
U.S. 2020

Courtney Benedict
Senior Director of Marketing, Miller Lite

Courtney Benedict
Senior Director of Marketing, Miller Lite
When Bud Light picked a fight with Miller Lite in its 2019 Super Bowl ads, Courtney Benedict was not about to let the attack go unchallenged. She helped orchestrate a response ad that co-opted Bud Light’s Dilly Dilly kingdom with a copycat version that ends with an actor playing the Bud Knight grabbing a Miller Lite. Its kicker: “In the real world, more taste is what matters.”
The approach is emblematic of the new energy Benedict has injected into the brand, which includes quick-response marketing that plays into current events. To reach young adult drinkers, Lite has “to be relevant to their lives, and our approach for doing so is to move at the speed of culture,” she says. Benedict was also behind a campaign that encouraged drinkers to unfollow Miller Lite on social media as Lite positioned itself as the “original social media.”
Benedict, who joined Molson Coors in 2014 after a stint at Unilever, has a big fan in Molson Coors Chief Marketing Officer Michelle St. Jacques, who calls her “a force to be reckoned with in marketing. She has a strong gut and intuition for her brands.”

Daria Burke
Chief Marketing Officer, JustFab

Daria Burke
Chief Marketing Officer, JustFab
As a young child, Daria Burke enjoyed creating her own fashion magazines, complete with outfits and stories, so it was not surprising that she ended up pursuing the ultimate storytelling career as a marketer in retail. As chief marketing officer at JustFab, Burke is responsible for driving global brand awareness and marketing at the digitally native shoe seller. Though she joined the El Segundo, California-based company—which is owned by TechStyle Fashion Group—late last year, the Detroit native is already working to streamline the brand’s data science and media measurement divisions and to diversify its influencer marketing program. Burke’s background at L’Oreal, Esteé Lauder and Facebook positioned her well for the task, despite the retail challenges from COVID-19. She and her team of 75 handle the bulk of JustFab’s advertising in-house.
“Another area of focus for us is how our brand is going to stand as a champion of change and what that means to support and amplify messaging around women, around social justice issues and the things that we care about as a broader society,” says Burke, who founded Black MBA Women, an organization to further women in leadership, eight years ago.

Elizabeth Campbell
Senior director of cultural engagement, McDonald’s U.S.

Elizabeth Campbell
Senior director of cultural engagement, McDonald’s U.S.
In her 16 years at McDonald’s, Elizabeth Campbell has pushed to switch roles roughly every two years. “I basically wrote a development plan that allowed me to do that,” says Campbell. Her drive is partly fueled by watching her mother earn her high school diploma in her 70s. “There’s nothing that people can tell me that I can’t do,” she says.
As senior director of brand and menu strategy, she helped launch delivery in the U.S. with plans such as a one-cent Big Mac offer. Collaborating with UberEats, Grubhub and Doordash pushed the Golden Arches to become more nimble. “It was probably the most challenging time, because it was reshaping the way McDonald’s thinks internally,” she says.
In her current role since November, Campbell gets to shape the chain’s social voice. “We’re not always going to get it right,” Campbell says. “It’s about how fast we can adapt and learn.” This year she’s strategized on details such as the notes tucked into more than 12 million Thank You Meals served to first responders and then on McDonald’s Black Lives Matter messaging. “What I call what is happening right now is a cultural revolution,” she says.

