Adweek 公布 2026 Innovator 50 榜单，AI 营销落地成为入选主线

“If you can dream it, you can do it” has never been more true. 

From advancing emerging technologies to delivering breakthrough ideas that drive real business impact, the 2026 ADWEEK Innovator 50 recognizes the executives shaping the future of marketing and advertising by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

These innovative leaders across disciplines at agencies, brands, tech firms, and media companies are moving at the speed of technological and cultural change, ensuring their businesses remain relevant tomorrow.

Jill Pavlovich

SVP of Digital Shopping Experiences, Albertsons Companies

With over 2,200 stores in 35 states, Albertsons Companies knows how to connect with consumers in the aisles. Jill Pavlovich has brought the same rigor to its digital storefront, advancing the ecommerce side of the business by integrating AI into the shopping journey through conversational search and personalized recommendations using first-party data. Among her biggest advances have been enhancing product discovery through AI and expanding shoppable recipe capabilities to reduce the daily stress of meal planning. Customers using Albertsons’ new AI-powered tools generated up to 26% higher average order values, demonstrating AI’s commercial potential in retail by helping to move customers more easily from inspiration to purchase.

Edmond Handwerker

Global Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer, APR

Having watched the AI revolution begin at Accenture, Edmond Handwerker recognized genAI’s potential to fundamentally reshape the marketing operating model. Since joining APR in 2024, he’s repositioned the company from a production consultancy to an AI-enabled production intelligence firm that gives clients more control by combining proprietary technology and one of the industry’s richest intelligence datasets, collected from 400 global brands. Instead of reviewing individual hero campaigns, APR now analyzes production investment across a client’s entire marketing ecosystem through its Acero platform, then operationalizes its insights at scale through its Capri system. With these assets, APR has won nine of 10 competitive pitches in the past year, while client engagements have generated $75 million in annual savings and cut production costs by 84%.

Tyler Denk

Co-founder & CEO, beehiiv

This is the year beehiiv grew beyond newsletter advertising, becoming a broader creator media platform that spans monetization, distribution, audience control, and paid access, pushing the industry to take creator-led media seriously. Under Tyler Denk’s leadership, beehiiv’s ad network doubled revenue to $15 million in ARR, publisher payouts topped $1 million monthly, and the platform grew to more than 50,000 active users. He rebuilt the network from a largely manual operation into a self-serve, increasingly programmatic system serving everyone from independent writers to major publishers. With advertisers including Roku and HubSpot investing in the channel, he’s established a model competitors are racing to match, strengthening the economics of creator-led publishing.

Jen Faraci

Chief Intelligence Officer, Digitas

In just over a year as Digitas chief intelligence officer, Jen Faraci has made AI a competitive advantage, unifying data, analytics, and product innovation into an intelligence layer that drives planning, activation, and measurement. Her signature achievement, the proprietary NX Score, uses large language models to assess brand-consumer relationships and identify actionable growth opportunities. Slashing brand diagnostics from weeks to roughly five minutes, the tool played a role in 80% of Digitas’ pitch wins last year. For Sephora, her data strategy helped deliver an 88% increase in media ROI. Faraci is advancing privacy-safe measurement while investing in diverse talent and the next generation of industry leaders.

Billy Parks

Head of Fox Creator Studios, Fox Entertainment

Above anything else, Billy Parks is a relationship builder, cultivating the trust of creators to bring them under the studio umbrella. He’s leading Fox Creator Studios in understanding what audiences want and turning that into original IP, scalable franchises, and new revenue opportunities. In the past year, Parks has secured seven creator partnerships representing more than 65 million followers, spanning both scripted and unscripted series, as well as mobile-native food and automotive storytelling. His model connects creators’ cultural credibility with Fox’s production, financing, advertising, and global distribution capabilities. One of his early successes, the YouTube sketch comedy series Read the Room with Josh Richards, generated more than 60 million views in its first four weeks and was greenlit for additional seasons.

Austin Leonard

VP & GM of DG Media Network, Dollar General

Austin Leonard is pushing retail media beyond the digital shelf, building Dollar General Media Network into a connected commerce platform that encompasses advertising, digital sales, and 21,000-plus stores. He brokered partnerships with The Trade Desk and Kevel to unify onsite and offsite activation, and with Google to bring Dollar General’s purchase data into YouTube and DV360. He also expanded the DG In-Store Radio Network to nearly 12,000 locations, making physical stores a scalable media channel. Under his leadership, DGMN generated $170 million in fiscal 2025 ad revenue, while championing industry-wide standards for measurement and commerce media innovation.

