Leslie Swafford - CMO, BOK Financial
Leslie Swafford spent the first thirteen years of her career in agencies. She started as an account executive at Phillips & Johnson, then worked at Dudell & Associates and The Focus Agency, before six years as a management supervisor at Rapp Collins Worldwide. BOK Financial hired her in 2008 as a senior marketing manager. In 2015 she became senior vice president and director of marketing for the wealth management division, responsible for every aspect of marketing for one of the bank’s most relationship-driven businesses. BOK Financial named her chief marketing officer in September 2026. Eighteen years at the Tulsa bank holding company, across B2C and B2B work in finance, energy, retail, and entertainment, sit behind a role she has held only a few weeks.
Tina Ames - VP Marketing & Communication, Saint Francis Health System
Tina Ames published three cookbooks to promote a hospital’s cancer, diabetes, and heart programs. That was at Avera McKennan, where she spent nine years as director of marketing and public relations for a 490-bed tertiary care hospital and its regional network, coordinating a name change across more than 50 entities and promoting the opening of a behavioral health hospital and an orthopedic institute. She then spent five years in Maui, where she founded Friends of Hana Keiki, a nonprofit supporting the local school, and partnered with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Kansas City agency work in health care marketing followed, at Prairie Dog/TCG and Walz Tetrick Advertising. CHI Health then made her division vice president of marketing and communications for nine years, covering 15 hospitals across Nebraska and southwest Iowa. Saint Francis Health System hired her as vice president of marketing and communication in September 2024.
Katie Segner - EVP Marketing, SpiritBank
Katie Segner traces her career to a high school psychology class and an early fascination with why people make the decisions they do. She started as an analyst in Williams’ professional development program, then co-owned Flower Girls, a wedding and event floral design business, for nearly four years. Oklahoma Central Credit Union hired her to run its marketing as a business development officer. SpiritBank brought her on as marketing director in 2008, and fourteen and a half years later named her executive vice president of marketing. She says the bank has grown assets by more than $224 million and deposits by 23.8% since 2023. Her G.O.A.T. campaign drove more than 2.16 million impressions and won a Bronze ADDY and a Bronze Telly, and her customer testimonial videos hold viewers through to the end two-thirds of the time. She also chairs the bank’s 20-member Leadership Council.
Jamie Leupen - Executive Marketing Consultant, Jamie Leupen Consulting
Jamie Leupen once managed a social media client who wanted to post one picture of a fish every day, and found a way to make it interesting. That was at sixPR, where she also produced press conferences and took two Olympians to a Bruno Mars concert. She joined 36 Degrees North, Tulsa’s startup hub, at its front desk in 2017, then came back as communications coordinator and rose to director of marketing and communications. She built the go-to-market for its third location, which hit 80% occupancy in its first year, and ran Global Entrepreneurship Week to a top five national ranking. As vice president of marketing and communications at Gradient, the organization’s innovation hub, she led a two-year rebrand, generated more than $5 million in earned media, raised inquiry form completion 161%, and won an InBIA Excellence in Communication Award. In March 2026 she started her own consultancy, bringing VP-level marketing leadership to organizations that need it part-time.
Melanie Christian - SVP Marketing, Firstar Bank
Melanie Christian spent seven and a half years at Saxum, the integrated communications agency, rising from account director to vice president and general manager of its Tulsa office. She also led the agency’s energy practice, handling omnichannel marketing, crisis communications, media relations, internal communications, and public affairs for clients in one of the region’s defining industries. Firstar Bank hired her as vice president of marketing in December 2019 and promoted her to senior vice president in February 2023. Nearly seven years in, she leads marketing at the community bank. Her agency training in aligning leadership, employees, and project teams carried over directly to an in-house role where she works with every part of the business.
