wants to listen."

Essity's purpose? In part, it's to help people deal with incontinence.

Redstedt came to Gothenburg, Sweden-based paper-products company Essity seven years ago to work on Tena, an incontinence brand of pads and pants, as global master brand and communications director. She says she's built up Tena by focusing on her favorite part of marketing: understanding people's psychology and deep-seated needs.

Focus groups are one reason she's so clear on the goal of dealing effectively and discreetly with a problem that affects one in three women over 35 and one in four men over 40.

"Usually after a focus group people want to get up and go," Redstedt says, drawing on her work for Unilever, Johnson & Johnson and well-regarded Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors, where she was account executive on Volvo. But with adult-incontinence focus groups, she says, "they want to talk longer" after the session. "They have very good advice and they help each other and they more or less network."

These groups also help her target ads, Redstedt says. And they've helped her realize that men were likely to respond to humor in adult incontinence ads, while women needed a more sober, if still lighthearted tone. The brand's new ads targeting men, from AMV BBDO, London, feature fictional Stirling Gravitas, "the most in-control man in the world," a strategy that helped spur 40 percent sales growth in 2017 for Tena Men, according to Redstedt's boss, Georg Schmundt-Thomas, president of the global hygiene category at Essity.

But a "Let You Be You" campaign from AMV BBDO for Tena's women's products, which focused on how they help women feel they can motorbike or go dancing without restrictions, led the women's products to 8 percent sales growth last year, according to Schmundt-Thomas.

Nishma Robb

Marketing Director, Google U.K.

Nishma Robb knows a little something about imposter syndrome.

The executive, who's marketing director for Google and YouTube's advertising products in the U.K. and the former chair of [email protected], has been vocal about feelings she'd be "found out" even as she climbed the ranks in the marketing world.

Robb recalls walking into rooms and being the only woman of color, she said on the "Badass Women's Hour" podcast earlier this year.

"When you don't see anyone like you around you, you fear that you're actually not meant to belong," she said. "I would talk about my achievements as being lucky ... and that's actually a really dangerous thing because you don't credit ability or your experience or your achievements at all in that way."

And her achievements are considerable. Prior to Google, Robb worked for I Spy Marketing, where she focused on developing client strategy and relationships. Acquired by iProspect in 2012, at Dentsu U.K., she did much of the same work and was a key part of the new business pitch team on brands including British Airways and Sky. Robb is also a non-exec board director and fellow of The Marketing Society, a global network of senior marketers.

Imposter syndrome isn't something you might never completely get over, she says, but she's worked to acknowledge her achievements and has pushed to get women and people of color into the industry.

Inside Google and out, Robb is known as a champion for diversity in business. She regularly appears on panels and keynotes, and has written on topics including the portrayal of women in advertising. She has said she wants to "radically change the way women are represented in our world—in film, media and advertising—so that little girls and boys realize there is no such thing as 'girls' jobs' or 'boys' jobs.'" One goal for this year, she's said, is to make progress in recruiting and developing diverse talent.

But Robb says her most significant achievement is being a mother of twin girls, who are big fans of "Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls" (Robb invested in a Kickstarter campaign to print the book).

Another achievement? As she says in her bio, it's her "impressive collection of shoes."

Leyya Sattar

Co-founder, The Other Box

Leyya Sattar, who grew up in small town outside of Manchester, England, wanted to be a creative because of an American TV show character she loved: Wilhelmina Slater, the diva-like creative director played by Vanessa Williams on "Ugly Betty."

"I was only 11 at the time, but I knew she was powerful, a woman of color, creative and looked amazing," Sattar says with a laugh. "I set goals for myself. I thought, 'How will I get from here to New York?'"

Sattar eventually left her small town and became a design manager in London. "I knew there must be other black and brown people in the industry, and I wanted to find them," she says. After meeting copywriter Roshni Goyate (also an Ad Age Women to Watch Europe honoree), they teamed up to build The Other Box.

"Our mission is to increase diversity in the creative industry, to celebrate and champion people of color and other minorities," Sattar says. That was something that resonated with both co-founders, who describe themselves as "two London-based brown, female, working class, state-school educated, second/third generation immigrants working as creatives in design and advertising."

The Other Box was among a few start-ups to get a shoutout from diversity advocate Cindy Gallop last year in her closing keynote at the 3% Conference. Gallop put Sattar and Goyate's names up on a slide and said, "Check them out, absolutely hire their talent, work with them, do anything you can."

The group hosts events and leads unconscious bias workshops in workplaces; it addresses race, but also sexual orientation, class, gender, parenthood and age. One topic of conversation is micro-aggressions, "like asking someone where they're from because they have a different skin color," Sattar says.

The Other Box works with brands, too. With London-based fashion brand Skinnydip, it hosted an event for International Women's Day and chose 12 creative muses—musicians, artists, designers—for a spotlight on female creativity and talent.

Sattar recently quit her job at a design company to focus full time on The Other Box. "We've created amazing things off a few hours a week," she says. "What happens when it's full-time?"