Scott Futterman

Co-Founder & CEO, Drmtlgy

Scott Futterman has grown Drmtlgy into an estimated $200 million skincare business without outside equity, proving that clinical credibility and community-driven marketing can rival traditional beauty playbooks. Over the past year, he led the brand’s launch in more than 1,400 Ulta Beauty stores, beating sell-in forecasts by 200% and generating more than $5 million in retail sales. Futterman’s commitment to evidence over hype drove an independently conducted clinical trial of Drmtlgy’s Needle-less Growth Factor Serum against a $295 competitor; results published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology showed 30% greater visible improvement overall. By fostering trust, committing to transparency, and engaging in long-term relationship building with its community, Futterman has created a marketing model that can resonate well beyond the beauty category.

Harshit Jain

Founder & Global CEO, Doceree

Healthcare marketing’s biggest blind spot is the disconnect between advertising exposure and patient outcomes. As founder and global CEO of pharma marketing platform Doceree, Harshit Jain has built an AI-powered system connecting clinical intent to prescription, fill, and refill across more than 25 countries. Its privacy-first infrastructure processes 951 billion annual clinical signals, serving over 500 pharma brands, with a product portfolio spanning AI-powered sales engagement with RepTwin, affordability tools, and publisher technology. One of Jain’s signature innovations, Daily Command, unifies planning, activation, and measurement for brand teams in one workspace. These advances led to Doceree being named a Sample Vendor in the 2026 Gartner Hype Cycle for Life Science Enterprise Technologies, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Veeva. Jain also works to broaden industry understanding of the future of healthcare on his podcast, The Next Marketing with HJ.

Zvika Netter

Co-founder & CEO, Innovid
Chief Innovation Officer, Mediaocean

Since co-founding Innovid in 2007, Zvika Netter has been a driving force behind some of the biggest changes in advertising, from interactive video to connected TV and now agentic AI. His latest bet is Nivo, an AI foundation that connects data, decision-making, and execution across the advertising lifecycle. Rather than generating recommendations alone, its specialized agents turn intelligence into action, cutting campaign workflows from weeks to minutes. Clients including Canvas Worldwide, FanDuel, Optimum, Paddy Power, and Tailwind EMEA are seeing up to 90% workflow efficiency gains, 40% less media waste, and 45% more impactful creative. Named Mediaocean’s chief innovation officer in February, Netter is extending this vision through Prisma and Protected.

Zach Epstein

Founder & CEO, Haus

In the Wild west of AI-driven media buying, Zach Epstein is grounded in causal evidence, not attribution or platform-reported performance. The CEO of Haus introduced Architect, an agentic optimization system that combines incrementality testing, predictive modeling, and business context to recommend how marketers allocate budgets across channels and campaigns. Built on real-world experiments, its explainable recommendations help marketers move from measuring results to making better investment decisions. As AI increasingly automates media buying, Epstein is making the case that independent evidence must guide the algorithms controlling advertising spend, bringing greater accountability to marketing’s most consequential decisions.

Tejas Manohar

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Hightouch

AI in advertising can do so much more than content generation, and Tejas Manohar is turning the technology on campaign execution. The Hightouch co-CEO has spearheaded an agentic marketing platform that uses customer data, brand guidelines, and performance signals to help marketers analyze opportunities, develop creative, and take campaigns live. Hightouch Ad Studio cut Otrium’s campaign production timelines by 70%, while boosting clickthrough rates 13% and conversions 15%. The platform has powered nearly 10 billion AI decisions across more than 800 customers. In April, Hightouch raised $150 million at a $2.75 billion valuation, accelerating Manohar’s vision for AI-powered marketing.

Alexander Guerrero

Founder & CEO, NexTide Media

With livestreams gaining popularity beyond gaming and sports, Alexander Guerrero has evolved NexTide Media from a livestream creator network into a full-stack AI-powered advertising platform that helps brands plan, safeguard, optimize, and measure campaigns in real time. LiveGuard monitors livestream content and automatically pauses ads when brand safety guidelines are breached; Kraken turns creator conversations into actionable audience intelligence. The platform’s campaigns have delivered more than four times the engagement of traditional digital advertising, while also thinking outside of the box for clients: For corporate travel management platform Engine, Guerrero developed a custom activation based on the insight that nearly half of its B2B target audience games and watches livestreams weekly.