Mona Gonzalez
Managing Director of Pereira O’Dell New York

Mona Gonzalez
Managing Director of Pereira O’Dell New York
Mona Gonzalez joined indie bicoastal creative shop Pereira O’Dell’s San Francisco office nearly six years ago. After two years on the West Coast, she moved over to the agency’s New York office and last July took the helm as its managing director—deservedly so. After she was named managing director, Gonzalez led the agency to generate 10 account wins in 100 days, including the Central Park Conservancy, Pillsbury and three AB InBev brands. In the past six months, the shop has seen 23 percent growth in new revenue. Gonzalez has led several impactful decisions during her time with the agency that have improved not just the profitability of Pereira O’Dell but its culture. After her maternity leave in the spring of 2019, Gonzalez spearheaded a new progressive parental leave and return policy. After COVID-19 forced the cancellation of traditional internships, Gonzalez reinvented Pereira O’Dell’s program to go virtual in an initiative she dubbed “Save the Internships.” Gonzalez says empowering employees to feel they can make the change they want to see at their companies is critical, and it’s why she “will stay at and why I believe in” Pereira O’Dell.

Flavia Guetter
Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager, Burger King

Flavia Guetter
Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager, Burger King
Flávia Guetter, originally from Brazil, studied in the U.S. as a high school exchange student and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami. After working for Anheuser-Busch InBev in Brazil, she aimed to snag a job at Burger King, which is owned by 3G Capital, an investment firm that also has ties to the brewer.
“When I moved from Brazil to the U.S., the first place I applied to work at was Burger King, because I was within the 3G culture. It seemed to me like a great fit,” Guetter says. She didn’t get a chance at Burger King, and worked at Samsung for two years on strategy in the Caribbean before landing at Burger King in 2018. “I was very aggressive with that dream I had of working at BK, and I finally got it,” Guetter says.
Since then, Burger King has been showing off more social media savvy. This year’s “The Moldy Whopper” showed the stomach-churning transformation of a Whopper left out to rot, which was intended to highlight BK’s decision to cut artificial preservatives. And 2019’s “Real Meals” promoted mental health awareness, saying “no one is happy all the time. And that’s OK.”

Julie Haddon
Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing, NFL

Julie Haddon
Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing, NFL
Football is broadening its appeal. Under Julie Haddon’s leadership, the NFL’s marketing team has helped expand the fan base, which is now 47 percent women—an all-time high for the sport. The league’s 100th anniversary spot during Super Bowl LIII featured a cavalcade of NFL athletes from across six decades of the game, but the ball ends up in the hands of 15-year-old Sam Gordon, who founded the first all-girls tackle football league.
“It’s very notable and purposeful,” Haddon says. “She runs with the ball off into the future because the next hundred years very well should have a woman in it. Our fans like to see themselves in our work.” Haddon also co-produced “A Lifetime of Sundays,” a documentary featuring the league’s few female team owners, and brought actor Regina King on board to narrate the film. She is also the founder and an executive sponsor of NFL Pride, the league’s LGBTQ affinity group. “I said we should be in the parade,” Campbell says. “We should be making a statement. We should be showing up strong as an advocate of the community.”
I think inclusivity starts with the top. It starts internally. You can't have an external strategy that doesn't match your internal strategy. Knowing that our audience is made up of all different types of people, we have to be able to speak to that and speak to the lens of the voices that are representative of our employee base and our fan base. We have to challenge ourselves to ask every day, are we looking at this through the right lens? And if not, let's get the right people in the room to have that lens.
At the NFL, we've changed the Rooney rule [which requires hiring decisions to include a diverse slate of candidates] to make sure that it's not only including people on the field, but off the field. We've made a commitment to end systemic racism. We are looking at how we continue to learn, listen and become a more inclusive culture for our players, our partners, our fans.

Whitney Headen
CEO, 19th & Park

Whitney Headen
CEO, 19th & Park
As co-founder and CEO of 19th & Park, one of the first Black woman-owned and operated agencies, Whitney Headen upended the agency model. She is a champion of true diversity, thinking about inclusion in every aspect of business. She’s also passionate about mentoring the next generation. Headen created the program The Life Currency, which focuses on professional and skill development in young adults. Growing up in Virginia, opportunities were far and few between, “and not everyone is as crazy as me to drive to another city and jump in,” says Headen. Her goal is to level the playing field by leveling access.
Headen never had any intentions of becoming an entrepreneur. But during her time climbing the ranks in digital marketing and sales, she realized she wasn’t able to service clients the way she truly wanted to under someone else’s brand. “I would have to leave to implement the change I wanted to see by building my own house,” she says.

