State of the Connected Customer Report
State of Marketing Report
We've enlisted some of the marketing industry's most illustrious names to determine the UK's 100 most effective marketers. Scroll down to find out who the judges are and what they think makes a great marketer.
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Top 100 Explained
The 10 Best Marketers
Meet the Judges
Top 100 In Focus
In Depth Analysis
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The Judges
Thomas Barta
further reading
Marketing Week columnist and marketing leadership expert
Lindsey Clay
CEO, Thinkbox
Helen Edwards
Partner, Passionbrand and Marketing Week columnist
Tom Fishburne
The Marketoonist
Ashley Friedlein
Founder, Econsultancy
Paul Geddes
CEO, QA
Kathryn Jacob
CEO, Pearl & Dean
Ashling Kearns
Vice-president of UK and Ireland marketing, Salesforce
Thomas is one of the world’s leading experts on marketing leadership. He is a former partner of McKinsey and the co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader with Patrick Barwise. Thomas studies the unique intersection of customer focus and change -including the world’s largest study, with over 68,000 assessments, on what makes for an impactful CMO. Thomas has consulted and marketed for over 20 years, in 14 industries and 45 countries. His clients include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including over two dozen from the Fortune 500. For the
Thomas Barta
Mark Ritson
Marketing Week columnist
and marketing professor
Sherilyn Shackell
CEO, The Marketing Academy
Phil Smith
Director general, ISBA
Dame Cilla Snowball
Portfolio director
Suki Thompson
Chair, Oystercatchers
Andria Vidler
CEO, Centaur Media
Stephen Woodford
CEO, Advertising Association
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Suki
Suki is an entrepreneur and transformational business leader - the founder of Bunker Gin, Oystercatchers, Haystack and most recently, Let’s Reset. Suki is executive director of Xeim, which brings together Centaur’s marketing brands including Marketing Week.
This is in addition to her role as chair of Oystercatchers, whose pioneering new marketing model brings together traditional marketing, digital, tech and innovation for clients like Sainsbury’s, The Post Office, EY, BA and McDonald’s, among others. For two years running, Oystercatchers has been named a leading UK management consultancy by the Financial Times.
A passionate advocate of accelerating the next generation of industry leaders, Suki mentors for WACL and actively supports Martha Lane Fox’s Tech50 @doteveryone. She also lectures at the government forum Making People Brilliant in the Digital Age, has twice been awarded a Merlin Mentor award by the Marketing Academy, and leads the development board at Centaur Media.
Lindsey Clay
Following a 20-year career at ad agencies including McCann Erickson and J Walter Thompson, Lindsey joined Thinkbox, where she has been CEO since 2014. Thinkbox is the UK marketing body for commercial TV in all its forms and on every screen. Funded by the commercial TV companies, it exists to help advertisers and agencies get the best out of today’s TV. Lindsey is also president of the Global TV Group, the informal grouping of TV broadcasters and sales houses’ trade bodies in Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Lindsey is a non-executive director of
content agency Somethin' Else. She is a trustee of the Rank Foundation; on the board of its production company, CTVC; and chair of the Rank Fellowship, its leadership award alumni group. Lindsey is a member and recent president of Women in Advertising and Communications, London, a fellow of the Marketing Society and a member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain.
Helen Edwards
Helen Edwards has an MBA from London Business School and is a PhD in Marketing. An award-winning business columnist, she guest-lectures in brand management at London Business School and is a regular industry judge and speaker. She is co-author of ‘Creating Passion Brands: How to build emotional brand connection with customers’, and is a partner at the strategic brand consultancy Passionbrand. She is a member of the executive education teaching team for brand management at London Business School and co-teaches the brand management
elective for the MBA course at Bath School of Management. She also writes a monthly column for Marketing Week.
Tom Fishburne
Tom Fishburne started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases as a Harvard Business School student. From a cartoon emailed to coworkers, Tom’s Marketoonist series grew by word of mouth to reach several hundred thousand readers every week and has been featured by Marketing Week, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Tom expanded Marketoonist into a small marketing agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons.
