Keith Landis - Global CMO, Xebia
Eighteen brands became one under Keith Landis. He consolidated them into a single branded house at Xebia and repositioned the consultancy as AI-first under a new brand promise, "Shaping Tomorrow With AI Today." Sixteen years at IBM built the foundation. He started there as a consultant in Global Business Services in 2003, ran account-based marketing for the Americas, and eventually built the company's global ABM methodology and scaled it to more than 1,000 marketers. His performance marketing work as an executive director supported $30 billion in IBM revenue on an annual budget above $50 million, and his marketing for the C-Suite Study series won ITSMA and Effie awards. Persistent Systems then made him CMO, where revenue doubled to $1 billion at a 23.5% compound annual growth rate and shareholders saw a 720% return over three years. Brand Finance named it the fastest-growing Indian IT brand in 2022. Landis has led Xebia's global marketing since May 2023 and co-chairs the marketing department advisory board at Drexel's LeBow College of Business.
Eileen Diskin - CMO, Comcast Business
Twenty-four years at one company is unusual anywhere. Eileen Diskin joined Comcast in 2002 after affiliate marketing roles at Disney and E! Entertainment Television, and spent seventeen and a half years as senior vice president of marketing communications and strategy. During that stretch Xfinity reached number 20 on the 2019 BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands ranking, and the company collected Effies, Cannes Lions, Clios, and a Jay Chiat Award. She moved to Comcast Business as chief marketing officer in February 2020 and rebuilt the brand and go-to-market strategy from there, leading a global relaunch and introducing Powering Possibilities as its communications platform. She launched Comcast Business Mobile and secured the largest sponsorship agreement in the division's history through a multi-year deal with the PGA TOUR. CableFax has named Diskin one of the most powerful women in cable every year since 2016, and Ad Age named her Working Mother of the Year.
Leslie Schultz - CMO, UST
Leslie Schultz founded an import business. She developed products in China and Hong Kong and distributed them direct and wholesale in the US, built the online commerce channel herself, and consulted for other entrepreneurs on the side. Her career started at Apple in sales development in 1993, then moved to Cox Enterprises, where she built internet channels and online brands for a traditional media company in real estate, employment, and automotive. Rx.com grew from 13 employees to more than 250 while she ran marketing. At Capital One her consumer partner marketing programs accounted for 65% of the business and generated over $2 billion in funded loans. Gateway put her in charge of $250 million in direct consumer and small business revenue as lead strategist, with a $30 to $50 million annual budget, plus marketing for education, government, and business segments generating nearly $1 billion. She spent four and a half years at Harte Hanks building omnichannel strategies for Sony, L'Oréal, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz, then directed global strategy for a $750 million Wolters Kluwer health portfolio. UST has been her CMO seat since March 2019.
Kathryn Condon - Global CMO, Vanguard
An ATM strategy that added $3 million in annual revenue was Kathryn Condon's early win, at a North Carolina bank in the 1990s. Accenture's financial services practice took her next, where she led platform conversions and a credit card acquirer study for top ten US banks. Bank of America then gave her six years, first running digital marketing and advertising across every bank channel and more than 100 campaigns, then segment marketing for the Preferred customer segment, which carried the second largest marketing investment in the Consumer Bank. Fidelity Investments kept her nearly thirteen years. She arrived as SVP of digital marketing in 2012 and rose to executive vice president and head of marketing for wealth and brokerage, launching platforms including Trade Talk with ESPN along the way. Vanguard named her principal and global chief marketing officer in January 2026, where she leads more than 600 marketing crew. She holds an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and a political science degree from Davidson.
Andrew Ploszay - CMO, Optum
Andrew Ploszay carried a sales bag first. He joined GSK in 2003 as a medical center account manager and spent two and a half years as a district sales manager before moving into digital marketing and media for US Pharma. Fifteen years at the company followed a clear arc: digital strategy and innovation lead for US oncology, then global digital and innovation lead for the oncology commercial center of excellence working between Philadelphia and London, then head of global multi-channel marketing, and finally global head of digital innovation and strategic partnerships. IQVIA recruited him in 2018 as vice president of digital strategy, promoted him to senior vice president of the digital office, and then to chief digital and marketing officer, a role combining both functions for more than three years. Optum named him chief marketing officer in November 2025. Twenty-two years in healthcare and life sciences sit behind that, all of it on the commercial side of an industry where the marketing is regulated as tightly as the product.