Larisa Johnson
Head of brand and influencer media; senior director at Twitch

Larisa Johnson
Head of brand and influencer media; senior director at Twitch
In 2018, when Twitch began to invest in marketing, Larisa Johnson was one of the gaming streaming platform’s first hires. She was charged with no small task: Make Twitch into a household name. She has certainly accomplished that. Today, the platform has 17.5 million daily visitors and 4 million streamers.
In building out the platform’s media marketing, Johnson has established her own in-house team, brought on agency partners, added influencers into the mix and helped lead the platform’s first brand campaign that showcased Twitch’s diversity beyond gaming.
Johnson’s media strategy has included growing the number of diverse streamers on the platform and amplifying those already there. A content partnership with Bustle, for example, highlighted female streamers. “There’s always new content and talent emerging and as a marketer, it’s our job to amplify those voices,” Johnson says. Making advertising measurable is another key objective. She recently partnered with Clear Channel Outdoor to track whether OOH could deliver website visits and conversions.

Siobhan Lonergan
Former Chief Brand Officer, Thinx Inc.

Siobhan Lonergan
Former Chief Brand Officer, Thinx Inc.
It stood out for its boldness: The 60-second commercial, for feminine hygiene brand Thinx, imagined a world where men menstruate, too. Siobhán Lonergan, who as Thinx’s chief brand officer worked with BBDO to create the spot, cites it as one of her major accomplishments at Thinx, where she worked for three years before being laid off in a round of coronavirus-related downsizing last month.
“We reached a huge audience,” she says of the spot, which earned 58 million impressions and a Webby award. “MEN-struation,” along with other initiatives like a “Bleeding Tour” where the Thinx truck traveled cross-country and a new sex blanket product, helped further the company’s mission of breaking taboos around subjects like periods and feminine care, Lonergan says. The Irish-born executive earned her marketing chops working at agencies on brands including Ireland’s Ballygowan mineral water.
Now, she’ll apply her learnings from Thinx to a new role. “My goal is to balance my experience with big brands and entrepreneurial approach to brand building with a company in growth mode,” she says.
Initially it was about prioritizing marketing initiatives to reflect what could be achieved remotely and balancing supply chain issues with the need to market and keep business moving forward.
Once that was under control, it was important to continue to inspire creativity within teams as it was tricky to maintain the usual fast flowing iterative idea process on video call. We solved by being even more prepared with briefs, sending them in advance, finding ways to make them more fun and engaging and encouraging time for individuals and smaller groups to have unstructured work sessions.

Surbhi Martin
VP-Marketing, Danone North America

Surbhi Martin
VP-Marketing, Danone North America
Two weeks into her job as VP of marketing for Danone North America, Surbhi Martin met with her agency, Lightning Orchard. “The conversion quickly went to how frankly bored I felt with yogurt marketing,” she recalls. “We had not done anything disruptive across our brands in quite a while.”
That’s no longer a problem. Under her leadership, Danone’s Oikos Triple Zero yogurt drew buzz with its #YoGlutes campaign that paid tribute to the rear ends of National Football League players, including Saquon Barkley, set to the soundtrack of “Bubble Butt.” The spot, which ran during the livestream of the 2020 Super Bowl, drew more than 25 million online views. Martin also leads Two Good low-fat yogurt, whose marketing includes support of organizations that fight food waste.
Martin, who is of Indian origin, says she has a growing awareness of stereotypes the industry places on women of color. She cites the phenomenon of “just not feeling as heard or as visible, and maybe it’s because tonally your posture is to be more hesitant or suggestive versus assertive,” but “I’ve learned to evolve my style in a way that feels authentic to me.”
Keep a more open mind about what it takes to be successful in this field. Don’t go for the usual profile. There are limited archetypes for women in this industry, and I sometimes wonder if the lack of diversity might partly be a failure of imagination to rethink what leadership can be and look like. I find it ironic that a creative field which requires imagination doesn’t have more diversity. We should bring the openness and big imagination we have in our approach to the work to the way we rethink leadership, and archetypes for female leaders.
I’ve really appreciated leaders who create open, inclusive and safe environments to show up as who I am. It minimizes the need to conform to a preconceived idea of leadership and I feel valued for who I am. Those leaders have usually gone out of their way to create inclusive cultures because they recognize it isn’t often the default and it won’t happen on its own.

