TRENDSETTERS

Parity was created in 2020 to close the gender income and opportunity gap in professional sports, and CEO Leela Srinivasan has been in her role for a year. To help revolutionize the financial model for women athletes and create meaningful opportunities for brands, she has championed what may be the most extensive study of women’s sports fandom to date. In partnership with SurveyMonkey, Parity surv...

Michael Kelly has worked in digital media and communications strategy roles at consumer packaged goods and technology companies for much of his career.  Now, he has accepted a “dream job” as Communications Director of World Bicycle Relief.  While he’s a cycling enthusiast, he’s also passionate about the mission to provide bicycles to remote regions of the world so individuals have transport to edu...

Rahul Malhotra is responsible for global brand strategy and architecture for the Shell brand family, which includes overseeing brand identity, brand stewardship, employee ambassadorship, and brand purpose. Over 125 years old and valued at over $50 billion, the Shell brand is one of the world's top 23 most valuable brands, and its yellow and red scallop shell logo is one of the most recognizable sy...

For the past decade, Anthony Farina, Chief Communications & Brand Officer of biotech giant CSL, has been part of the company’s extraordinary evolution. From his beginnings as the first communications leader in CSL’s century-long history, he has helped champion a purpose-driven ethos or “promise,” which enabled the CSL family to unify as one global brand as it doubled in size through acquisitio...

Gilbert Dávila is among the most sought-after experts on multicultural marketing in the United States today.  After spending 25 years working as a senior marketing executive and multicultural market expert at Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, The Walt Disney Company, and others, he co-founded DMI Consulting in 2010.  He also co-founded AIMM, The Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, i...

Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel believes that brands reflect culture and actively shape societal norms and values. Her new book, Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy , demonstrates how marketers can create programs that resonate effectively with audiences and meaningfully impact society.    Her book is devoted to helping marketers view culture more criticall...

Few can boast of a professional life that includes investment banker, equity research analyst, long-time agency executive, and developer of two of the global advertising industry's most widely relied upon data sets.  Brian Wieser has devoted much of his career to understanding trends in media spending, its overall effect on advertising budgets, and what this means not only to marketers but to inve...

SeeHer is the ANA’s global initiative to champion the positive representation of women and the leading global movement to eliminate gender bias in marketing, media, and entertainment.  A new edition of the report, Global Perceptions of Progress on Gender Equality , conducted by SeeHer in partnership with dentsu, showed some surprising results, including disillusionment in the U.S. market. While 90...

As a leader in self-regulation, the ANA, through the Center for Ethical Marketing, helps businesses build brand and consumer trust through best practices, guidelines, guidance, compliance services, and committees. The Center seeks to educate, elevate, and advance accountability for the industry and mediate consumer complaints.  Senny Boone, Senior Vice President of the Center for Ethical Marketing...

Liz Kneebone has spent much of her career focused on environmental, social, and governance issues, as well as playing an active role in stakeholder engagement and change management. Today, as Vice President of the Society and Sustainability Collective, an ANA initiative, she believes sustainable, inclusive marketing practices are a significant growth driver for all organizations across every indus...

Martin Puris believes we are approaching a second Creative Revolution in Advertising. He plans to be part of it—just as he was instrumental in the first Creative Revolution during the Golden Age of Advertising when he founded Ammirati & Puris with his partner Ralph Ammirati in the 1970s. Famous for finding the right words to convey the Big Idea, Martin Puris, as a copywriter, coined such iconi...

The AEF is the ANA Educational Foundation, and its mission is to connect today’s advertising and marketing communities with academia. AEF educates and inspires the next generation of talent while advancing the understanding of marketing and advertising in society. According to Gord McLean, President & CEO of AEF, “Our future marketing and advertising leaders are not just looking for a job, the...

Fifty-two percent of Americans have experienced online hate. And violence attributed to hate speech has increased worldwide. Expressions of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and other forms of targeted harassment against vulnerable groups and individuals can make the connectedness of social media become toxic. Anita McGorty, Executive Vice President of Engage Responsibly, talks about how t...

