From embracing new technology to demanding corporate transformation and transparency, women are leading the charge of business disruption. They’re visionaries making bold moves. They’re reinventing the rules of marketing, revolutionizing brands, remaking organizations and developing new approaches to business. To honor these innovators, She Runs It presents the annual Changing the Game Awards. This year’s honorees will be saluted at a special April 10 luncheon at New York City’s Gotham Hall.
Learn more about—and be inspired by—their achievements below.
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Brainwave
Changing the way a product is marketed
Ukonwa Ojo
Former CMO, Covergirl
Coty
In 2017, under Ukonwa Ojo’s direction, Covergirl underwent a major rebrand that transformed its efforts across packaging, product design, in-store experience, logo/tagline, not to mention look, tone and feel of all communications. With the tagline “I am what I make up” – a big shift from its famous “easy, breezy, beautiful” branding – Covergirl now urges women to look like the person they really are. Sure, the brand still welcomes the girl next door. But Covergirl also now reaches out to the fierce, the sleek and the daring. Really, it’s a way to cheerlead authenticity, diversity and empowerment – not the prescriptive beauty norms. Which makes sense, since Ojo herself is an unstoppable force for female leadership, diversity and inclusion.
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Heidi Browning
CMO & EVP
National Hockey League
What moves the puck for hockey fans on social? Last night’s physics-defying goal? The latest ice brawl? Actually, through research, talks with fans and focus groups, NHL CMO Heidi Browning found out its much more personal. For one, fans crave moments featuring other fans, like that time a player tossed a puck to a euphoric little boy in the stands – over 85.5 million people have gone online to see that boy hug his puck. Browning also discovered that casual fans “want to know more about the players, about their lives off the ice and what has inspired them,” she told Sports Business Journal. It’s these kinds of insights and data that Browning is using to execute the league’s growth marketing strategy.
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Cherilyn Williams
Director, Global Portfolio Marketing
Marriott
Inclusion, diversity, human rights – these are some of the words that sum up Cherilyn Williams’s efforts at Marriott. This year, she oversaw the launch of #LoveTravels, celebrating those who promote inclusion, equality, peace and human rights. A centerpiece of the program, the Beyond Barriers Social Innovation Investment, will distribute $500,000 in grants to groups and individuals who are breaking down the barriers that divide us. Williams also leads Marriott’s multicultural marketing initiatives promoting its portfolio of hotels to LGBTQ, African-American, U.S. Latino, and women travelers. Plus, she supervised the formation of Marriott’s Center of Excellence, a resource on multicultural marketing and social impact.
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Anita Patil-Sayed
SVP, Director, Human Truths Group
dentsu X
Understanding people has been a challenge ever since, well, people developed the ability to understand anything. Anita Patil-Sayed, though, has gotten a leg up, thanks to data. At dentsu X, Patil-Sayed helped establish the agency’s Human Truths Group, a first-of-its-kind data/analytics practice. Human Truths brings together the best skill sets and perspectives of traditional research, consumer insights, cultural understandings and, most important, data sciences. This is necessary to challenge the status quo about how to approach insights and drive transformation with clients. And it is clearly working, as Patil-Sayed played a major role in winning the coveted LVMH account as it seeks to digitally transform its 70-plus brands.
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No Apologies
Creating whole new business models or marketplace opportunities
Seema Bansal
Founder
Venus Et Fleur
Seema Bansal’s future began to bloom on Valentine’s Day 2015 when she received a bouquet of faulty florals. Sent by her boyfriend Sunny Chadha, the low-rent roses bore little resemblance to the elegant, pricey ones Chadha ordered online. With this, the couple saw an opportunity to reseed the online floral industry: Venus Et Fleur, their bespoke rose atelier, would peddle flawless arrangements. Partnering with a farm in Ecuador, the couple sourced long-lived roses and then took it further. The fresh-cut blossoms are treated with a wax-based solution that maintains the shape and texture of the flowers for up to a year. Growth and celebrity fans (including the Kardashians) followed. And Bansal also now has a fiancé: Chadha—the man who sent that original lacking bouquet.