Rona Mercado
Senior VP of Accounts, Cashmere

Rona Mercado
Senior VP of Accounts, Cashmere
Rona Mercado had a thriving career in entertainment—working at an independent record label with artists including Snoop Dogg and Wu-Tang Clan and creating campaigns for major motion pictures—when she decided to leave it behind to help start Cashmere in 2003. Since then, she’s helped grow the agency from a four-person shop in Venice Beach to a 90-person creative collective.
Today, as senior VP of accounts at Cashmere, Mercado plays a vital role in cultivating the agency’s growing roster of brands that includes Google, Amazon, Apple TV+, Lego, HBO, BMW and Jack in the Box. In 2019, she led Cashmere, Ad Age’s Multicultural Agency of the Year, to 100 percent revenue growth. Understanding early on she had to adapt the business in the wake of the pandemic and create new streams of revenue, Mercado launched a virtual experiences division rooted in social and culture called “Nice Sweater.” She also serves as a role model within the agency and has an award in her honor: The Rona Mercado Award, given to one employee each year who went above and beyond for Cashmere.

Laura Molen
President, advertising sales and partnerships, NBCUniversal

Laura Molen
President, advertising sales and partnerships, NBCUniversal
Laura Molen knew she wanted to sell TV ads when, during a career fair she attended while studying at Syracuse University, she watched NBC present its upfront sizzle reel to the college students.
Molen started her career at Turner when Ted Turner was married to Jane Fonda, who was vocal in the need to have more women at the company. “I saw that as an opportunity, so when jobs opened I pitched every one,” she says.
Molen says she was always inspired to move into areas of change, which led her to jobs in cable TV at a time when everyone wanted to be in broadcast. She helped launch UPN and later Spike TV.
Molen joined NBCU in 2013, overseeing sales of its cable networks. She was promoted to lead all of ad sales alongside Mark Marshall in November 2018 and expanded her role this year to oversee ad sales of NBCU’s new streaming platform, Peacock.
Molen is passionate about advocating for the accurate portrayal of women and girls in all media and has worked with the Development School for Youth NYC to help break the cycle of poverty.
As an industry we need to really educate ourselves more about what it means to be fully open, accepting and empathetic of people who are different, and really train people to get educated and really stand for acceptance for different points of view and different types of people. I have found the more diverse a group of people I work with, typically the better business results we deliver. Part of that is having different perspectives makes people more confident, more comfortable.
I can speak from being a 20 year working mother. I was a VP when my daughter was born and I gave a presentation on why I should work one day a week from home. My boss was very traditional and people said I was never going to get it, but I told him what he could count on me to deliver for the company. I didn’t want to play the victim and feel like I have to work five days in the city, just because no one has done otherwise. A lot of times we are held to old standards in more traditional companies. People need to talk about working from home more. And now that we are all working for home we are finding people are liking not having to commute and they can stop and have dinner with their family and then go back to work if they have to.

