The most innovative CMOs in the world - The Rebels

Under Armour hired Donkin from Amazon in August, so we've yet to really see what his effect on the sports apparel business will be.

But we can get a flavor from his work at Amazon, where Donkin served as head of worldwide brand and mass marketing. He led campaigns for products including FireTV, Kindle, and Prime.

Amazon launched its first Super Bowl campaign this year to promote the Echo wireless voice-command device. The spot showed actor Alec Baldwin throwing a Super Bowl party with the help of Echo. Guests included former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, actor Jason Schwartzman, and Missy Elliott. Amazon also assembled a team of about 20 people to interact with people on social media before, during, and after the game.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Donkin explained how he approached marketing at Amazon: "How do we move from this idea, from being a functional brand to an emotional brand? How do you begin to tell the story of a category that sounds very complicated?"

Andy Nairn, founder of Amazon's ad agency, Lucky Generals, said of Donkin: "He is a great client to work with. Straightforward, decent, and ambitious. The kind of person you want right next to you in the trenches."

This summer, Harbert took a decadeslong positioning that insurance is for when things go wrong and took a 180 view: Insurance is for when things go right.

The new brand platform, "Here to help life go right" — moving away from its "good neighbor" tagline — was launched during the first game of the NBA Finals, of which the brand is a sponsor. In the cinematic 60-second launch ad, a child asks, "What if we woke up one day and everything just stopped going wrong?"

Harbert said of the rebrand, "We thought it was time to hit the refresh button in a category that's got a lot of clutter today — everyone seems to be talking to the consumer in the same way."

Harbert probably has more insight into his industry and company than most — he started as a State Farm agent in 1992.

Lewnes has been Adobe's CMO since 2006 and has been working to help realize the brand's potential to not only be known for its creative products like Photoshop, but also its entire marketing suite.

This year, Lewnes led the launch of the Adobe Digital Price Index — using insights such as online purchasing patterns and partnerships with professors from Stanford and the University of Chicago to launch a monthly report on various economic indicators affecting marketers' businesses.

Lewnes has also transitioned Adobe's approach to customer experience from what she dubbed an "inside-out" approach to an "outside-in" approach. So instead of Adobe telling the customer what they want to hear, all marketing material now starts with the customer's problem and how Adobe can help solve it.

Adobe has also launched some cinematic ad campaigns — more reminiscent of a consumer brand — to showcase those problems its products help solve. Recently, for example, Adobe released an ad featuring a fictional basketball player about to sign a billion-dollar contract. He gets tired of the endless paperwork and accepts an offer from a rival team. The ad promoted Adobe Sign and carried the tagline: "How's your customer experience? We can help."

Lewnes is a board member of the Advertising Council. Last year, she helped launch its anti-bullying campaign, encouraging young people to post a custom emoji any time they see bullying.

Lucio became HP's global chief marketing and communications officer in 2015 and is responsible for branding, demand generation, strategic events, and global communications.

Under Lucio's leadership, HP has looked to give consumers a more emotional connection to the iconic brand through its internal marketing mantra, "keep reinventing," in its first year as a standalone company after splitting from the Enterprise unit.

An example of this approach was HP's award-winning "Premium" campaign the company says helped it capture share from Apple. Elsewhere, the company released a "Star Wars"-inspired notebook to tie in with the release of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The company also boosted its appeal with gamers with the launch of the Omen gaming line.

This year, Lucio demonstrated he is a marketing innovator by demanding that HP's ad agencies have a more diverse group of employees. Failure to comply with HP's requirements within 12 months could result in an agency's removal from the brand's roster, Lucio said.

Mildenhall joined Airbnb from Coca-Cola in 2014, and was tasked with transitioning the company from a disruptive tech startup into a global travel brand with a household name.

It's fair to say he's helped Airbnb achieve that. From redesigning the company's logo, appointing TBWA as its first global agency and launching its first global ad campaign, Mildenhall quickly shifted the company's marketing strategy from plucky to mature.

In October, Mildenhall won Adweek's Brand Genius award for the hospitality industry. According to Adweek, rather than just promote the product, Mildenhall has used marketing to address some of the issues around the way Airbnb works — examples include launching its "Never a Stranger" campaign to address the fear some people have about staying in strangers' homes, and its "Don't Go There. Live There." push, taking aim at the staid hospitality industry.

Mildenhall isn't afraid to speak out about issues affecting the advertising and marketing industry. At Cannes this year, he lamented how "white" the event was and urged other marketers to join him in pushing the industry to become more diverse.

Mukherjee joined SC Johnson in September 2015 as its first global CMO, presiding over more than $1 billion in media spend and dozens of household brands.

SC Johnson won five Lions at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this year, with four awarded to Glade's "Museum of Feelings" interactive experience. The museum, which popped up in New York last November, saw 56,000 visitors take in fragrance exhibits. The exterior of the building also changed color to reflect the mood of the city, based on data from Twitter.

The other Cannes win was for Ziploc for an outdoor campaign that used the empty space in spills of cereal, toys, and tools to spell out the message "Life needs Ziploc."

At Cannes, Mukherjee explained how she is using data as the foundation to dazzle consumers with creative campaigns: "We can’t simply take on board the data without reminding ourselves of the inspiration of why we are here. Data is latest magic pixie dust. Going back to fundamentals works every time."

Serrao came on board as ConAgra Foods' chief growth officer in August 2015 from Campbell Soup, where he led US marketing. Reporting to the company's chief executive, Serrao leads the company's Growth Center of Excellence and is responsible for marketing, innovation, insights, and research and development.

