The CMO Podcast

What happens when the very definition of “workplace” changes almost overnight?

This week, Jim sits down with Benji Baer, Chief Marketing Officer of CBRE, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate and investment services companies. Operating in more than 100 countries, CBRE helps companies and investors buy, sell, lease, finance and manage everything from office towers and logistics centers to data centers, hotels and major urban developments.

Benji joined CBRE in 2019, just months before the pandemic fundamentally reshaped how we think about offices, cities, flexibility and human connection at work. But her career has long b...

What turns a celebrity endorsement into genuine advocacy?

Jim is joined by Daymond John, founder and CEO of FUBU, founder of The Shark Group, and one of the original investors on ABC's Shark Tank, alongside Karen Spaeth, Chief Marketing Officer of Starkey.

Karen has spent more than 16 years at Starkey, leading across events, communications, customer experience, and global marketing before becoming CMO in 2023. Today, she oversees the company's global brand strategy and is helping reposition hearing aids as advanced, AI-powered wearable technology designed to improve connection, confidence, and quality of life.

Daymond's relationship...

How do you take a brand that inspires extraordinary loyalty on the inside and make the rest of the world understand why it matters?

That’s the challenge Ethan Braden took on when he became Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Texas A&M University three years ago.

Texas A&M was already one of the largest and most influential universities in the country, with generations of fiercely loyal Aggies. But outside Texas, the story was very different. Research showed that 40% of Americans had either never heard of Texas A&M or ha...

What happens when technology moves faster than our ability to understand its impact?

Our final episode captured during the Cannes Festival, Jim sits down with Jacqueline Corbelli, Founder and CEO of BrightLine, for a conversation that begins with the future of connected television and expands into a much broader discussion about AI, leadership, purpose, and human wisdom.

Jacqueline is one of the earliest female founders in adtech and helped pioneer interactive and connected TV advertising more than two decades ago. Today, BrightLine works across the streaming ecosystem with leading broadcasters, platforms, and Fortune 100 brands to...

What does it take to market some of the world's most iconic brands?

Recorded live during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Jim sits down with Mark Kirkham, Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo Beverages U.S., to explore how one of the world's largest marketers continues to reinvent brands like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Starbucks Ready-to-Drink, Lipton, and poppi in an era defined by AI, changing consumer behavior, and relentless innovation.

Mark oversees brand and marketing strategy across PepsiCo's $28 billion U.S. beverage portfolio. During more than 15 years with the company, he's held marketing...

As people take greater ownership of their health, the role of brands is changing.

Recorded live at the Havas Café during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, this conversation explores how marketing can help people live healthier, longer, and more fulfilling lives.

Jim is joined by:

What makes someone fall in love with a brand?

Recorded during the Cannes Lions Festival, Jim brings together three leaders who are redefining what it means to build brands people genuinely want to be part of.

Joining the conversation are…

Together, they explore how purpose creates loyalty, why community is every brand's greatest asset, and what it takes to scale without losing your identity. Mi...

"Creativity is all about creating desire." So what makes people truly desire a brand?

This week, we're back at the Havas Café for the second of our three-part series exploring Creating Desire. This conversation focuses on one of the most powerful drivers of all: creativity.

Jim is joined by:

Together, they discuss how leaders create cultures where creativity can thrive, why teams need permission to take risks, how h...

Fresh off one of the biggest sporting events in the world, Sean Summers, our guest this week, joins Jim after experiencing the FIFA World Cup from two unique perspectives: as a lifelong football fan from Argentina and as the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercado Libre, an official tournament partner. 

Mercado Libre has grown from an online marketplace into Latin America's leading ecommerce and fintech ecosystem. Operating across 18 countries with nearly $29 billion in annual revenue and a market value exceeding $90 billion, the company has become one of the region's most valuable and influential businesses.

Sean shares t...

Six Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles racing around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It may sound like a publicity stunt, but for Todd Kaplan, it was something much bigger: a reminder that great marketing should surprise people, spark conversation, and create joy.

This week, Jim welcomes Todd Kaplan, Chief Marketing Officer of Kraft Heinz North America. Since joining Kraft Heinz in 2024 after nearly two decades at PepsiCo, Todd has been leading one of the industry's most ambitious brand transformations, helping modernize more than 70 iconic brands while building a culture rooted in creativity, collaboration, and consumer insight.

Recorded live...

Some marketing ideas capture attention for a moment. The very best ones become part of culture. And you could say...that's priceless.

Recorded live at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Jim sits down with Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard, to discuss what it's like to lead one of the world's most iconic brands. Mastercard, known globally for its “Priceless” platform and its role at the center of everyday commerce, has spent decades building trust, emotional connection, and cultural relevance across markets. 

