Josh Line - CMO, Yahoo
The launch of eos lip balm, Disney Parks' MagicBand, and an Emmy-winning cooking show with chef Eric Ripert all trace back to Josh Line's agency years. He worked on brand and product strategy at Anomaly and Droga5, where his projects included BMW's 'i' electric vehicle line and Coca-Cola's vitaminwater. Viacom hired him in 2011 into MTV Scratch, its creative strategy group, and he stayed at the company for nearly 14 years. As EVP of marketing at Comedy Central, Paramount Network, and TV Land, he led 200 staff and helped grow Yellowstone into the number one show on television. His team won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix, Webby Media Company of the Year, and Promax's Creative Marketing Team of the Year. Line then became Paramount's chief brand officer, where he ran the ViacomCBS rebrand to Paramount Global, chaired the enterprise marketing council, and played a leadership role in the launch of Paramount+. Yahoo named him CMO in March 2025. He also sits on the board of trustees of WNET, New York's PBS media group.
Ian Colley - CMO, DeepIntent
Ian Colley spent 23 years at IBM. His roles there covered communications for Global Services, Europe, Middle East and Africa, corporate, and financial communications, based variously in White Plains, Paris, and Armonk. Before IBM he managed communications for Goldman Sachs, Barclays Bank, and Club Med at two New York agencies. The Trade Desk recruited him in 2019 to head communications, made him interim CMO two years later, and then CMO and EVP, a job covering global marketing, editorial content, and social media. He left after seven years. DeepIntent, a healthcare demand-side platform, appointed him CMO in April 2026, reporting to its founder and CEO. His arrival followed the launch of DeepIntent Helix, a healthcare marketing cloud with insights across more than 3.7 million healthcare providers and over 240 million patient lives. Colley speaks regularly at CES, Cannes Lions, and Brandweek.
Meghan Mitchell-Marks - CMO, Axonius
Cloud and cybersecurity companies have occupied Meghan Mitchell-Marks for most of the past decade, but her career started in power grids. At Siemens she ran global marketing for the software business inside its smart grid division, spending eight months based at headquarters in Nuremberg. Puppet then brought her into worldwide demand generation. Twistlock followed, and its acquisition took her to Palo Alto Networks, where she served as acting CMO of Prisma Cloud and overhauled its messaging, demand generation, and go-to-market approach. She held that CMO title formally in 2021 before Orca Security hired her to run marketing. Four years there covered product marketing, digital, communications, and brand. Axonius made her CMO in February 2026. Her first job was at Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Harris Beber - Global Growth & Integrated Marketing, Google Cloud
Flowers, then diapers, then photo books. Harris Beber began at 1-800-Flowers just after the dot-com bust, moved to Amazon as head of digital marketing and strategy for a subsidiary's ten websites, and led marketing and revenue at Shutterfly. He has described the thread as understanding what drives customer behavior. CMO roles followed at The Nature's Bounty Co. and then Vimeo, where he stayed five years. Google brought him in as CMO of Waze, then global CMO of Google Workspace. In mid-2025 he joined monday.com as the first true CMO in the company's 14-year history, arriving at a business growing more than 25% and already profitable. He organized marketing around core competencies, built an enterprise marketing function from scratch over 18 months, and grew the team past 200 people. A SailGP partnership with the Bonds Flying Roos team, owned by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, started with a cold LinkedIn message. Beber returned to Google in July 2026 to lead global growth and integrated marketing for Gemini Enterprise, Google Workspace, and Google Cloud.
Jordan Bitterman - CMO, MiQ
To explain first-party data, Jordan Bitterman commissioned a hip hop artist and animated the lyrics into a music video. That was TripleLift, where he was CMO for more than four years and part of the executive team behind 45% annual growth and the company's $1.4 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners in 2021. His agency years came first. At Digitas he led the North America practices for social, mobile, and content, handled the agency's largest account in American Express, co-founded The NewFronts, and launched American Express Unstaged, the first live-streamed concert series. Mindshare then made him chief strategy officer for North America, where he created The Loop and was named to Adweek's list of the most admired people in media. He was CMO of The Weather Company through its integration into IBM. MiQ hired him in January 2025. His launch of Sigma, the company's AI-powered advertising technology, generated more than 150 press mentions and a 185% increase in customer engagement. Bitterman also hosts a podcast and invests in early-stage companies.