Innovation is the really the core of Serrao's work. He says that smaller companies in the food market are driving two-thirds of the overall growth in the US food category because they are able to be "faster, more iterative."

Serrao told Food Business News that ConAgra has been looking for "growth pockets" by disaggregating the 150 traditional food categories and regrouping them based on the foods' attributes and what consumers think of them. That work showed the "vegan" attribute appearing in many of its growth pockets — which may not have popped up when looking at the traditional food categories — changing the way it thinks about the vegan business opportunity.

Meanwhile, Serrao told The Chicago Tribune he has also been looking to "renovate" brands with "modern attributes," such as sourcing its Alexia frozen potato products from ingredients that aren't genetically modified. The company also launched two organic products to be sold at Whole Foods.

Sherrard has been with T-Mobile since 2003. Alongside CEO John Legere, he has helped build its reputation as the "Un-carrier."

Recent unconventional campaigns led by Sherrard include the brand signing DJ Khaled to launch a Snapchat series, launching the T-Mobile Tuesdays loyalty program that gets customers free products and services on Tuesdays, and its $70 "unlimited plan" called T-Mobile One.

More traditionally, T-Mobile grabbed naming rights for a new sports arena set to open on the Las Vegas Strip in April. T-Mobile also used its Super Bowl ads this year to turn the heat up on competitors, with a spot starring Drake and another starring Steve Harvey. And anyone who watched this year's World Series saw T-Mobile's #unlimitedbaseball initiative.

ExecRank placed Sherrard at No. 3 in its algorithmic ranking of the top CMOs in the US in 2015.

KFC promoted Tilling from UK marketing chief to global CMO in 2013, making her responsible for the KFC brand across 125 countries.

In the US in 2015, the brand brought back its Colonel Sanders character, with a number of different actors playing the role. Greg Creed, CEO of YumBrands, KFC's parent company, said in May last year that 80% of viewers responded positively to the ads and 20% hated them — and that he was happy about the hate "because now they at least have an opinion."

In October, Creed attributed KFC US's nine quarters of same-store sales growth to "distinctive and disruptive advertising and positioning" plus "breakthrough marketing."

Under Tilling's leadership, KFC has also dramatically redesigned its restaurants, publicly committed to a new quality standard it's calling "Re-Colonelization," and added new regional menu items.

Wahl came on board as McDonald's US marketing chief in 2014 at a challenging time for the company, as it struggled to grow sales and attract customers to its 15,000 restaurants in the country.

She has set about transforming McDonald's marketing function as the fast-food chain bids to win back millennial diners, an audience Wahl knows is "difficult to influence."

Wahl has staffed her department with more than 200 specialists from tech companies including Amazon and PayPal, which has helped McDonald's use digital insights to make big business decisions. For example, Twitter data showed millennials were complaining that McDonald's breakfast ended at 10.30 a.m. — it used this insight to introduce an all-day breakfast menu. According to data from Technomic, 78% of millennials said they visited McDonald's at least once a month in the first quarter of this year, its highest success rate in three years.

Wahl oversaw McDonald's US creative and media agency review, ending a 35-year relationship with Leo Burnett and awarding the $1 billion account to DDB. Wahl added a rare "pay-for-performance" clause in the contract — all the agency's profit from working on the account will come from rewards tied to McDonald's business and brand performance.

The appointment also marked another step in McDonald's major marketing overhaul that has seen the brand increase its creative output from "approximately 2,500 pieces of marketing content a year" to "roughly 5,000 pieces."

Ward has been with Geico since 1984 — probably the longest CMO tenure in the business — and he is consistently producing outside-the-box work that garners accolades in the marketing world.

Adweek named Geico's "Unskippable" work, in which the brand took on skippable YouTube ads by freeze-framing the scene except for one character — like the destructive dog at a family dinner — its ad of the day in March 2015. The campaign won the Grand Prix award in the film category at Cannes and was one of the most-awarded ads of the year, helping Geico pick up "Client of the Year" at the One Show.

Campaign described Geico's partnership with ad agency The Martin Agency as one of the US's "most creative partnerships," thanks to its "relentlessly consistent" — as described by Ward — comedic ads that have helped the brand move from No. 8 to No. 2 in the insurance category over the last decade.

Ward told Campaign in May that unlike many marketers, "we don't test stuff," as that would make its ads "mediocre." Instead, the brand focuses more on the art than the science, resulting in edgy campaigns that yield a huge audience, like its "Hump Day" experience that garnered around 40 million viewers.

As the lead marketer for one of the world's biggest consumer packaged goods companies — with a portfolio of brands including Dove, Lipton Tea, Hellman's, and Ben & Jerry's — Weed is best known for using his influence to try to drive change within the wider marketing and advertising industry.

This summer, Unilever promised to stamp out dated gender stereotypes from its ads — such as a mom doing the cleaning, and smiling women swishing their hair in shampoo ads. Unilever took this approach after it conducted a study of 1,000 global ads and found that 50% contained stereotyped portrayals of women. Weed is pushing for other marketers to also get on board with the #Unstereotype movement.

Weed has also called for digital media giants to provide what he calls the "three V's" — viewability, verification, and value — to prove they are being transparent about the success of ad campaigns on their platforms.

Trained as an engineer, Weed often describes his role as being an alchemist of data and creativity: "I love the magic and the logic," he said on stage at Cannes this year. He also spoke about the formula he applies to the business: "I to the power of N" — individuals, influencers, and impacts.

Weed is also responsible for sustainability. He said sustainable living brands now deliver half of Unilever's growth and are growing faster than the rest of the business.