After nearly a decade as Chief Marketing and Commu...

How do you reinvent one of the world's most iconic brands without losing what made it iconic in the first place?

Recorded live on the Tubi Stage at Cannes Lions, Jim sits down with Fabiola Torres, Chief Marketing Officer of Gap, to unpack one of the most compelling brand turnarounds in retail. Drawing on leadership experience at Nike, Apple, PepsiCo, and now Gap, Fabiola shares how the team rebuilt the brand by focusing on marketing fundamentals, embracing creativity, investing in culture, and reconnecting with consumers across generations.

They discuss why every brand should be treated...

Great brands do more than meet a need. They transform that need into desire. But in an increasingly crowded and fragmented media landscape, how can brands earn attention, turn that attention into affection, and ultimately inspire people to act?

Recorded live at the Havas Café during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, this special roundtable is the first in a three-part series exploring the many dimensions of desire. 

Jim is joined by three marketing leaders approaching that challenge from very different industries: 

Artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing at a pace unlike anything we've seen since the birth of digital. But as today's guests remind us, the fundamentals of great marketing haven't changed.

Recorded live at the Infillion Café during Cannes Lions 2026, Jim sits down with Marie Gulin-Merle, Global Vice President of Ads & Commerce Marketing at Google, and Anda Gansca, Co-Founder and CEO of Knotch.

Marie has spent her career leading marketing for some of the world's most iconic brands, including L'Oréal, Calvin Klein, and PVH, before joining Google to help shape the future of advertising, commerce, an...

Just days before Supergirl hit theaters—and as Ulta Beauty launched its ambitious partnership with Warner Bros. to bring the film to life through an immersive, 360-degree campaign—Kelly Mahoney sat down with Jim Stengel to discuss one of the biggest transformations happening in marketing today.

Kelly is the Chief Marketing Officer of Ulta Beauty, the nation's largest beauty retailer, with more than 1,400 stores, over $11 billion in annual revenue, and a loyalty program serving more than 47 million members. After more than a decade helping build Ulta's growth strategy and industry-leading loyalty ecosystem, she's now leading the brand into...

This week, Jim welcomes Grace Kao, Chief Marketing Officer of Snap Inc. Founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, Snap has grown from a simple idea about visual communication into a global platform reaching more than 940 million monthly active users and generating nearly $6 billion in annual revenue.

Grace joined Snap in late 2024 and was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer just months later. Before Snap, she held senior marketing leadership roles at Spotify and Instagram, helping some of the world's most influential platforms connect with creators, businesses, and consumers.

Tune in as Grace shares what...

 For 24 straight hours every June, the world's greatest endurance race pushes drivers, machines, and engineers to their limits at Le Mans. For Michelin, it's more than a race, it's a proving ground for innovation, performance, and one of the most enduring brands in the world.

This week, Jim welcomes Omer Waysman, Vice President of B2C Marketing for North America at Michelin. Founded in France in 1889, Michelin has grown into a global company with nearly $30 billion in annual revenue. While best known for its tires, Michelin's business extends far beyond the road, spanning brands including BFGoodrich and U...

The role of the CMO is evolving. Increasingly, it is becoming a pathway to the CEO's office.

Jim's guest this week, Melissa Grady Dias, first joined the show in 2020 as Global Chief Marketing Officer of Cadillac, where she helped transform one of America's most iconic brands into the leading luxury EV brand while navigating a global pandemic and unprecedented industry disruption.

Now she has entered an entirely new chapter. Melissa recently became CEO of Measured Wellness, a healthcare company focused on preventative care, wearable technology, AI powered health insights, and what she calls "care between...

What does growth leadership actually look like in 2026?

Recorded live at the Kellogg School of Management Marketing Leadership Summit, this week’s episode features two standout conversations with leaders building some of the most talked-about brands in business today. 

First Jim sits down with AT&T’s Chief Marketing and Growth Officer Kellyn Smith Kenny to chat about how a 150-year-old company is transforming itself through customer obsession, operational accountability, and AI-enabled personalization. 

Then, e.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin and President Kory Marchisotto share the culture, creativity, and community-first mindset behind one of...

Are you a hopeful leader? Is your brand a hopeful brand? What does hopeful even mean anymore? And in a moment defined by uncertainty, anxiety, and rapid change, one emotion is emerging as a powerful force for brands and leaders alike: hope.

Jim’s guests this week as both return guests, as he sits down with Samantha Maltin, Chief Marketing and Brand Officer at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and George Carey, CEO and founder of Human-ology, for a deeply human conversation about why hope matters now more than ever. 