Ali Miller

General Manager of Advertising, Instacart

Having a product background shapes Ali Miller’s approach to innovation at Instacart, listening closely to consumer sand partners to build technology that solves real problems and creates better shopping experiences. She’s connected Instacart’s first-party purchase data to campaigns across social, streaming, and programmatic channels, leading to Instacart Ads surpassing $1 billion in revenue in 2025 with more than 9,000 active brand partners. She expanded AI-powered campaign optimization, introduced shoppable short-form video, and launched Ads Studio, a full-service creative marketing offering that has delivered over 420 campaigns with nearly 200 CPG brands. Through partnerships spanning Meta, Roku and TikTok, Miller is linking brand discovery to measurable sales, helping advertisers connect fragmented consumer journeys to actual purchases.

Siddharth Taparia

Global Chief Marketing Officer JLL

The complexity of commercial real estate makes it ripe for AI innovation. As global CMO of commercial property services and investment firm JLL, Siddharth Taparia has built a dedicated AI marketing team, prioritized digital content for GEO to grab share of voice in LLMs, and deployed over 30 use cases to accelerate content production by 65%. Recognizing that brand awareness doesn’t guarantee conversion, he moved JLL beyond the traditional B2B tactics of commercial real estate. The firm has emerged as a leader in brand-to-demand integration, which has raised marketing-originated revenue by 149% since 2023 and marketing-influenced revenue by 407%, with JLL’s brand value up 24% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. 

Jamie Domenici

Chief Marketing Officer, Klaviyo

The fragmented road of the customer journey is being smoothed by the AI innovations of Jamie Domenici. The Klaviyo CMO is advancing autonomous marketing, steering the company’s evolution into an autonomous B2C CRM where intelligent agents act on customer data to drive results. Customer Agent and Composer automate service and campaign creation, while integrations with Anthropic, Canva, and Shopify bring AI into marketers’ existing workflows. On platforms, Klaviyo Social Marketing folds creator content, social engagement, and DMs into unified customer profiles. The bottom line has grown alongside Klaviyo’s ambitions, with revenue up 32% to $1.2 billion in 2025, while customers generated $3 billion in attributed Black Friday/Cyber Monday revenue. Domenici also champions adoption through global industry events, sharing these practical use cases for AI in marketing.

Nic Baird

Co-founder & CEO, Koah

Making conversational AI into a viable business required Koah CEO Nic Baird to rebuild its advertising infrastructure from the ground up. Recognizing that legacy adtech couldn’t account for how people research and make decisions in AI chats, he rebuilt Koah around user intent and real-time behavioral analytics. The results are striking: Koah delivers clickthrough rates roughly four times higher than legacy adtech across AI environments and has served more than 65 million native ad impressions, all backed by a human team that has grown 175% over the past 12 months. Publishers including Liner and Luzia have reported significant performance gains, while Koah’s $20.5 million Series A signals growing investor confidence in a new advertising channel.

Mercedes de la Guardia

Director of Data Intelligence, AI & Innovation, LLYC

Brands looking for blunt feedback on their products can ask Mercedes de la Guardia, who’s turned generative AI into a practical research tool. As communications and consulting firm LLYC’s director of data and AI, she helped develop Synthetic Audiences, a human-guided methodology that tests creative, messaging, products, and packaging before launch. For one technology client, de la Guardia designed a synthetic jury of 27 different audience profiles to evaluate 51 creative assets, producing 459 assessments in 72 hours and uncovering gaps in the evidence needed to drive purchase. The approach has demonstrated an average 90% compatibility with traditional focus-group findings while compressing research timelines.

Zeev Farbman

Co-founder & CEO, LTX

The only solution to the closed-model economics of AI video, as LTX CEO Zeev Farbman sees it, is open-weight technology that gives creators and enterprises greater control over costs, intellectual property, and deployment. LTX-2, released in January, enables production-ready audio-video generation on local hardware or private cloud infrastructure, at roughly one-eighth the cost and one-seventh the render time of closed models. The model family has surpassed 11 million downloads on Hugging Face, signaling demand for accessible alternatives as cost increasingly becomes a factor in AI adoption. With LTX-2.3 on the horizon, Farbman is steering LTX beyond video toward world models, expanding what open creative technology can make possible.

Mansi Jain

Chief Operating Officer, Glance

One of commerce’s biggest assumptions is that it begins with search. The 10 million monthly users of agentic commerce platform Glance know there’s a better way. Mansi Jain launched the AI-powered product discovery app in May 2025 during New York Fashion Week, and in roughly a year has logged installs across 80 million devices. The platform uses visual, personalized recommendations to move consumers from inspiration to purchase, with 40% of MAUs adding items to cart and 15% transacting. Jain has expanded Glance across mobile and connected TV, including a first-to-market Samsung smart TV shopping experience, opening new territory for brands to connect discovery, media, and commerce in a measurable, cross-platform way. Jain is also bringing more women into AI by hosting events at industry gatherings such as Shoptalk and Cannes Lions.

