Sarah Kettler - CMO, Cars Commerce
Sponsorship marketing did not exist at SeatGeek until Sarah Kettler launched it. She negotiated a league-wide relationship with Major League Soccer and several of its clubs, then expanded into the NFL and NBA with multi-million dollar deals. She also built a proprietary measurement model to assess what those sponsorships actually did for ticket sales. Ten and a half years at the company took her from manager of marketing strategy to EVP of marketing and communications. Along the way she introduced direct response TV and digital video advertising, rebuilt the marketing team from five people to 20 after the pandemic, and helped double SeatGeek's unaided awareness while exceeding ROAS and retention targets. Consulting came first, at Berkeley Consulting, then Deloitte, then IMG, where she managed multi-million dollar budgets across sports platforms. Cars Commerce named her CMO in June 2026.
Amy Jones - CMO, Cision
Amy Jones started in email. Her early roles at e-Dialog and One to One Interactive led to European retention marketing at VistaPrint in Barcelona, then retention marketing at Rue La La, then VP of email operations and analytics at Grand Circle Corporation. That direct response foundation shaped everything after. Zeta Global made her VP of marketing for four years, followed by Everbridge and then Oracle, where she was hired as a change agent to drive adoption of digital demand generation technology and rebuild the organizational design behind it. Boeing then handed her something different: CMO of Digital Aviation Solutions, covering the Jeppesen and ForeFlight brands and the software and data services that power aviation. Cision brought her in as CMO in December 2025. Her background spans B2C and B2B, technology vendors and enterprise brands, with P&L ownership throughout.
Rhiannon Naslund - CMO, Origami Risk
Rhiannon Naslund worked as a NICU and PICU dietitian at Cook County Hospital before she worked in marketing. Mead Johnson Nutrition hired her as a medical sales representative in 2006, and she spent nine and a half years there, moving into sales training and then global marketing management in Glenview. Medical devices followed at Leica Microsystems, where she spent four years as senior marketing manager for the Americas and then director of microsurgery for North America. Healthcare technology came next. At Kalderos she joined as VP of marketing in 2020 and became CMO two years later. She has led marketing at Origami Risk since May 2024, where the platform covers risk, safety, compliance, and insurance for organizations across government, healthcare, construction, and manufacturing.
Brian Cooper - CMO, project44
Marketing data science is Brian Cooper's specialty. He spent nearly eight years at Juniper Networks, ending as VP of marketing and data science, then moved to Rubrik as VP of demand, digital, and data, managing 34 people through the company's April 2024 IPO and its growth to $1.1 billion in ARR. There he reported pipeline progress to the CEO weekly, implemented 6sense for account conversion, deployed five global campaigns for five new product offerings, and built an ABM pod strategy shared with sales and product. project44 made him CMO in July 2025. In his first year he launched a redesigned website, announced the LunaPath acquisition, and built a multi-agent SDR outreach workflow connecting Salesforce data to an email-writing agent. He made AI fluency a formal performance expectation, written into hiring criteria and reviews. Cooper also co-authored research published in Harvard Business Review on what is broken in marketing technology.
Cristina Rossman - CMO, Relativity
Cristina Rossman spent nearly 18 years at Morningstar, joining when the company earned $100 million in ARR and leaving when it had passed $1.5 billion. She was a co-founder of Morningstar Direct, the software offering that now contributes roughly $800 million in revenue, and later led product marketing across four independent business units in software and investment solutions. Relativity hired her as its first CMO in May 2020, during a transition from on-premise software to cloud, from founder to CEO, and into global expansion. ARR has nearly tripled since. She created the company's generative AI brand, aiR, built its demand and commercialization strategy, and grew RelFest into an industry conference and commercial driver. She also developed Relativity's investor narrative and drafted its confidential S-1 alongside the CEO, founder, CFO, Goldman Sachs, and Silver Lake. Rossman describes bringing an investing mindset to resource allocation and an engineering mindset to execution.