Jacob Hawkins - Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, Five Below
Jacob Hawkins spent nearly ten years watching Overstock.com grow from a startup into a billion-dollar retailer, and he ran most of the company along the way. As SVP of online marketing he managed a $50 million annual advertising budget across 60,000 affiliates and improved spend efficiency 25%. As SVP of change management he doubled the buyer and product count and built a partner integration platform that now manages more than $700 million in revenue. As SVP of supply chain he ran 1,300 drop-ship partners and 800,000 square feet of warehouse. Aeropostale, Groupon, and Belk followed. At Groupon he was general manager of a $1.4 billion North America goods business with more than 400 people. At Belk he drove omni penetration from under 10% to over 40%. Forever 21 then hired him to rebuild marketing, and the company went from 25% sales decline to positive growth while advertising efficiency improved more than 25% and earned media passed a billion impressions a year. Five Below made him chief marketing and digital officer in March 2025.
Koleen Cavanaugh - SVP & CMO, Independence Blue Cross
Koleen Cavanaugh has worked at one company for twenty-six years. She joined Independence Blue Cross in 2000 as director of marketing administration and held that role for more than eleven years before moving through product services, consumer marketing, and member marketing directorships. Six years as vice president of marketing followed, and she became senior vice president and chief marketing officer in February 2023. The job spans an unusual range of audiences: group clients, consultants, brokers, consumers, and members, each wanting something different from a health insurer. She oversees direct mail, email, digital, social, and community campaigns, and directs member experience strategy and its measurement. Outside work she is the mother of a teenage daughter and samples the best ice cream in every new place she visits.
Cate Lochead - CMO, Bentley Systems
Databases, then security, then identity, then AI. Cate Lochead has marketed the unglamorous infrastructure of enterprise software for two decades. She started in analyst relations and product management at Oracle, spent time at Intuit on QuickBooks communications, returned to Oracle as a vice president, then founded her own agency for four and a half years serving companies including LivePerson and QlikTech. Couchbase brought her in-house, where she supported two late-stage rounds totaling $90 million across three consecutive years of 100% growth. At MariaDB she lifted quarterly pipeline coverage from 0.7x to 2.5x and grew monthly product downloads eightfold. She took VMware Carbon Black through its IPO, which saw a 26% jump in share price and a 200% increase in organic web traffic. JumpCloud kept her more than three years, where her team sourced 100% of pipeline and the company raised over $300 million across Series E and F. Bentley Systems named her chief marketing officer in September 2025. Lochead also co-founded Soul Savvy, a nonprofit wellness center in a village outside Kigali, Rwanda.
Barbra Sainsurin - Global CMO, Anthropologie Group
Barbra Sainsurin leads marketing across four businesses that share a customer but not much else: Anthropologie, Home, Weddings, and Terrain. Personalization is what she brought to the job. She built those capabilities at Under Armour and at Marriott before joining URBN, and she frames her entire approach as a question about what has changed in a customer's life and what the brand should therefore do differently. Her current focus is bringing the Anthropologie point of view into more everyday moments, widening how the brand tells stories through creators and social platforms, and giving each business in the portfolio room to be itself rather than a variation on the flagship. She works across creative, merchandising, insights, finance, and regional teams, and describes strong marketing as the place where creative ambition meets commercial judgment.
Andreea Roberts - SVP Marketing, Cognizant
The $11 billion leveraged buyout of SunGard Data Systems in 2005 put Andreea Roberts in a room with McKinsey and KKR Capstone. She spent eight years at the company in Philadelphia, rising to vice president and head of Americas marketing, where she partnered with the private equity sponsors on go-to-market transformation and used data modeling and behavioral science to deliver double-digit growth in brand awareness and client retention. Silicon Valley came next. She ran her own consultancy for three years advising post-Series A startups and their VC backers on value proposition, MVPs, and partnerships. Unisys then made her vice president of the global sales center of excellence, where she shifted the organization from business intelligence to predictive sales analytics and helped produce a multi-fold increase in new client acquisition over three years. Cognizant hired her in 2020 as global CMO of its business process services business. Since January 2026 she has been senior vice president leading global marketing across eight service lines and 40 practices that generate more than 90% of company revenue. Roberts writes on AI and the technology economy for Fortune and the World Economic Forum.
The City That Runs the Marketing
Philadelphia's corporate story is usually told through what it lost, but the marketing story runs the other way. Four of the ten people here run global marketing organizations for companies headquartered on other continents or across the country, and they do it from here because the talent, the universities, and the client base make it workable. The six who market for local companies are handling health insurance, index funds, discount retail, and infrastructure software, which is to say the industries that have anchored this economy for generations. Neither group is passing through. Several have spent a decade or two at the same employer, and one has spent twenty-six years. That is a city that keeps people, which turns out to be a competitive advantage in a discipline where most leaders move every four.