Tessa Burg

Chief Technology Officer, Mod Op

In transforming full-service agency Mod Op’s operations for the AI era, Tessa Burg is guided by two pillars: productivity and possibility. Beyond efficiencies, she built a proprietary technology stack that delivers marketing services in a new way. To create it, she started with people, founding and leading Mod Op’s Ad Council that spans every department, which yielded 13 enterprise initiatives within six months. Burg conceived and launched Orion, an in-house intelligence platform that has powered more than 700 AI agents, generated $3 million in measurable value, and contributed to $5 million in incremental client revenue. Its workflow platform is used by more than 95% of employees, while Burg has trained 400-plus staff in AI development so far. 

Jim Wilson

CEO, Madhive

Local media is getting access to the technology necessary to compete with national advertising giants with Madhive. CEO Jim Wilson has built the company into an omnichannel platform serving more than 8,000 local sellers, with its AI-powered Maverick suite automating campaign planning, targeting, and optimization. In live campaigns, Maverick has delivered 17.5x return on ad spend, 4x higher conversion rates and 112% more foot traffic. Its 2026 AI agent launch lets advertisers manage campaigns through natural-language commands, bringing advanced intelligence directly into everyday workflows. Through partnerships spanning local broadcasters and streaming platforms, Wilson is advancing a more competitive, accountable future for local advertising.

Vinay Jain

Co-founder & CEO, Notch

Since launching autonomous marketing platform Notch less than a year ago, Vinay Jain has shown that AI isn’t just capable of assisting marketers—it can operate as one. Drawing on nearly eight years building Meta’s ad infrastructure, including Lead Ads—which grew from zero to $1 billion in annual revenue—he launched Notch’s Max, an autonomous agent that plans strategy, creates ads, launches campaigns, and optimizes budgets across Meta and TikTok. Max has generated over 85,000 ads for more than 16,000 advertisers thanks to its Brand Brain memory layer trained on proprietary data, continuous feedback loops, and ecommerce integration, helping triple Notch’s revenue in six months. By bringing campaign management into ChatGPT and Claude, Jain is also challenging the dashboard-centric model of digital advertising.

Melissa Burdick

Co-founder & President, Pacvue

The past year has brought a strategic shift to Pacvue, with president Melissa Burdick guiding the retail media platform into something entirely new: an agentic commerce grid that connects planning, activation, and measurement across retail, social, streaming, and AI. Pacvue’s new platform, Prism, connects every touchpoint along a customer journey to business outcomes, with early results showing a 5% lift in total ROAS and 12% higher sales. Pacvue now manages more than $12 billion in ad spend across more than 100 retail networks. Burdick is also expanding access to AI training and mentoring women in commerce, building the talent pipeline alongside the technology.

Ethan Braden

VP & Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Texas A&M University

Meeting audiences where they are is the bread and butter of most advertising, but higher education hadn’t seen the like until Texas A&M University’s Ethan Braden. He elevated the school to No. 6 in global visibility, up from No. 21 two years ago, with an unconventional marketing strategy around motorsports, research, service, and popular culture. Texas A&M’s NASCAR activation linked sponsorship with engineering, safety, manufacturing, and other institutional priorities; the university was also a primary team sponsor in the IndyCar series, where it debuted a service-centric brand film featuring Lyle Lovett. Braden also launched a university-owned media platform that has generated 76.8 million search impressions, while YouTube content generated 75 million views and earned-media mentions rose 83%.

Bas Korsten

Global Chief Creative Officer, VML

Bas Korsten is pushing creative agencies into territory once reserved for scientists. As a follow-up to The Next Rembrandt and the Mammoth Meatball, he was the dreamer behind T-Rex Leather, which used AI modeling and biotechnology to grow leather from a genetic blueprint reconstructed from 66 million-year-old dinosaur collagen. The April debut generated 4.63 billion media impressions, lifted Lab-Grown Leather’s share price 279%, and increased luxury brand inquiries tenfold. Korsten is also advancing AI across VML’s creative operations while championing award-winning innovations spanning healthcare and sports commerce. Under his leadership, VML won 53 Cannes Lions in 2026 and saw 35% organic growth.

