CMO, Rightmove
Digital and social platforms have transformed the way young generations buy and sell properties. It's why Rightmove CMO Matthew Bushby has ensured the brand is showing up on channels like TikTok, both to deliver entertainment and leverage its role as a search tool. It has grown its audience on socials by 120% and engagement by 150% in the last 12 months and Bushby insists this is “only the beginning” of a promising journey.
Staying ahead of the curve is critical to brands reliant on the health of the housing market, which has endured some tumultuous conditions in recent years. Bushby has consistently kept Rightmove ahead of the pack when it comes to testing and iterating new approaches in marketing. In May, the brand also unveiled the next phase of its ‘If they can find it, so can you’ campaign, a multichannel push designed to highlight the scale of the brand’s offer and build on the success of the ‘Believe It’ platform launched in 2023.
Though uncertainties clearly remain, the record number of sellers joining the platform at the start of 2025 and its “busiest start to a year” for mortgage in principle applications is a sign that Bushby is on the right track.
Vice-president and CMO, Samsung Europe
Benjamin Braun is a passionate advocate for innovation and change within the marketing sector. He is a big believer in the power of AI to elevate marketing. Rather than splashing out millions on mass reach channels, the CMO has said he’s focused on leveraging more personalised, targeted creative that converts without the huge price tag.
It's the same experimental and forward-thinking attitude that has characterised Braun throughout his marketing career. From the award-winning ‘Wildlife Watch’ initiative, which repurposed handsets for a virtual ranger experience to help the conservation of endangered species in Africa, to ‘Missing Masterpieces’, a world-first exhibition on Frame TVs to find priceless stolen and lost art, Braun has never shied away from bold, agenda-setting activity.
Being able to move people is key to his work, as he looks to position Samsung as far more than a tech brand. The business carried out research to determine the most emotionally powerful life moments, from holding your newborn baby to witnessing a child’s first words, and then showed how Samsung helps people capture them forever, which is the focus of its latest campaign, ‘Life Unfolds Fast’.
Benjamin Braun
Matthew Bushby
Vice-president of marketing EMEA, SharkNinja
Europe is a core market for US product design and tech company SharkNinja as it looks to accelerate its global presence. Susie Donaldson was brought it as vice-president of marketing for the EMEA region in January last year to help on this mission, tasked with driving up market share and building brand awareness, testament to her incredibly strong track record in tech.
Already Donaldson has overseen campaigns for a surge of new product innovation for the European market, with 17 additional Shark and Ninja products set to be introduced across the EMEA region. She also led a push to sign up celebrity ambassadors and influencer partners as the brand accelerates its investment in social channels like TikTok.
And it’s already cutting through, with Europe credited as a key source of growth at the brand’s latest update and 2024 dubbed its "strongest year to date".
Donaldson joined SharkNinja after 16 years at Canon, where she headed a team of 40 marketers, with a remit spanning strategy, content, data analytics and customer experience. Prior to that, she led channel marketing at Samsung Mobile.
Global chief customer and marketing officer, Carwow
Online automotive marketplace Carwow has had a transformative few years, posting revenue growth of 37% in 2023, with its latest filing for the first half of 2024 showing an even bigger 56% boost. Its ‘Sell My Car’ service has helped drive this, having now sold 160,000 cars worth a combined £3bn since its acquisition of Wizzle in 2021.
Much of this meteoric success arguably lies in the brand’s unique blend of commerce and content. Its impressive sales record is fuelled in no small part by a social media reach of 651 million and 1.1 billion annual views on YouTube, with users heading to its platform for information and expertise, as well as a new car.
Leading all of this is global chief customer and marketing officer, Ben Carter, a journalist-turned-marketer who had spells at Dunelm, Purplebricks and Just Eat prior to joining Carwow in October 2022.
Carter has recently expanded his remit to take on Carwow's newly launched retail media arm, as well as rolling out Sell My Car in Germany. It’s a lot to handle, but Carter has set his team up in a way that means they are empowered to handle whatever comes their way.
Ben Carter
Susie
Donaldson
Marketing director UK, Renault Group
French, electro and pop are the three pillars that now characterise Renault’s marketing in the UK, according to marketing director David Isherwood.
It follows a global effort to drive reappraisal and reposition the brand as something a little more playful, provocative and French, a heritage the automotive brand believes holds sway with UK car buyers.
This updated positioning underpinned Isherwood’s strategy for the ‘Rethink. Renault’ campaign in 2024, which was designed to drive consideration of the brand among new consumers and upscale its proposition.
The UK launch of the brand’s flagship electric vehicle, the Renault 5 E-Tech, this year further built on the groundwork the campaign had laid, with the car marque taking over the Future Stores retail space on London’s Oxford Street for a week.
