Gary Sun - CMO, ID.me
Gary Sun began as a product engineer at the semiconductor company Spansion. Operations came next, then a marketing analyst role at a startup, then internet marketing at eBay. Google hired him in 2012 and kept him nine years. He ran Shopping Ads marketing, then moved to vertical marketing as a director, and finished as director of search and commerce ads marketing, covering the products that generate most of the company's revenue. Crypto followed. He spent five years as vice president of marketing at Coinbase, a stretch that included the industry's sharpest boom and its sharpest contraction. ID.me named him chief marketing officer in April 2026. The McLean company verifies identity for government agencies, retailers, healthcare organizations, and financial services. Sun also founded Sunny Vinyl, which he ran for three years alongside his early marketing work.
Derek Weeks - SVP Marketing, Anaconda
All Day DevOps reached more than 100,000 practitioners, and Derek Weeks co-founded it. The free online conference grew to 40,000 annual participants and 180 local events across 20 countries, and cut event cost per lead by 95% while influencing millions in pipeline. He built it while spending seven and a half years at Sonatype, where he helped create the DevSecOps and software supply chain security categories, supported 10x ARR growth through Series C to E, and produced the State of the Software Supply Chain Report. Vista Equity Partners acquired the company. The Linux Foundation then recruited him as CMO, where he scaled a centralized marketing organization serving 32 business units, grew the team from 10 to 32, increased available marketing investment 72%, and lifted website traffic 300% while reinvigorating brands including PyTorch and OpenSSF. At Katalon he was the first CMO, where he deployed more than 40 AI agents, lifted marketing's contribution to new logo ARR by 50%, and sustained a 14-quarter G2 Leader streak. Weeks joined Anaconda as SVP of marketing in April 2026, working from Bethesda. He is also the author of Unfair Mindshare, an Amazon bestseller on community-led marketing.
Colby Proffitt - CMO, Seekr
A security clearance and a fishing byline are an unusual combination. Colby Proffitt spent two and a half years as an analyst at SAIC and five more at NetCentrics, first as a senior business analyst and later as director of marketing, and he has written freelance for the Outdoor Writers Association of America since 2016. Cybersecurity marketing became his lane after that, through roles at ForeScout, Tanium, and Netskope, where he ran public sector marketing. Shift5 brought him in as VP of marketing for the rail, aviation, and defense fleet security company. Carbyne then made him CMO, and when Axon acquired it he led go-to-market integration for the new Axon 911 business unit, unifying three product lines and architecting a category creation strategy around AI-enabled emergency intelligence. Seekr named him chief marketing officer in May 2026, marketing explainable AI to enterprise and government buyers. Pavilion named him Startup CMO of the Year in 2024, and he joined the Fast Company Impact Council in September 2026.
Behnaz Ghahramani - SVP Global Marketing, Marriott International
Behnaz Ghahramani started as an IT consultant in Virginia, then managed a 30-person international team rebuilding an e-commerce platform that generated more than $800 million in sales. Luxury came later. Gucci hired her in 2011 as director of relational marketing for the Americas, where she supported the launch of Chime for Change, the company's global campaign for women's empowerment. Ralph Lauren followed, where she led global brand strategy for the luxury collections and licensing businesses. As CMO of Stuart Weitzman she ran brand, communications, and e-commerce globally with a focus on China, and hosted a podcast produced by Dear Media. She then spent a year and a half as chief executive of Brother Vellies, the sustainable accessories brand. Old Navy made her CMO in 2023, where she supported more than $8 billion in sales across five consecutive quarters of growth, led the brand's first strategic rebrand in a decade, and earned places on Adweek's best holiday ad list and TIME's World's Best Brands. Marriott hired her as SVP of global marketing in June 2025, overseeing strategy, media, creative, content, lifecycle, loyalty, and partnerships for Marriott Bonvoy and more than 30 brands. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and speaks at INSEAD, Harvard Business School, NYU, Parsons, and ESSEC.
Thomas Bain - CMO, Silent Push
Public relations agencies trained Thomas Bain. He spent his first six years at Weber Shandwick, Schneider Associates, Schwartz Communications, and Racepoint Group before moving in-house at Application Security, where he ran global PR and analyst relations. At Q1 Labs he produced an industry study with Ponemon Research on critical infrastructure that drew coverage in Businessweek and Dow Jones. Cybersecurity has held him ever since, across nine companies: Security Innovation, CounterTack, Centripetal Networks, Morphisec, RiskRecon before Mastercard acquired it, Cyware Labs, Finite State, and VulnCheck, where he was CMO for two and a half years. Silent Push named him chief marketing officer in April 2026, marketing preemptive cybersecurity into the enterprise security operations center. Bain also sits on four advisory boards and speaks regularly at industry conferences. His stated approach fits on one line: have a vision, tell the story, drive value.