Sir Martin Sorrell possesses the exceptional ability to seamlessly integrate macro geopolitical issues and technological trends with his deep understanding of marketing, advertising, and media. Plus, he has decades of experience interpreting the significance of an industry’s evolution, first-hand. Certainly, one of the many things that drives him as a CEO is being forthright about current realitie...

Marla Kaplowitz has spent a long career at ad agencies…. And now as CEO of the 4A's (American Association of Advertising Agencies), she is helping her members navigate the constantly changing agency world. She sees her role as ensuring that agencies remain relevant, compete successfully, and have the resources to flourish. Today, she anticipates how events in 2024 will impact the business, interpr...

Two long-time friends and international media professionals had a simple idea that is now changing how both clients and agencies can access strategic marketing solutions—whether within North America or throughout the world. Called AdVentures Americas for its US home base, Oliver Eills (Founder & CEO) and Patrick Williams (Managing Partner), both originally from the UK and Ireland, have spent t...

Bob Liodice, chief executive officer of the ANA, certainly understands both the challenges and opportunities marketers face today. As he anticipates the key issues and trends of 2024, Bob considers both large, defining topics like the effect of AI on the industry and how a central ANA tenet like “growth” is continuing to develop, as well as tactical solutions like new efficiencies available to the...

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), is unquestionably an optimist when he talks about the potential for marketing to drive outcomes and even reshape business goals. However, he is also tremendously pragmatic when he discusses the importance of embracing key marketing initiatives. He believes that CMOs “need to lead,” and given the global complexities of the year ahead...

Lisette Arsuaga, Co-Founder of AIMM, ANA's Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, has long been an advocate for demonstrating how high-growth brands are also those with strong diversity and inclusion attributes or “cultural relevance” that is embedded throughout all marketing touchpoints. Recently, AIMM conducted a survey through the Cultural Inclusion Accelerator (CIA) to better unde...

Rogier Vijverberg founded the agency SuperHeroes in Amsterdam in 2009 with an ambitious mission to save the world from boring advertising. Nearly 15 years later, SuperHeroes is still an independent agency, but now with offices in New York (or Williamsburg Brooklyn to be precise) and most recently Singapore… driven by that same mission. A self-described “digitalist,” with the title of Chief Creativ...

Michel Quintas has the rare title of Director for Global Digital Strategy and Execution at Biogen, the Cambridge, Massachusetts multinational biotech company specializing in the treatment of neurological diseases. Not only has he helped lead an enterprise-wide transformation of Biogen’s digital customer engagement, but he has been instrumental in advocating omni-channel programs and a Digital Cent...

Jared Belsky , Founder & CEO of Acadia, the recently launched and highly successful Atlanta-based agency, has been on both the client and agency sides during his career. He believes that marketers often are trained in every aspect of their business except managing their ad agencies. His latest book, You Get the Agency You Deserve , offers both practical and emotional lessons on how to improve...

Conversation with Leela Srinivasan, CEO of Parity Parity was created in 2020 to close the pay gap in women’s sports, benefitting elite women athletes and their fans, as well as brands. Founded by former leaders on Wall Street, the company drives revenue to pro women athletes by curating sponsorship opportunities, as well as other aspects of brand ambassadorship, content creation and in-person appe...

Phil Rowley, Head of Futures for Omnicom Media Group UK, admits that the Metaverse is both overhyped and underappreciated. While a lot of marketer attention is now on the “shiny objects” of AI with products like ChatGPT, he has recently focused on “Avoiding the Regretaverse” or, perhaps better said, “how not to mess up in the Metaverse.” Beginning with definitions, we discuss how brands can best t...

Few would disagree that an agency’s greatest asset is its people. Tim Ringel, ad veteran, serial entrepreneur, and one of the founders of agency group-- Meet The People, is on a mission to ensure that an improved work culture is front and center for ad agency employees. He describes Meet the People as the world’s first people-centric agency group, based on a better work/life balance, no glass ceil...