Josh Goldstine

President of Worldwide Marketing & Distribution Paramount Pictures

Theatrical campaigns feel fresh again under the leadership of Josh Goldstine. At Paramount, he’s infusing legacy franchises with fresh relevance to engage a new generation of moviegoers. A campaign for Scream 7 took the villain Ghostface from the screen to the real world, including UFC matches and Supercross races, and even a crossover with rapper Ghostface Killah. The film’s comedy counterpart, Scary Movie, brought a haunted living room to Times Square along with integrations with Bravo’s hit series Summer House. By stoking social buzz and expanding the genre appeal of horror, Scream 7 became the franchise’s highest-grossing film, earning more than $200 million worldwide, while Scary Movie delivered a franchise-record opening and $224 million in box office revenue, becoming the first R-rated comedy since 2017 to surpass $100 million domestically.

Andrew Panay

Founder & CEO, Panay Brand Studios

By approaching every campaign through his expertise as a filmmaker, Andrew Panay is making Hollywood-worthy ads at an impressive scale. Through Panay Brand Studios, he delivered more than 175 pieces of content for T-Mobile and Microsoft in a year, including Super Bowl campaigns. His character-driven Microsoft Copilot spots helped propel the product from 15 million to 30 million paid seats by mid-2026. Panay also launched Cyprus, a generative AI production studio, and 3for360, a sprint program delivering refined creative concepts in three days through human-AI collaboration. His model unites filmmaking, technology, and speed, pushing brands to compete more effectively for cultural attention.

James Cadwallader

Co-founder & CEO, Profound

Marketing’s next battleground is AI-powered search, and Profound CEO James Cadwallader is leading the charge for brands. As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations, Profound gives brands the tools to measure visibility, track citations, correct misinformation, and improve their presence in AI-generated answers. Its platform now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Target, Walmart, and Figma, with customers reporting significant gains in AI visibility. Through products such as Profound Index and AI Marketer, Cadwallader is making an emerging discovery channel measurable and actionable for marketers. The company has raised $155 million at a $1 billion valuation, and over 15% of the Fortune 500 use the platform.

Charlie Flax

Founder & CEO, Propeller (Omnicom Health)

Charlie Flax has spent two decades anticipating healthcare marketing’s next frontier, from omnichannel strategy to AI-powered execution. As Propeller’s founder and CEO, he has made experimentation an operating principle, equipping all 133 employees with AI training and embedding new capabilities across the Omnicom Health agency, showing how adoption of a new technology can be a people-first process. Today, 80% of client brands use fully agentic workflows, cutting project time by 30%. The approach delivers in healthcare’s most demanding environments: Propeller executed a Johnson & Johnson direct-to-consumer launch within 48 hours of FDA approval. With 10 new agency of record wins and a growing client roster, Flax is proving regulated marketing can move faster.

Gaëtan Godart

Managing Director, Programmads

Launching a campaign on Amazon’s advertisingSP platform used to be a weeklong, multi-specialist process. To streamline that process, Gaëtan Godart of Programmads has stripped away the technical complexity with Talk to Launch, an AI agent that lets users build Amazon DSP campaigns through natural-language conversations with Claude. The innovation compresses the time needed from idea to execution into as little as an hour, eliminates handoffs between three specialists, and cuts advertiser onboarding from four weeks to nearly instant. The approach exemplifies Programmads’ evolution from platform partner to technology innovator, complementing its award-winning Adsecura platform as the company posted 45% revenue growth in 2025.

Joel Lunenfeld

Global CEO, Publicis Media Exchange

Publicis Media Exchange claimed the top spot in COMvergence’s 2025 new business rankings, the icing on a historic year for global CEO Joel Lunenfeld that saw more than $10 billion in new client billings including Coca-Cola, Mars, Paramount, and Kenvue. Lunenfeld built creator and sports marketing into Publicis Groupe’s fastest-growing strategic platforms, integrating acquisitions (160over90) and key hires (Suzy Deering as CMO of Publicis Sports), as well as embedding identity, audience intelligence, and ROI measurement into media planning. His innovations helped make creator campaigns accountable to the same performance standards as traditional media. Promoted to global CEO of PMX from U.S. CEO in February, he is scaling that model worldwide.

Rachel Jacobson

CEO, REACHTV

Within six weeks of becoming CEO of ReachTV in April, Rachel Jacobson secured the network’s biggest deal yet: live coverage of all 104 FIFA World Cup matches across more than 80 U.S. airports, reaching 51 million monthly travelers. The partnership attracted new advertisers (including UnitedHealth, St. Jude, Klarna, and Polymarket), sold out inventory, and helped make airport media a more compelling proposition for brands seeking engaged audiences beyond streaming and digital platforms. FIFA programming drove audience concentration 25% above non-game periods, while ReachTV revenue rose 16% year-over-year through Q2, making the case for expanding the industry’s definition of premium inventory to OOH and travel media.