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Jacqueline Corbelli
Founder, Chairperson & CEO
BrightLine
It’s a whole new world of TV today, and BrightLine, Jacqueline Corbelli’s company, is helping advertisers navigate the disruption. Consider this: BrightLiine created a first-of-its-kind way to shop directly from the TV screen. Through T-Commerce: Movie Tickets on Hulu, viewers of the trailer to Tomb Raider could select showtimes and buy tickets using their TV remote. This innovation was made possible through Brightline’s advanced TV advertising platform, InCast, which continues to innovate via things like voice activation. Corbelli is also an agent for change outside the office – she’s been chairman of Millennium Promise, sits on the U.N.’s Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and plays a leading role on Pope Francis’ Ethics in Action Committee.
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Mish Fletcher
Managing Director, Marketing & Communications
Accenture Interactive
When Accenture Interactive rocked the industry with its foray into the media buying space, it was Mish Fletcher who led the charge, securing an exclusive for the Programmatic Services launch in The Wall Street Journal, not to mention over 100 other pieces of media coverage. Since joining in 2017, the Ogilvy alum has overseen a number of groundbreaking programs that have driven brand awareness for Accenture Interactive and enhanced its commercial effectiveness in the market. She spearheaded the Digital Transformation Playbook, a year-long thought leadership program co-created with Adweek. Most recently, Fletcher launched CMO Collaborator research, inspiring marketers to extend their influence and seize the experience agenda.
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Kiersten Barnet
Global Head, Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index
Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s Kiersten Barnet leads indexes that spark progress and can change the world. In 2018, she became global head of Bloomberg’s GEI, a groundbreaking performance barometer for gender equality at publicly held organizations. It’s a way to clearly identify progress for diversity and gender equality. A highlight: The percentage of executive-level positions held by women in GEI member firms increased 33.5 percent from 2014 to 2016. “Everybody seems to understand the business case for gender diversity in the boardroom and at the top,” Barnet told Fairygodboss. “But we could use a community to get there.” The result: the 30% Club, which Barnet helped start in the U.S. in 2014 to achieve a 30 percent female-director presence on S&P 100 boards by 2020.
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Paradigm Shift
Changing the way a customer segment or target audience is approached
Sophie Bambuck
VP, Global Brand Marketing, Nike Sportswear
Nike
Competitive swimmers don’t wear sneakers, at least not in the pool. But Sopie Bambuck, a one-time collegiate swimmer, has become one of the driving forces behind sportswear at Nike and its Converse subsidiary. In her year as CMO of Converse, Bambuck pushed the brand to new places, executing its “All the Stories Are True” campaign. She also drove the journey to reclaim Converse’s place on the basketball court with the relaunch of the ERX and signing Kelly Oubre Jr. as Converse’s first basketball athlete in nearly a decade. She started with the Nike brand, helping lead sneaker culture in Europe, among other things. And she’s just returned back to Nike overseeing sportswear marketing.
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Jessica Rodriguez
President, COO & CMO
Univision
Jessica Rodriguez has platforms and she knows how to use them. She led the charge on a refreshed and diversified content strategy at Univision. Take the reality competition, Nuestra Belleza Latina (Our Latin Beauty). Under Rodriguez, the show was reimagined to focus on inclusive stories around real women of all sizes and ages, which resulted in a strong digital performance and helped Univision wrap 2018 as the only major broadcaster in English or Spanish to grow during the fourth quarter in primetime across all key demos. She also gets credit for the company’s award-winning advertising, including its first brand campaign, “Todo Es Posible” (“Everything Is Possible”), a multi-platform initiative promoting Hispanic America’s core values.
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Kristen D’Arcy
Head of Performance Marketing and Media
American Eagle
When Kristen D’Arcy joined American Eagle Outfitters in 2017, the company still advertised through traditional channels like linear TV and magazines. The problem was that AE’s youthful, digital-first customers were elsewhere. D’Arcy immediately set out to shake up the company paradigm. She pushed the company to adopt a digital-first strategy (not an easy sell, but she came armed with data). The result: reaching customers at the right time with the right message for more efficient and impactful results. Now, because of D’Arcy, the company that had stepped gingerly into the digital age is actually taking risks, leveraging beta opportunities with digital partners to further improve performance.