These ambitious efforts by Isherwood and his team to transform the automotive brand are already making waves, with the business posting “record profitability” in 2024, and a strong start to 2025.
Marketing director, BMW UK
When Colette Healy’s promotion to UK marketing director at BMW was announced in May last year, she was credited as already having been "instrumental” in guiding the direction of the car manufacturer’s UK business. She first joined the business from Rolls-Royce in 2019 to lead marketing and product management for Mini, before moving to a strategy role for the wider BMW Group in the UK in 2023.
With Healy at the helm, BMW UK has continued its EV push, coupled with ongoing partnerships that champion circularity, such as its three-year ‘Recharge in Nature’ project. The scheme has so far seen 78 new EV charge points installed across six of the UK’s 15 National Parks, with plans for 135 charging points in total.
She is also overseeing the UK iteration of a push to drive interest in its luxury models, with country-specific campaigns planned for outdoor/print advertising and TV commercials, as well as global activity across social platforms.
All while the German multinational looks to shore itself up against some of the fallout from Trump’s tariffs on global automotive markets.
Colette
Healy
David
Isherwood
Sales and marketing director, Hyundai Motor UK
Andrew Tracey knows his stuff when it comes to what makes car buyers tick. Having started his career at Seat UK where he rose through the ranks over the next decade to become marketing director, he was then snapped up by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles before joining Hyundai in 2020.
Overseeing both sales and marketing at the UK arm of the South Korean car manufacturer, Tracey understands more than most the symbiotic relationship between the two functions, with a clarity and commerciality to the creative campaigns his team puts out as a result.
In November, for example, a UK follow-up to Hyundai Group’s highly successful ‘New Dawn’ campaign focused on both challenging brand perceptions and highlighting its premium product line-up and elevated customer service. The decision to build on the previous campaign rather than start afresh was another strategic move, with the New Dawn campaign in 2023 having already pushed up UK sales 5.4% year-on-year by 2024. In the same year, it nudged up its market share and grew interest in its fleet of alternative fuel vehicles, which now represent over 50% of total sales.
Vice-president marketing UK&I, Google
With two decades at Google, vice-president of marketing, Eileen Mannion, will have had a front row seat to some sweeping technological changes, navigating the ways in which they’ve transformed both Google’s products and services, and how the brand’s billions of users interact with them.
In the last few years, that’s been AI, with Mannion an unabashed champion of its capability to unlock growth for fellow marketers. She believes the plethora of tools now offered can free up resources and “unleash creative potential”. She says it is enabling marketers from all backgrounds to ignite new ideas and “move at the speed of culture”.
With no shortage of competition when it comes to AI-enabled innovation, though, Mannion has also had to work hard to differentiate, supporting the launch of new AI tools and features for Google Ads with clear customer insight and demonstrations at major industry events.
Its latest campaign for Gemini leans on humour. Featuring stars such as Peter Crouch and Katherine Ryan, it shows how the AI tool can be used to solve everyday problems.
Eileen
Mannion
Andrew Tracey
Director of marketing, Ford of Europe
Running ultramarathons in his free time, Peter Zillig isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. The director of marketing at Ford of Europe joined the business five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, after nearly four years as chief executive at Cheil UK, and nearly two decades agency-side.
His focus has included a company-wide commitment to pushing EV adoption – and championing the clear environmental benefits that go alongside it. The ‘Park the Car’ initiative, for example, highlighted how 50% of daily car journeys are 5km or less – a distance EVs could easily manage. More boldly though, it highlighted how parking the car and walking or cycling just one of those journeys could reduce individual carbon by 84%. Meanwhile, the Ford Explorer campaign, ‘Charge Around The Globe’, was a world-first electric vehicle global expedition, designed to address core customer concerns.
With 60% of Ford EV buyers brand new to the brand, it’s a complex, multifaceted customer acquisition journey, Zillig has admitted. But – a sucker for a good challenge – he’s clearly the right man for the job.
CMO, Motorway
Since joining online used car marketplace Motorway from dating app Bumble last year, CMO Naomi Walkland hasn't stopped, keen to bring her experience of scaling brands to a new sector.
This resulted in the launch of a new brand positioning and visual identity in March, a move that reflects the changing nature of the market and a growing acceptance among consumers to sell their car online. ‘It’s not magic, It’s Motorway’ tackles the misconception that selling a car can be a “painful process”, while educating consumers about the role its smart tech plays in removing the hassle.
Walkland is a big advocate for involving the CFO in key marketing moves like this from the early stages and has worked tirelessly to ensure collaboration between marketing and finance is tight. She describes the relationship she has with CFO Liz Kistruck as a “strategic partnership”, a sentiment echoed by Kistruck. By being transparent and building a track record of proving marketing effectiveness and showing the value marketing delivers, she has increased confidence in marketing within finance and beyond.
Naomi Walkland
Peter Zillig
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