Miles Fisher

VP of Global Ad Platform Partnerships & Business Development, Roku

Scale is great, but performance is better. Miles Fisher is helping close streaming TV’s accountability gap, building the partnerships that make connected TV measurable against real business outcomes. The latest tool, launched in April with Fisher leading the strategy and partner development, is Roku Create, which unites premium inventory with retailer and audience data, simplifying campaign targeting and purchase measurement. He also helped make Roku the first major streaming publisher to optimize campaigns against outcomes in real time through iSpot. A Nielsen integration strengthens cross-platform measurement, while an Amazon Ads partnership expands authenticated reach to 80 million U.S. households. These partnerships and integrations drove advertising revenue 25% higher year-over-year to $673 million in Q2 2026, outpacing both the U.S. OTT and digital advertising markets.

Melissa Jackson Parsey

Global Chief Strategy Officer, R/GA

R/GA is calibrated for the new intelligence era under Melissa Jackson Parsey. She oversaw the development of Intelligent Brand Systems and built its proprietary core, BrDNA, a proprietary framework that makes brand values, behaviors, and judgment legible to AI, enabling more adaptive and consistently on-brand experiences. The technology has shifted the business from one-off campaigns to AI-powered brand systems that can constantly iterate, raising clients’ long-term strategic value. Her vision extends beyond creative execution to challenge agency economics, championing value-based partnerships over time-based billing. She has embedded AI training and tools across R/GA while leading strategy for launches including Fox One and Google Health, helping to fuel 35% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 2026.

Alyson Griffin

Head of Marketing, State Farm

Leading a team of more than 500 marketers, State Farm’s Alyson Griffin has given the insurer a more modern and culturally relevant way to speak to the next generation of policyholders. Challenging insurance’s reliance on price wars and saturation advertising, Griffin has repositioned Jake from State Farm as a cross-platform cultural force, spanning gaming, creators, sports, and premium entertainment to reach Gen Z and millennial audiences. In a first for the insurer, Griffin partnered with Netflix to bring Jake into the basketball comedy Running Point, generating 2.3 billion impressions, while the branded series Gamerhood drove 65.6 million engagements and lifted Gen Z favorability eight points. Griffin’s broader strategy delivered an eight-point YoY increase in brand likeability.

PJ Pereira

Founder & Creative Chairman, Silverside

At 53, after three decades in advertising, PJ Pereira became a beginner again, rebuilding Silverside as an AI-native creative company. His model brings filmmakers, designers, and technologists together in workflows that make ambitious ideas faster to produce and easier to scale. For Coca-Cola, a five-person team generated more than 70,000 clips in a month for “Holidays Are Coming,” earning top marks for creative effectiveness. For Svedka, Pereira helped deliver what was widely recognized as the first Super Bowl commercial produced primarily with generative AI. Under his leadership, Silverside’s revenue grew from $50,000 to $2.4 million in one year.

Mor Klier

EVP of Product Management, Skai

At Skai, Mor Klier is building the infrastructure for AI to run marketing operations, not simply assist them. Over the past year, he launched several category-first products, including Skai Studio, which coordinates AI agents to execute workflows from performance monitoring to budget adjustments, and Skai MCP, an open interface connecting organizations’ own agents to Skai’s data and execution capabilities. The platform now serves over 1,500 users across more than 200 organizations, with reported efficiency gains of up to 50%. By pairing autonomous execution with human oversight and open architecture, Klier is advancing a new operating model for marketing.

Ben Jones

Founder & CEO, Sundogs

After a decade leading creative research at Google, Ben Jones left to build Sundogs, an independent intelligence company decoding what makes video work across platforms. With video now accounting for 82% of internet traffic, Sundogs’ technology analyzes thousands of clips frame by frame, turning creative cues into actionable signals. Rather than hoard its findings, Jones has elected to publish Sundogs’ research, boosting its relevance industry-wide and pushing companies to rethink platform-specific content. The company’s creator scoring model serves brands including Nestlé and Unilever, while a Circana study linked its creative signals to up to 60% higher sales lift. In two years, Sundogs surpassed $6 million in revenue, all while helping the broader advertising industry make the kinds of ads people will actually watch. 