Pam Piligian - CMO & SVP, Navy Federal Credit Union
Craisins and rechargeable batteries both launched on Pam Piligian's watch. She introduced the Ocean Spray product as an account supervisor in Boston in the late 1980s, and later led the Energizer rechargeable line introduction that was recognized at CES as one of the most successful product launches of its year. Agencies occupied her first three decades, at DDB in San Francisco, BBDO South, Tausche Martin Lonsdorf, and then nearly 21 years at Fitzgerald+CO in Atlanta, where she rose to SVP and group account director on the firm's largest accounts. Her work there won a Bronze Cannes Cyber Lion for Durex, a Silver Effie for TVA, and a Midas Award for the Navy Federal "Stories" campaign. That client became her employer. Navy Federal hired her as chief marketing officer and senior vice president in May 2017, and she now leads a 275-person team serving 15 million members at the world's largest credit union, with $197 billion in assets. Piligian sits on the Management Council and the Transformation Strategy Committee and was a founding member of Chief's DC chapter.
Noha Abdalla - CMO, Choice Hotels International
Noha Abdalla began at the American Red Cross and the Corporate Executive Board before finding television. Seven years at Discovery Communications took her from marketing manager for the Discovery Health Channel to vice president of marketing for Animal Planet. Capital One hired her next, and she spent seven years there building the brand social media function, rising from director of brand strategy to vice president of digital brand strategy and social media during the years when banks were figuring out what social media was for. Hilton then made her global vice president of social media and later of digital and content marketing, a role that ran through the period when travel marketing had to reinvent itself overnight. She was CMO of MyEyeDr for nearly two years. Choice Hotels named her chief marketing officer in August 2022, marketing a portfolio that ranges from Comfort Inn and Quality Inn to Cambria and Radisson.
Marni Puente - SVP & Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, SAIC
The Smithsonian employed Marni Puente for seven years. As a public affairs specialist she promoted the cultural and educational programs of The Smithsonian Associates, the institution's membership and outreach arm, working to broaden its reach and generate paid attendance. Consulting firms took her from there. She spent a year at BearingPoint guiding change communications for the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, then six years at Booz Allen Hamilton setting market shaping strategy for defense and civilian agency clients. Accenture, Eagle Hill, and five and a half years at KPMG followed, the last as marketing lead for enterprise innovation. SAIC named her senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer in March 2024, running enterprise strategy across the defense, space, civilian, and intelligence markets. Her stated project there is turning the function into an AI-first, data-driven organization. Twenty-five years in, Puente speaks frequently on marketing transformation in regulated and mission-driven industries. She holds a master's from Towson and a bachelor's from Johns Hopkins.
Chris Mumford - CMO, Marketplaces, CoStar Group
Chris Mumford managed logistics for the archery and cycling venues at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Advertising claimed him afterward, and The Martin Agency claimed most of his career. He spent nearly twenty years there across two stints, working on GEICO, Discover, Walmart, UPS, Stolichnaya, and the USTA among others, and served as the agency's president for almost five years. Interpublic then made him EVP of client experience and integration for Verizon's value brands across FCB and GOLIN. He ran his own fractional CMO practice briefly before CoStar Group hired him in July 2024 as chief marketing officer for marketplaces, leading brand and demand generation for Homes.com, Apartments.com, and LoopNet. Mumford has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2022. He describes the job as finding what makes a brand great and then leveraging it into a transformational opportunity for the business.
Anna E. Banks - EVP & CMO, AARP
ShippingPass hit a 28% subscription rate and gained 350,000 subscribers in three months, lifting purchase frequency more than 300%. Anna E. Banks led its national launch at Walmart Global eCommerce, where she also co-developed customer segmentation across a 34-million-person base and ran category marketing for more than ten categories generating over $6 billion. Agencies came first. She spent a decade in digital strategy at Harte-Hanks, MRM and McCann Worldgroup, where she directed Microsoft's emerging media trials across Germany, the UK, India, China, and Australia, and then at Organic, where she led consumer insights and strategy across three offices. Fair Trade USA made her chief marketing officer, and in two and a half years she doubled the consumer database and quadrupled annual earned media coverage. Sephora then hired her as SVP of personalization and performance marketing, leading digital marketing and media, retention, CRM, market research, and marketing effectiveness for teams driving more than $1.5 billion in annual North American revenue. AARP named her executive vice president and chief marketing officer in August 2025, where she leads brand strategy, integrated communications, membership lifecycle, experience design, customer care, and editorial.
The Quiet Half of the Region
The politics get the attention and the contractors get the reputation, but the marketing careers built here run on something else. A credit union with 15 million members. A hotel loyalty program with 300 million. A membership organization whose brand is its entire business. Those jobs demand patience and scale rather than speed, and the security and identity companies down the road from them demand precision about claims that can be checked. Notice how many of these people started in public relations, at the Smithsonian, or inside an agency: this is a region that rewards marketers who can be accurate and persuasive in the same sentence, because the audiences here have always been unusually good at telling the difference.