Jeremy Diamond - SVP Marketing, Vast Bank
Jeremy Diamond founded Welltown Brewing in 2018 and still owns it. He built its brand, team, and community partnerships into a sustainable business. In 2021 he also co-founded Labor Division, a Tulsa branding, web, and video agency serving nonprofits and regional institutions, and exited as majority owner in 2025. Before either venture he spent three years as marketing manager and sales lead at Lamar Systems, positioning technical broadcast infrastructure products. Vast Bank named him senior vice president of marketing in April 2026, where he owns strategy and execution across deposits, lending, and digital adoption. Few bank marketing chiefs have also run a brewery and an agency, and both taught him the same lesson from different sides: brands grow when the community feels like it owns them.
Ken Maguire - CMO, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises
Ken Maguire learned casino marketing in Atlantic City in the 1990s, holding marketing roles at Resorts International and the Sands before working as a junket representative for Trump Plaza and Harrah’s. He moved to New York’s Monticello Gaming and Raceway to manage video gaming and player development, then to Oklahoma in 2007, where Cherokee Nation Entertainment made him senior director of marketing for the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa. He later took on corporate marketing across all eight of its properties. River Spirit Casino hired him as director of marketing in 2015, and he spent nearly a decade there before Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises named him chief marketing officer in October 2025. More than thirty years in gaming have taken him from the junket business to running marketing for one of the state’s largest tribal gaming operations.
Valerie Stone - VP Brand & Marketing, Hogan Assessments
Valerie Stone started in the music business, coordinating promotions and then managing national promotions for INO Records in Nashville, running campaigns across radio, tours, and events. After a year at Stan Johnson Company, Hogan Assessments hired her as brand manager in 2012, leading brand initiatives across the company’s international distributor network. Fourteen years later she runs brand and marketing for the whole company. Along the way she built Hogan’s content strategy and webinar program as sales enablement manager, led channel marketing and enablement, and became marketing director over an integrated global function spanning brand, demand generation, content, PR, events, and sales enablement. She was named vice president of brand and marketing in June 2026. Hogan’s personality assessments are used by organizations to hire better and develop leaders, and her job is connecting that science to buyers in more than one language.
J. Kyle Clifton - VP Marketing & Communications, Patrons Bank
J. Kyle Clifton worked as a teller and loan counselor at WEOKIE Federal Credit Union, earning top sales recognition four months in a row. At Oklahoma State University he interned in marketing for residential life, helping run a move-in recycling program that diverted more than 200 tons of cardboard. Spectra then made him marketing director for an event center in Enid, where he led its rebrand and name change and handled all concert and event advertising. Banking brought him back. He spent two and a half years as AVP and marketing and communications officer at Stride Bank, then joined Patrons Bank in the same role in 2022 and was promoted to vice president of marketing and communications in September 2024.
Griffin Parker - CMO, GenScripts Pharmacy
Griffin Parker spent nearly twenty years selling orthopedic implants to surgeons in operating rooms across Oklahoma. He started as a business analyst at IBM in Tulsa, where he led the first Six Sigma Green Belt project in its business transformation outsourcing unit. At DePuy, Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedics company, he shared the National Sales Rep of the Year award in his first year. Exactech then had him build its Oklahoma territory, and he was named Sales Associate of the Year for the Southwest in 2009 and made its Million Dollar Club five years running. Tornier recruited him to launch its lower extremity division in western Oklahoma, and he later earned President’s Club recognition at ACell before moving to Integra LifeSciences. GenScripts Pharmacy named him chief marketing officer in August 2023. He has won national sales awards nine times.
Where the Numbers Show
Tulsa’s marketers tend to know exactly what their work produced. Deposit growth by percentage point. Occupancy rates in a building’s first year. Earned media in dollars. Cardboard recycled by the ton. That comes from the institutions they serve: community banks that answer to local depositors, health systems and tribal enterprises with obligations to the people around them, and a handful of companies that sell to the world but are still close enough to home to be judged by it. It also comes from backgrounds that reward measurement, like orthopedic sales quotas and casino player data. In a city this size, results get noticed quickly, and so do the people who deliver them.