Rogier Vijverberg

Chief Creative Hero, SuperHeroes

As AI democratizes art, outsiders are challenging agencies at their own game, and Rogier Vijverberg is working to give the industry an edge. At SuperHeroes, he launched Jimmy, a collective of AI and CGI artists; Lois, a global artist management platform for storytellers committed to human-crafted work; and The Robins, an 80-person Gen Z insight collective. Working together, these three branches have delivered results such as “Made with Lenovo Yoga” generating 1.3 billion views, lifting Gen Z brand awareness from 4% to 43%, and helping to drive a 23% increase in global AI PC sales. Through free AI education and artist-led experimentation, Vijverberg is expanding access to the tools of the future while championing human imagination.

Katelyn Watson

Chief Marketing Officer, Talkspace

Mental health care has a capacity problem, but AI can narrow the gap—if it’s done responsibly. In June, Talkspace CMO Katelyn Watson spearheaded the launch strategy for Tee by Talkspace, an AI-powered mental health guide developed with clinical oversight, setting a model for bringing sensitive AI products to market. More broadly, over the past year she’s repositioned the brand from a subscription-based therapy service to an insurance-first mental health platform spanning therapy, psychiatry, and self-guided support. And rather than celebrities, she let real Talkspace users speak to its effectiveness. Under Watson’s leadership, Talkspace grew revenue 22% annually and payer revenue 38%, while expanding into Medicare and TriCare, eventually leading to Universal Health Services acquiring the platform in August.

Mac Cummings

CEO & Co-founder, Terakeet

Mac Cummings saw that generative AI would affect much more than search, and transformed Terakeet from an enterprise search marketing company into a reputation management platform. The Reputation Operating System combines proprietary intelligence, strategic counsel, and continuous monitoring to help brands shape how they appear across AI platforms, search, and news. Its proprietary intelligence platform Presidio helps companies identify emerging threats and influence the information AI uses to generate answers. And recognizing that there’s a darker side to reputation management, Cummings recruited former FBI executive Matt Gorham as a strategic advisor on disinformation and cybersecurity. 

Neil Waller

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Whalar Group

In the 10 years since Neil Waller co-founded Whalar Group in 2016, the creator economy went from being worth less than $2 billion to $300 billion. And Whalar has grown alongside it under Waller’s guidance: The creator and social agency’s group turnover rose 32% in 2025 to $165 million, attracting investment from Marc Benioff, Shopify, and Hollywood producer Neal H. Moritz at a $400 million valuation. An already banner year culminated in the acquisition of Whalar’s agency business by Accenture Song in June, which has allowed Waller to realign with his original mission: doubling down on creators and building with them at every step. With the assets he retained in the deal—Whalar’s talent management platform Foam; Lighthouse Studios, where creators build scalable media networks and original IP; and the new media company Scalable covering the industry—Waller is helping creators turn viral fame into durable business success.

Lara Schmoisman

Founder & CEO, The Darl

Competing for attention in an AI-driven marketplace needs a new playbook. Recognizing that traditional SEO no longer guarantees discovery, The Darl CEO Lara Schmoisman developed AI Visibility Optimization frameworks that help brands earn citations and recommendations from generative search platforms. Her Creative Growth methodology connects storytelling and visual identity to conversion data, linking creative decisions to commercial results. Beyond client work, Schmoisman educates marketers on emerging search behaviors and challenges entrenched industry conventions through her podcast, Coffee N5, with more than 1.5 million downloads, and her Unpopular Opinions newsletter. 

Simon Au

Head of Creative at The Kitchen North America, Kraft Heinz

To develop work across 27 distinct Kraft Heinz brands that feels authentic to each of them, Simon Au has built an entrepreneurial model inside the CPG giant’s in-house agency The Kitchen. As head of creative for North America, he’s enabled teams to take culturally relevant ideas from concept to launch in as little as four hours, a model that has produced ideas that feel more like entertainment rather than advertising. Heinz KegChup generated more than 1 billion earned impressions, while “Draft Kraft, Get Kraft” helped drive 50,000 additional boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese sold weekly. Today, The Kitchen produces over two-thirds of Kraft Heinz North America’s brand media output; in the past year, its work has generated more than 20 billion earned impressions and 40 million engagements. 

Robin Triplett

VP of Integrated Marketing Experiences, The Coca-Cola Company

To optimize Coca-Cola’s marketing model, Robin Triplett is uniting data, media, technology, social, and commerce across a $1 billion-plus portfolio of over 17 brands. Her data-led system has doubled media ROI, generated more than $150 million in efficiencies, and increased first-party data by 148%, with the model scaling across more than 10 global markets. By connecting brand investment to commerce and measurement, Triplett is moving marketing beyond individual campaigns toward continuous, intelligence-led growth. Her leadership extends to industry standards through the Media Rating Council and IAB, while internal learning initiatives have helped team engagement rise 24 points.