Ashley Emery - CMO, VelocityEHS
Demand generation is where Ashley Emery made her name. At Employ she was SVP of demand generation for the Jobvite division, reporting to the CMO, leading a team of 13 and driving 80% of the organization's sales pipeline target across three segments. Her work covered demand forecasting, budget optimization, and building out a marketing technology stack with AI-driven targeting and automation. VelocityEHS named her CMO in October 2024. She now leads 35 marketers across product marketing, performance marketing, brand, and content for a company selling environmental, health, and safety software to more than 11,000 customers. Her toolkit is hands-on, from Salesforce and Pardot to Adobe InDesign and Premiere. Emery joined the Fast Company Executive Board in April 2026, where she contributes to discussions on AI, B2B marketing, and workplace safety.
Alexandra London - CMO, G2
Alexandra London argues that trust is the only thing that survives disruption, a conviction she traces to consumer marketing. She ran search for T-Mobile and MetroPCS at Publicis Groupe, owning the P&L, forecasting, and business planning, and lifted ROI by integrating offline and online transactions across stores and call centers. Expedia Group then kept her five years, where she led SEM, SEO, paid social, affiliates, and app growth, built in-house attribution frameworks, launched the company's first customer data platform, and exceeded targets with 20% ROI growth and 45% more transactions year over year. At Zoom she oversaw global digital strategy for a $4.7 billion company, lifting lead quality 200%, conversion 28%, e-commerce transactions 92%, and digital pipeline contribution 50%. Google and LinkedIn featured her programs. G2 named her CMO in January 2026. She writes about the Answer Economy and what go-to-market looks like when the first buyer might be an AI agent.
Patty Spiller - CMO, Tempus
Medical devices came before digital health for Patty Spiller. She spent nearly seven years at Abbott, starting in global product marketing for guidewires, moving to field sales in São Paulo, then returning to Santa Clara for product marketing on Absorb and group management roles in demand and strategic marketing. Livongo hired her in 2016 as VP and head of growth marketing. She stayed more than five years, through the company's July 2019 IPO and its November 2020 merger with Teladoc Health, leading growth marketing for both after the deal closed. Tempus brought her on as SVP and head of marketing in 2021, three years before its own June 2024 Nasdaq debut, and promoted her to CMO in June 2025. Spiller advises early and growth-stage companies, mentors through Endeavor, and is part of the operator network at January Ventures.
Brad Harbaugh - VP of Marketing, Smokeball
Three private equity exits appear on Brad Harbaugh's record, at enterprise values of $53 million, then $320 million, then $1.2 billion. All three came during his 11 years at VelocityEHS, where he rose from director of marketing to associate vice president with full revenue marketing ownership at a company with $150 million in ARR, 500 employees, 16,000 customers, and 10 million users. His remit widened over time from running marketing functions to shaping commercial strategy alongside sales, product, customer experience, and finance, including M&A integration and brand architecture after acquisitions. He grew marketing-sourced pipeline from under $10 million to more than $150 million across those stages. Smokeball, whose US headquarters is in Chicago, hired him as VP of marketing in August 2026, reporting to its US president. Harbaugh has also taught creativity, entrepreneurship, and sales and marketing management at DePaul University since 2020.
Max Scholle - SVP, Global Marketing, Keeper Security
Max Scholle generated more than 200 leads a week for a 74-person sales team at Hub Group, his first job out of school. Agency work followed at SmarkLabs, where he moved from growth marketing specialist to client delivery manager in two years, running multi-channel plans and marketing automation implementations. Keeper Security hired him as a marketing campaigns manager in June 2020. Six years and five promotions later he is SVP of global marketing, leading roughly 40 people across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. His teams cover demand generation for both private and public sector, marketing operations, consumer marketing, customer marketing, channel marketing, product marketing, events, paid search, and SEO. He describes himself as a Chicago-based marketer, an NBA enthusiast, and a fan of the Oxford comma.
Why the Hiring Bar Here Is Set Where It Is
Look at what these Chicago companies actually sell and the pattern explains itself. E-discovery software for the Department of Justice and most of the Am Law 200. Precision medicine built on millions of de-identified research records. Supply chain visibility. Password security for thousands of institutions. Risk and compliance platforms for hospitals and municipalities. None of it sells on brand recognition alone, and the buyers ask hard questions. The marketers who thrive here tend to arrive with an unusual first chapter, whether that is a hospital ward, a sports agency, or a call center, and they stay because the work rewards people who can carry a number into a boardroom and defend it.