Megan Imbres - CMO, Peloton Interactive
The Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show ran on Megan Imbres' watch. As managing director of Marcom LA, she oversaw the global marketing communications group behind Apple's services businesses. Netflix shaped the six years before that. She joined in 2013 and helped build the streaming brand from the ground floor, managing go-to-market for Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, and Narcos, and expanding the service into Australia and New Zealand. As director of product creative she led a global team of nearly 70 people across six countries, launching more than 800 originals in 29 languages. The company grew from under 20 million subscribers to more than 200 million over her tenure. She also built a marketing team from zero at Quibi and served as global head of brand marketing for Amazon Ads. Peloton named her CMO in June 2025, with global brand, product marketing, growth, creative, consumer insights, and member engagement in her remit. Imbres is a competitive triathlete who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York.
Heather Zynczak - CMO, AlphaSense
Heather Zynczak started as a software developer. That technical grounding preceded consulting work at Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, and Booz Allen Hamilton, then executive roles at Oracle and SAP. Domo hired her as CMO in 2012, and she led the company through three years in stealth mode before its product unveiling in 2015, a stretch during which revenue grew from zero to $100 million at 100% year over year. She also created Domopalooza, whose first edition drew more than 1,300 director-level attendees. Pluralsight came next. There she re-accelerated B2B revenue growth to more than 50% year over year, owned a digital revenue target above $50 million, led a business development team of roughly 100, and served on the IPO team that took the company public in 2018. AlphaSense brought her in as interim CMO in late 2023 and made the role permanent in April 2024. Zynczak has served on eight technology boards, holds an MBA from Wharton, and founded Women@Domo and Women@Pluralsight.
Erin McCallion - CMO, Perion
Twenty-four straight quarters of incremental revenue growth came out of a legacy print business. Erin McCallion spent nearly nine years at The Deal and TheStreet, where she led the transformation of The Deal's print operation into a digital SaaS and advertising model, overseeing product marketing, advertising sales marketing, events, PR, customer service, and design. She also relaunched The Deal Economy, the industry's M&A forecasting conference. Advertising technology followed. At Mediaocean she ran global marketing across buy-side and sell-side product suites, its managed service business, and the Connect platform. Three years at Outbrain as VP of global marketing came next, then a CMO role at GumGum. Perion appointed her CMO in April 2024. Her career began in different territory entirely, as a brand marketing associate for the Decleor skincare line, building out US spa accounts for retailers including Nordstrom and Sephora.
Adriel Sanchez - CMO, o9 Solutions
At Citi, Adriel Sanchez managed a four-person team sending more than 12 million outbound emails a month across 20 marketing programs. Direct marketing is where he began, and it still anchors his approach. Nine years at SAP took him from online strategy for Latin America to VP of demand generation, leading a team of 70 across digital marketing, telemarketing, database marketing, and sales alignment. His inbound model there delivered a 3.5x increase in sales-accepted opportunities, and a content syndication overhaul cut build costs 45%. Commvault then hired him to run marketing for the Americas, a $600 million data management business, where he doubled marketing contribution to pipeline and lifted revenue from marketing activities 55% in 12 months. CMO roles at Newsela and WalkMe followed. Sanchez became CMO of o9 Solutions in June 2026. He is fluent in Spanish and has spoken publicly about what SAP's inbound marketing program taught him.
Kathryn Cook - CMO, Alloy
A fifth-grade short story about a dog named Chuck won Kathryn Cook a grand prize, and her mother still has it. Storytelling turned into a career in public relations, first at RLF Communications, where she led a $134 million municipal bond campaign to a 59% margin of victory, then at Pure Communications, handling biotech and pharmaceutical clients and getting promoted four times in under four years. nCino gave her nine years and a widening remit. She arrived as director of public relations in 2015, became VP of global communications, and served as interim CMO for ten months. Alloy hired her as CMO in June 2024. The AI-powered identity and fraud prevention platform counts more than 800 financial institutions and fintechs as customers, and Cook leads a team across the US and the UK spanning brand, communications, content, demand generation, digital, design, product marketing, and business development. Her career has covered fundraising, an IPO, global expansion, and M&A.
Where Agency Training Still Pays Off
Count the people here who spent their early years inside an agency or a newsroom and the number is closer to half than you might expect. That grounding shows up in the work: a rap video explaining first-party data, a llama mascot for project management software, a live-streamed concert series built for a credit card brand. New York rewards that instinct, because the city's biggest marketing category is selling to marketers, and the people buying can spot a generic campaign instantly. The numbers still have to land. What separates this group is that they rarely arrive at them through safe work.