Chris Koehler

Chief Marketing Officer, Twilio

The rules of B2B marketing are changing fast, and Chris Koehler has been working to infuse the same surprise and delight as B2C. At customer engagement platform Twilio, he has embedded AI across marketing operations, cutting research and content development from weeks to less than a day and increasing account-based marketing output fivefold without adding headcount. He’s also advancing AI-powered brand discovery, with visitors referred by large language models converting at roughly three times the rate of traditional search traffic. Koehler pairs automation with creative ambition, using cultural partnerships, influencer campaigns, and sharper storytelling to make enterprise technology resonate. His premise: As AI scales content, distinctive brands matter more.

Nic Baird

Co-founder & CEO, Koah

Making conversational AI into a viable business required Koah CEO Nic Baird to rebuild its advertising infrastructure from the ground up. Recognizing that legacy adtech couldn’t account for how people research and make decisions in AI chats, he rebuilt Koah around user intent and real-time behavioral analytics. The results are striking: Koah delivers clickthrough rates roughly four times higher than legacy adtech across AI environments and has served more than 65 million native ad impressions, all backed by a human team that has grown 175% over the past 12 months. Publishers including Liner and Luzia have reported significant performance gains, while Koah’s $20.5 million Series A signals growing investor confidence in a new advertising channel.

James Borow

General Manager, Universal Ads

Premium television is now as easy to buy as social ads through the work of James Borow, who built the Universal Ads platform that enables businesses of any size to create, buy, and measure TV campaigns through a single interface. In the past year, he’s led the rollout of new capabilities including a free self-service Ads Manager, full-funnel reporting, and the industry’s first shoppable premium CTV offering, which brought in 21 new publisher partners and 16 API partners, extending potential reach to 90% of U.S. households. Universal Ads’ performance-focused approach helped increase Jones Road Beauty’s new-customer revenue by 90%, while campaigns for independent pizzerias drove a 5% incremental lift in orders. Borow also hired David Shaw to lead the platform’s international ambitions, including launching in the U.K. earlier this year.

Jehan Hamedi

Founder & Executive Chairman, Vizit

Is it possible to know the performance of an ad before it runs? Jehan Hamedi pioneered a category he’s dubbed Perceptual AI: technology that predicts how shoppers respond to product imagery, and launched Vizit Spark, a generative AI engine designed to create ecommerce visuals proven to increase sales across more than 5,000 product categories. Built on millions of purchase decisions and billions of visual data points, the platform serves eight of the world’s 10 largest consumer packaged goods companies, as well as longstanding partners Mars, L’Oreal, and Colgate-Palmolive. Across products analyzed by Vizit’s AI, 95% see measurable gains in conversion, units sold, or revenue. Hamedi’s 47 U.S. patents underscore his pioneering work in visual intelligence.

Andrea Bendzick

CEO, Wpromote x Giant Spoon

Andrea Bendzick is bringing a marketer’s experience and a CFO’s rigor to the longstanding brand vs. performance marketing debate. As CEO of Wpromote x Giant Spoon, she paired the performance agency with the Cannes Lions-winning creative shop—and partnered with AI platform Smartly—to unite creative ambition with best-in-class performance tools. Her biggest contribution is the Care Index, developed with Northwestern University’s Medill School to quantify how consumer affinity predicts revenue. Tested across more than 100 brands, the model predicted next-month revenue with 90% accuracy. She’s also launched an AI-focused rotational program, equipping junior strategists to tackle client challenges with AI from the start and putting their skills to use in real-world challenges facing agency clients.

May Habib

Co-founder & CEO, Writer

As May Habib sees it, enterprise AI’s real opportunity isn’t simply generating content faster, but changing how the work of marketing and revenue teams gets done by connecting the systems that shape a brand. With Writer, she’s built an AI platform that helps nearly a third of the Fortune 500 operationalize brand standards, creative judgment, and customer knowledge through AI agents. Recent releases include Playbooks for repeatable workflows, Skills that encode brand expertise, and the latest Palmyra X6 model. Working together, these systems turn a company’s unique assets into shared infrastructure. At Vodafone, Writer improved search rankings 30% and doubled content engagement; at Boots, it cut SEO audits from weeks to minutes; and at Clorox, it reduced ecommerce listing management time by 85% across thousands of products and retail platforms.

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