Michele Morales
VP-Design Director, FCB Chicago

Michele Morales
VP-Design Director, FCB Chicago
Michele Morales is a rare combination of designer and art director, having worked at a six-person design shop before becoming VP-design director of FCB Chicago.
“Being in an agency setting, I had the opportunity to marry the craft and detail focus of the designer with this conceptual side that I have,” says Morales.
She designed the 853-page “Gun Violence History Book” for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, spanning 228 years. It was “quite literally thick enough to stop a bullet,” Morales says of the book, which won three Gold and three Silver Cannes Lions.
Morales also helped bring Blue Bunny Ice Cream from its small-town Iowa roots to a Soho pop-up experience that brought in 26,000 people and generated more than 442,000 impressions.
She’s been at the center of FCB’s 3% Movement effort, designing a space for inclusivity to foster conversations, and worked with Chicago’s “After School Matters” program to lead workshops introducing teens from diverse neighborhoods to advertising and design careers.
Hire more people of color. Hire more women. Hire more women of color.
Not just one or two. Support us in creating a community and listen to us. I’ve been the token, and it’s a lonely place to be. Learn to give us recognition and tell everyone about our hard work. If we don’t have a community, you won’t retain our talent.
When different life experiences intersect, we learn new ways to connect with our consumer and the work becomes stronger. As you’re recruiting, recognize it as an opportunity to bring in new perspectives and diversity in gender, skin color, sexuality, disability and talent. If you don’t see that talent, go to high schools and introduce our industry to kids at an early age. If this isn’t happening at your agency, do the work and talk with leadership about how to make this happen.

Sadie Novello
Chief Content Officer, GIPHY

Sadie Novello
Chief Content Officer, GIPHY
Sadie Novello originally joined GIPHY, the world’s largest GIF search engine, in 2018 to lead the company’s in-house production studio. But since her promotion to chief content officer, her role has become more multifaceted. “I’ve had the opportunity to take on so much more—adding content, partnerships, marketing and PR, and a lot of company-wide operational work,” Novello says. Under her leadership, GIPHY Studios tripled its project load, creating content for REI’s “#OptOutside” campaign, stickers for Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte season and GIFs for Wells Fargo’s NBA Finals campaign. She also launched the company’s first employee resource group, GIPHY ID, which leads diversity and inclusion efforts. To that end, Novello was instrumental in removing the company’s college degree requirement, removing a barrier to a talent pool that had previously been shut out. A mother of three, she has also been vocal in positioning family commitments as strengths rather than barriers to work and productivity. “It has been such a gift to work with incredible people and get to stretch my skills in so many directions,” Novello adds.
Absolutely whatever is necessary. The stats are awful and every single leader in this industry has a responsibility to step up and take this on as a priority.
Opportunity means that the recruiting process needs to be reevaluated and often completely restructured at every level, from internships through the most senior hires. Companies must actively remove bias from the recruiting process, systematically change how recruiting happens to seek out—instead of wait for—a diverse set of candidates, and adjust policies like requiring a college degree, or removing other barriers of entry for marginalized populations.
Retention means the organization has to actively prioritize and constantly be evaluating if they are maintaining a safe and healthy environment and opportunities for career growth for everyone. Diversity and inclusion should not only fall to an ERG, it should be built into the fabric of the organization, and that comes from every single person at the organization understanding the importance—but especially the leadership team making it a building block of the organization, and holding ourselves accountable.