He draws literally and figuratively from 20 years in the marketing trenches in the US and Europe, including roles at HotelTonight, Method, General Mills, and Nestle. Tom is the author of 'Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of marketing, business, and doodling in meetings'.
Ashley Friedlin
Ashley is one of the most influential and connected figures in digital and marketing. In 2018, he founded the private professional messaging app Guild. He founded Econsultancy with Matthew O’Riordan in 1999, helping its customers achieve excellence in digital and marketing. He grew the business and led its successful sale to Marketing Week’s owner Centaur Media in 2012. In 2013 he authored the ‘Modern Marketing Manifesto’, which set out how digital and classic marketing should combine. In 2017 he followed this up with the ‘Modern Marketing Model’ (M3), which
redefines marketing for the digital age. Ashley is author of two best-selling books on digital. A columnist, commentator and blogger, he speaks worldwide on digital and marketing trends and best practice. Ashley is involved in a number of other digital businesses and ventures as investor, adviser, mentor and operationally, including real-time data delivery platform Ably, ecommerce recruitment company Cranberry Panda, charity Age UK and the Government Digital Service.
Paul Geddes
Paul Geddes has ample understanding of what makes for effective marketing, having risen to CEO of Direct Line Group (DLG) after leading marketing at its former owner Royal Bank of Scotland, then being CEO of RBS retail banking. He spent 10 years in the top job at DLG, leading it through the its divestment from RBS. He put in place a brand-led business strategy, empowering the DLG marketing team to create campaigns establishing long-term brand equity and differentiation, thus enabling the business to grow its brands in a
highly commoditised insurance marketplace. His background in marketing also includes past roles at Procter & Gamble, Comet and Argos. Since leaving DLG this year, he has been named the new CEO of digital skills business QA, taking up his role in September.
Kathryn Jacobs OBE
Kathryn has extensive experience in many areas of the media industry including national newspapers, magazines and radio. She has also turned her hand to running cross-media initiatives that expanded her role into television, posters, radio and cinema.
Now, as CEO of Pearl & Dean, she just focuses on film and cinema. Building on the reputation of Pearl & Dean, the team have grown their activities outside of the usual venues into pop up cinema, cinemas on luxurious ships, film partnerships and product placement.
Previously, she was managing director of SMG Access, commercial director of Virgin Radio and agency sales director of IPC Magazines.
Ashling Kearns
Ashling Kearns is the marketing leader at Salesforce covering UK and Ireland. Ashling is responsible for driving marketing awareness and sales pipe generation across both markets. Since joining Salesforce seven years ago, she has been laser-focused on bringing her wealth of knowledge to focus on creating an innovative and high-performing marketing team. Ashling thrives on the fast pace of the business but has a passion for promoting wellness among her team, as well as coaching and mentoring younger members of the business and industry, both inside and outside of Salesforce.
Mark Ritson
Mark Ritson is adjunct professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School and visiting professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University. He has a PhD in marketing from Lancaster University and has been a faculty member at some of the world's leading business schools, teaching on the MBA programs at London Business School, MIT Sloan and the University of Minnesota.
Mark has worked globally on marketing projects as a consultant. For 13 years, from 2002 to 2015, Mark served as in-house professor for LVMH, the world's largest luxury group, working with senior
executives from brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior and Hennessy. Mark has written a weekly column on branding for Marketing Week for over a decade. On three occasions he has been judged the business columnist of the year at the magazine industry’s flagship PPA awards. His scholarly publications include articles published in Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.
Sherilyn Shackell
Sherilyn is the founder and CEO of The Marketing Academy, a unique non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of leadership talent in the world of marketing, media and advertising. In the UK, Australia and USA, it brings together some of the world’s best-known brands to provide world-class learning for young leaders through to CMOs. When she gets the chance, she writes about talent engagement and development, a particular passion, and all things ‘leadership’, featuring in many articles in The Sunday Times, FastCompany, The Telegraph, AdNews,
Marketing Week, AdWeek and Management Today. Her background includes 25 years spent as a board-level headhunter before selling her company, and she served eight years on the global board of IMD International Search Group. She is currently a board advisor to Grace Blue Executive Search CMO Practice and WeAreFearless.