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Cheryl Grace
SVP, Strategic Alliances
Nielsen
A life-long innovator and passionate multicultural advocate, Cheryl Grace conceived and created Nielsen’s first African-American Consumer Report back in 2011. This cutting-edge study not only garnered cross-industry attention, but it led to Nielsen’s Diversity Intelligence Series (DIS), now a robust portfolio of comprehensive reports focusing specifically on diverse consumers’ unique consumption and purchasing habits and behaviors. Most recently, she’s championed aligning three DIS reports – African American, Latina and Asian American women – into a single Power of She theme to amplify the answers to a critical question: What is next in multicultural marketing and who are the key influencers?
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Quantum Leap
Changing the way an organization is aligned to proactively meet new challenges
Anne-Claire Berg
Culture and Engagement Director
Danone
Not unlike the yogurt made by her company, Anne-Claire Berg’s career has been quite cultured. Her educational mix – journalism, law and business management – gelled together to produce an executive who promotes health and well-being worldwide. Berg has helped make Danone the world’s largest certified B corporation (meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability). Closer to home, she initiated “One Person, One Voice, One Share,” a Danone program that gives workforce participants a share in the company, allowing each a say in the organization’s priorities. Berg also helped align the company with the U.N.’s global food and sustainability initiatives to support healthier consumption habits worldwide.
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Amy Cheronis
Chief Integration Officer
MSL
Remember when CIO stood for chief information officer? Now, those initials have morphed into chief integration officer, and Amy Cheronis may be the one to justify it. As the integration kind of CIO, Cheronis has excelled at blending MSL’s PR capabilities with offerings across other Publicis Groupe companies in the U.S. Spearheading new partnerships, Cheronis has turbocharged growth at her Chicago office. And she’s significantly boosted MSL’s client roster to boot. Cheronis has been called a champion to her clients. Her efforts have led to a more impactful and effective product offering for all MSL clients.
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Lynn Lewis
U.S. CEO
UMWW
Lynn Lewis does more than run a business; she operates a miniature progressive society. UM Worldwide’s just-minted U.S. CEO (and former global CMO), she pushed the agency to accommodate the modern employee and the society they desire. First, she elevated UM’s women. Recognizing that the agency already housed the next generation of diverse, dynamic talent, Lewis led the launch of IDEAL, a program designed to engage, retain and promote diverse female leaders from within. She chairs the agency’s Diversity & Belonging Council, a multicultural group of employee volunteers committed to making all cultures feel welcome at UM. And she led the east coast launch of UM’s discretionary time-off policy, enabling employees to take paid time off as they saw fit.
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Fiona Carter
Chief Brand Officer
AT&T Communications
Leading a 300-plus member team across brand marketing, media, sponsorships, global events and communications should be accomplishment enough for any executive. But AT&T chief brand officer Fiona Carter didn’t stop there. She led the Fortune 10 company through a massive agency consolidation and is even experimenting with blockchain in the digital ad supply chain. For Carter, though, there’s still more. She propelled the company into a leadership position in the National Association of Advertisers’ #SeeHer movement, an initiative to improve how girls and women are portrayed in the media. And, with AT&T Presents Untold Stories (in conjunction with the Tribeca Film institute), Carter spearheaded a program celebrating diverse storytelling.
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Fearless Voices
Recognizes those who use their voices, talent and tools to break through unendurable silence, creating a path for action and change
Colleen DeCourcy
Co-President, CCO
Wieden + Kennedy
Colleen DeCourcy’s career has been punctuated by fearless moments. She was one of the founders of Times Up Advertising, an initiative launched by more than 200 female ad industry leaders to address sexual harassment and systemic inequality in the workplace. Creatively, her work at Wieden + Kennedy is as provocative as it is inspirational. The bold “Dream Crazier” spot, part of Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign, was the talk of the Oscars broadcast. Narrated by tennis superstar Serena Williams, it makes a simple statement: If you think a woman in sports is crazy, let’s show you what crazy can do.