Together, they explore groundbreaking resea...

A few weeks ago at Havas’ Hudson Street headquarters in New York City, industry leaders gathered on the eve of the Advertising Hall of Fame induction ceremony for a candid conversation about leadership, legacy, creativity, and courage. 

For this special episode, Jim joins NFL Chief Marketing Officer Tim Ellis in conversation moderated by Maggie Connors, Chief Marketing Officer of Havas Creative Network. Together, they reflect on the defining decisions that shape a career, especially the ones that didn’t feel obvious at the time.

From transforming Pampers into a purpose-led brand to rebuilding trust and cultu...

What does it take to transform a legacy brand and yourself as a leader at the same time?

To celebrate the launch of the streaming series on Hulu, Designed to Last, Jim welcomes Sherina Smith, Enterprise Chief Marketing Officer at American Family Insurance. Founded nearly a century ago in Madison, Wisconsin, American Family, or AMFAM, has grown into one of the largest mutual insurers in the United States. It serves millions of customers and generates more than $15 billion in annual revenue. The company has built its brand around a powerful purpose: to inspire, protect, and restore people’s...

This week, about 5.5 thousand marketers from 44 countries and 800 brands are convening in Miami for one of the fastest rising gatherings in our industry, and Jim’s guest is the entrepreneur behind it all.

Jim welcomes Christian Muche, Global President and Co-Founder of POSSIBLE. Christian began his career as an accountant before discovering marketing, with time at early internet pioneers AOL and Yahoo in the early 2000s. In 2007, he co-founded DMEXCO, the Digital Marketing Exposition and Conference in Cologne, which became one of the most influential marketing and technology events in the world. Then in 2021, coming out of th...

What does it take to turn a simple drink into a global cultural phenomenon?

This week Jim welcomes Allison Varone, the Head of Marketing at Campari America, to unpack the strategy behind one of the most impressive modern brand growth stories. From the rise of Aperol Spritz to the expansion of non-alcoholic options, the Campari Group has become one of the world’s leading spirits companies, with a portfolio of more than 50 premium and super-premium brands, from aperitifs, tequila, whiskey, rum, to cognac. Campari has grown into a $9 billion global player, built on a portfolio of premium br...

Long before our guest this week became the CMO of Levi’s, he was rocking the brand as a kid, breakdancing with his brother in shell-toe Adidas and Levi’s denim. Fast forward a few decades, and he’s now leading one of the most admired brands in the world.

This week Jim welcomes Kenny Mitchell, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of the Levi’s brand at Levi Strauss & Co. The legacy brand was founded in 1853 by Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss during the California Gold Rush. Originally designed as durable workwear for laborers, now 173 years later, it is the m...

If the role of a CMO is to make a brand interesting, why does so much marketing today feel anything but?

This week Jim sits down with Nick Law, Creative Strategy & Experience Lead of Accenture Song, the $20 billion creative services division of Accenture, to explore what’s gone wrong in modern marketing, and what leaders need to do to fix it. In 2019,  Accenture Song (then called Accenture Interactive) purchased the highly awarded and fast-growing creative agency droga 5. Teaser alert: its founder, David Droga, is a big reason Nick is now at Accenture Song. 

Nick’s journe...

If you think the biggest growth opportunity in marketing is Gen Z, Millennials, or Gen Alpha, this episode may change your mind. We kick off a special monthly series focused on how marketers approach different generations, starting with Gen X and Baby Boomers.

To explore the 50+ audience, Jim welcomes Brent Rivard, CEO and co-founder of Geezer Creative, an agency built around one bold premise: the marketing industry has been ignoring consumers who represent an $8 trillion opportunity.

Gen X and Boomers control roughly 70% of disposable income in the U.S., yet most brands remain obsessively focused...

More and more CMOs are ascending to the CEO role. Starbucks, Hinge, Revlon, Avon, and Brinker International are all companies that have elevated former CMOs to CEO.

Joining Jim this week is a guest who joins that group. Diana Haussling is the Chief Executive Officer of hello, the bold, happy, design-forward oral care brand. Founded in 2012 by Craig Dubitsky with the goal of being a “friendly” alternative in the market, hello was acquired by Colgate in early 2020 for a reported $351 million. Today, hello products are found in over 55,000 retail stores across the U.S.

Before step...

What does it take to build a brand that cuts through the noise in a world where most people are trying to ignore you?

Jim’s guest this week is Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, Chief Marketing Officer at DoorDash, who has spent the last seven years helping transform the company from a restaurant delivery app into a multi-category commerce platform with over $14 billion in revenue and more than 3.2 billion orders in 2025. Today, DoorDash is one of the most recognizable brands in tech, with ambitions to become a “24/7 life assistant” for its customers.