Phil Smith
Phil Smith is director general of ISBA, the voice of British advertisers. His broad marketing and general management career has spanned packaged goods, grocery retail, consultancy and marketing technology startups. He spent 10 years at Kraft, latterly as vice-president of strategy for Western Europe. He was marketing and trading director for Kwiksave before joining the board of Somerfield as group marketing director. He joined Camelot, the National Lottery operator in 2002, becoming commercial and operations director before being appointed managing director
of Musgrave GB in 2007. He was commercial director for the 1,000-boat Thames diamond jubilee pageant in 2012. Phil has also worked on a number of early-stage and startup digital businesses, most recently with Ecrebo, the point-of-sale marketing specialist.
Dame Cilla Snowball
One of the most respected names in advertising, Dame Cilla Snowball spent 26 years at AMV BBDO, most recently as group chairman and chief executive, before stepping down to continue a portfolio career at the end of 2018. Among her current appointments are roles chairing the private sector council of the government’s GREAT Britain campaign and the Women’s Business Council. She is also a non-executive director of property investment trust Derwent London.
Her highly decorated career saw her named one of the UK’s 100 most powerful women by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Having led an agency responsible for some of the greatest ad campaigns of recent decades, she has worked with many of the country’s top marketers and possesses abundant insight into what makes for effective marketing. Clients have included BT, Guinness, Asda, Walkers and The Economist.
Suki Thompson
Suki is the founder of Bunker Gin, Oystercatchers, Haystack and Let’s Reset, and is executive director of Xeim, bringing together Centaur’s marketing brands including Marketing Week. She remains chair of Oystercatchers, whose pioneering model brings together marketing, digital, tech and innovation for clients like Sainsbury’s, British Airways and McDonald’s. The Financial Times has twice named it a leading UK management consultancy. Suki mentors for WACL and supports Martha Lane Fox’s Tech50 @doteveryone. She also lectures at the government forum Making People Brilliant in the Digital Age.
Andria Vidler
Andria has over 30 years’ experience in content industries, with a record of delivering business transformation through customer-focused innovation. As CEO of Centaur, Andria has led a transformation turning readers into paying customers; has revitalised brands like Marketing Week, Econsultancy and Oystercatchers; and has launched Festival of Marketing and Influencer Intelligence. These businesses now form the Xeim group, which advises, informs and connects the modern marketer. Andria previously ran EMI Music UK and was a marketing leader at the BBC and Bauer Media.
Stephen Woodford
The Advertising Association’s mission is to promote and protect the role, rights and responsibilities of advertising. Prior to joining, Stephen held management roles Leo Burnett, WCRS/Engine and DDB/adam&eveDDB. He currently chairs youth marketing agency Livity, transforming young peoples’ lives, especially from BAME backgrounds. He is a founder and director of U, a digital challenger bank. Stephen was president of NABS and serves on the board of the History of Advertising Trust. He was IPA president, leading its first ethnic diversity initiative and transforming its professional qualifications.
CMO Fellowship Programme (a joint venture between McKinsey and The Marketing Academy to prepare CMOs for a CEO role), Thomas serves as its long-standing leadership dean. He is also a columnist for Marketing Week.
Suki is the founder of Bunker Gin, Oystercatchers, Haystack and Let’s Reset, and is executive director of Xeim, bringing together Centaur’s marketing brands including Marketing Week. She remains chair of Oystercatchers, whose pioneering model brings together marketing, digital, tech and innovation for clients like Sainsbury’s, British Airways and McDonald’s. The Financial Times has twice named it a leading UK management consultancy. Suki mentors for WACL and supports Martha Lane Fox’s Tech50 @doteveryone. She also lectures at the government forum Making People Brilliant in the Digital Age.
State of the Connected Customer Report
State of Marketing Report
further reading
SPONSORED BY SALESFORCE
What sets the Top 100 marketers apart
What sets the TOP100 marketers apart
podcasts
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podcasts
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hOME
hOME
meet the judges
meet the judges
methodology
methodology
analysis
analysis
TOP100 hOME
TOP100 hOME
meet the judges
meet the judges
methodology
methodology
analysis
analysis
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