Stephanie Perdue
VP of Marketing, Chipotle Mexican Grill

Stephanie Perdue
VP of Marketing, Chipotle Mexican Grill
Stephanie Perdue began her career in entertainment at Fox, then moved into the restaurant industry and hasn’t looked back.
“The intensity and the agility and the creativity of the restaurant industry has really been integral to who I am as a marketer,” Perdue says. “There’s so many dynamics, from digital to physical locations. It just makes it an exciting industry to be a part of.”
Perdue says the changes required by brands during the coronavirus pandemic called for a “radical shift.” Going all-in on digital ordering, mobile ordering and carry out required a shift in the entire marketing plan. The loss of live sports and live music required even more changes to Chipotle’s strategy.
The brand shifted further toward digital, streaming and social, focusing on real-time marketing opportunities. The brand also went to a fully virtual version of its Chipotle Challenger Series, an esports competition streamed on Twitch and YouTube.
“Those are all things we never had imagined we would be doing if you had asked six months ago,” Perdue says.
I think, for me, my career has really been about creating innovative ideas that don't exist. And so I try to look at what I'm working on and say, ‘What risk are we taking today to make the customer experience better?’ And so I hope that the biggest risk I've taken is not what I've done in the past, but what I'll do in the future.
With innovation, I think the key to success is failures. I can tell you a lot of times people may have looked and said, ‘Wow you're going to take on that project that the company has failed, you know, five to 10 times on?’ But, I think I think it's those failures that really create rich insights for success.
At Chipotle, I think it was creating menu innovation at a time where the brand really didn't do menu innovation. We've launched two in the past six months with carne asada and our queso blanco, and they've been the best new menu introductions for the company. So, I think the only reason why those have worked is because there's probably a lot of failures before those.

Ericka Pittman
Chief Marketing Officer, Viola

Ericka Pittman
Chief Marketing Officer, Viola
After 25 years of leading marketing across categories spanning CPG, beauty, food and beverage and luxury goods, Ericka Pittman is out to conquer a new terrain: cannabis.
As the chief marketing officer of premium brand Viola, Pittman is the first African-American woman CMO of a multistate cannabis company. After serving as CMO of Aquahydrate and as a top exec at Sean Combs’ Combs Enterprises, she joined the cannabis firm in December 2019—which means she’s spent the majority of her tenure at the brand under lockdown. In that short time, she has led activations including bringing New York’s Jue Lan Club to Chicago for NBA All-Star Weekend; “420 Daily,” a virtual programming series on Instagram; and launched the company’s social equity initiative, Viola Cares, with nonprofit Root and Rebound.
Viola was founded in 2011 by NBA vet Al Harrington and is built on a foundation of promoting social equity and minority representation, evident in Pittman’s most recent projects, which include a partnership supporting “Bike Rides for Black Lives” with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Department of Human Civil Rights.

Joy Robins
Chief Revenue Officer, The Washington Post

Joy Robins
Chief Revenue Officer, The Washington Post
The Washington Post has completely restructured its sales team since Joy Robins took the top revenue role.
“We reorganized the sales team last fall to be more focused on the client first,” Robins says, “really thinking about how they could better solve business challenges as partners rather than as media sellers. That is something we’ve really been deliberate about.”
The Post developed an agency partnership team. Robins also points to work The Washington Post has done with brands including Rolex and AT&T, where the advertising relationship is deeper than just running an ad.
In the news business, it is necessary to educate brands more about where they fit into the broader conversations going on, and how their messages are received when surrounded by subjects like coronavirus and questions of social justice.
“One of the things that I’ve really focused on over the last year is helping advertisers and agencies understand that news is actually the ultimate place for brands as they navigate things like trust and sentiment and intent and purpose,” Robins says.

Carmen Rodriguez
Chief Client Officer, GUT

Carmen Rodriguez
Chief Client Officer, GUT
For Carmen Rodriguez, leaving David Miami to join GUT last year was a no-brainer. She was joining Anselmo Ramos and Gaston Bigio, with whom she’d worked since David Miami itself was a startup and where, as she puts it, “I had found my people.” In just two years the fledgling GUT has won business from the likes of Philadelphia cream cheese and Popeyes and has even added new clients in the pandemic, being appointed by Headspace to work on its first TV campaign.
One of the industry’s most awarded account management leaders, Rodriguez has always been passionate about creativity (she even once wrote a Super Bowl commercial script that was pitched to a client), and actively encourages younger account managers and strategists in the agency to speak up about creative ideas.
Having joined the industry as a “very outspoken” 17-year-old intern, she’s never been afraid to champion brave projects. When her creative team at David came to Rodriguez with the idea for Burger King’s Google: Home of the Whopper, she recalls: “I wanted to cry, knowing all the conversations I would have to have with lawyers, but I knew we had to do it.”

Susan Vanell-Charpentier
Associate Director-Brand Building Purchases, Procter & Gamble Co.

Susan Vanell-Charpentier
Associate Director-Brand Building Purchases, Procter & Gamble Co.
Susan Vanell-Charpentier wanted to be a marketer when she joined Procter & Gamble Co. 22 years ago, but couldn’t afford the requisite M.B.A. So she figured she’d try purchasing, let P&G pay for her degree, then move into marketing.
But she liked purchasing so much that she stayed. Now as associate director-brand building purchases, she has the best of both worlds, leading an effort that includes sorting what gets done in-house and with agencies, plus expanding global buying with women-owned marketing services shops.
“In TV media buying, the agencies do a really good job of that,” says Vanell-Charpentier, 44. “That’s a scale game, so breaking that out over 11 categories and having each of us do negotiations doesn’t make a lot of sense.” However, in planning, where agencies have to be educated on brand needs anyway, keeping it in house makes more sense, she says.
“Some agencies are really amazing with in-housing models. Carat has been amazing for us because they’ve helped us do different parts, and they’ve kept parts,” she says. “We’ve struggled at other times where [agencies] feel threatened.”
Generally speaking I don’t think of myself as a huge risk-taker. I spend a lot of time in my head analyzing a situation … so that by the time I make a decision, I don’t see it as risky.
But she recounts a pandemic-era flight of risk taking in her personal life. “When we were in quarantine my husband and I were out walking,” she says. At one point, her husband told her, “I really don’t want to go home yet, let’s turn left instead of right.” They saw a house on a five-and-a-half-acre lot that they liked, as a result, “and 46 hours later, we had a contract on the house.”
Because of my work in supplier diversity, I have strong feelings about this. We as an advertiser have to play a strong role. We believe very strongly that better diversity brings better teams and better results. So we need to make sure that the people working on our accounts reflect the people who are our customers, our consumers. We have to first request that and make sure we are holding people accountable. But then we also have to support it.
For example, with women, the language for keeping them in the industry is flexibility. And frankly this industry has not done that very well. We’ve learned during COVID that you can do pretty much anything working from home. So this idea that we as women have to be in an office, have to put in certain hours, that’s really limiting when we’re also trying to do the job of being a mom and a wife and taking care of the house, which just naturally are tasks that fall on women.
For people of color, we have to promote an environment that helps them thrive. From what I’ve seen in the past two weeks, frankly we have a lot more racism in this country than I ever knew. Those of us in the majority have to become not just allies but champions. We have to speak up. We have to create cultures that are helpful to really force change. So we need to make sure agencies and publishers are measuring progress, that they are reporting that back, that they are asking for help, and we’re offering help. Because we know how to do it. As advertisers, we’ve done a pretty good job generally speaking. So we need to share those lessons with them and lift up this whole industry as well.

Shayna Walker
Director of diversity and inclusion and campus recruiting, Horizon Media

Shayna Walker
Director of diversity and inclusion and campus recruiting, Horizon Media
Shayna Walker, director of diversity and inclusion and campus recruiting at Horizon Media, wears many hats. But Walker is doing even more behind the scenes to fix the ad industry’s diversity problems.
Getting more women and people of color in the ad industry has been talked about ad nauseum for decades, says Walker. “It is easy to talk about the need for change,” she says. “But what’s missing is consistent action. The real work lies in truly committing to ‘the how’ and disrupting the status quo to actually effect change.”
That change is seen with Walker’s efforts in partnering with two historical Black schools, Howard University and Morgan State University. In 2019, she spearheaded a partnership with the Association of National Advertisers Educational Foundation to participate in its Campus Speakers Program.
Thanks to Walker’s efforts, Horizon says 28 percent of the company’s internship employees were hired through diversity partnerships and more than 40 percent of the 2019 summer intern class were students of color, up 10 percent year-over-year.