Kofi joined DoorDash in 2019 as VP of...

If culture moves at the speed of TikTok, then today’s CMO has to move just as fast. 

This week, Jim is joined by Sofia Hernandez, Global Head of Business Marketing and Commercial Partnerships at TikTok. Since launching in the U.S. in 2018, TikTok has reshaped culture, content, and marketing. And its mission, to inspire creativity and bring joy, has fueled extraordinary growth, even as the company has navigated controversy and major shifts, including the recent acquisition of TikTok U.S. by a consortium of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. The platform now reaches more tha...

To kick off Women’s History Month, Jim welcomes Lara Balazs, the Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe. A company at the center of creativity, transformation and technology. Founded in 1982, Adobe is a software company that is famous for its creativity, innovation, and strong employee and customer-centric culture. Their purpose is to change the world through personalized digital experiences, and their offerings include the Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Adobe Express.

Lara is an experienced CMO. Before Adobe, Lara was the CMO at Intuit for six years, and oversaw a strong run...

What does it take to revitalize a 150-year-old company? Jim’s guest this week, Conny Kalcher, has done it twice. First at LEGO during its historic turnaround, and now at Zurich Insurance as their Group Chief Customer Officer, where she’s proving that empathy is not a soft skill but a strategic advantage. 

Conny spent 33 years at LEGO, where she helped navigate one of the most dramatic brand turnarounds in modern business history. Then in 2019, she joined Zurich Insurance, a company with over 200-country reach and a $100 billion market capitalization, to lead global customer loyalty and advocacy at a...

With the Olympics bringing the world together once again through sport, we’re sharing an episode worth revisiting that feels especially timely.

This week, join us as we reach into the vault to share an episode captured live at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in March 2025. Jim was joined on stage by Emily Silver, SVP, Chief Marketing, eCommerce & Athlete Experience Officer at Dick’s Sporting Goods, the $13 billion revenue retailer.

Dick’s was founded by Dick Stack in 1948 with his first product line, bait and tackle. Today, Pittsburgh based Dick’s Sporting Goods has more tha...

This week we return with one of our most anticipated episodes of the year…the 8th annual Super Bowl Advertiser Roundtable. As is tradition, Jim is joined by Gary Vaynerchuk to welcome a collection of marketing leaders behind this year’s most talked-about Super Bowl campaigns. 

Our Featured Guests are…

We’re living through one of the biggest shifts in the internet since it began: a move from building content for people to building content for machines, on behalf of people. On this week’s episode, Jim Stengel is joined by James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO of Profound, and Daniel Shin Un Kang, Head of Organic and Agentic Search at Expedia, for a thoughtful, practical conversation about AI search, answer engines, and what this shift means for the future of marketing.

James founded Profound in 2024, raising $60 million and earning recognition from Redpoint Ventures as one of the most...

In the first month of 2026, many leaders are recommitting to being more consumer-centric and more human — inside their organizations and in the market. This episode of The CMO Podcast is designed to help you do exactly that.

Jim Stengel hosts a roundtable discussion around the book The Consumer Insights Revolution: Transforming Market Research for Competitive Advantage, which chronicles PepsiCo’s multi-year transformation of its insights and analytics function.

Joined by Steve Phillips (Zappi), Nataly Kelly (Zappi CMO), Katherine Melchior Ray (brand leader at Nike, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hyatt, and more), and Stephan Gans (Chief Consumer Insi...

With the NFL season in full swing and the Super Bowl just weeks away, Jim sits down with Tim Ellis, Chief Marketing Officer of the National Football League, for a timely conversation about leading one of the most powerful brands in the world. 

Recorded live at the ANA Masters of Marketing in Orlando, this episode explores how the NFL continues to evolve beyond the game itself into a cultural force that brings people together. Since joining the league in 2018, Tim has helped reshape how the NFL shows up — making it more human, more inclusive, and more connected to...

The auto industry is changing faster than ever, yet cars remain deeply personal, symbols of freedom, connection, and possibility. Few companies embody that spirit like General Motors, a brand that has shaped culture for more than a century and is now leading the charge toward an electric and connected future.

Jim’s guest this week is Norm de Greve, Chief Growth Officer of General Motors. GM is, of course, home to iconic brands like Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac. It is a $77 billion revenue powerhouse driving innovation across combustion, electric, and autonomous vehicles.

Norm brings a...

At CES 2026, the conversation around AI often swings between hype and fear — but for marketers the real question is far more grounded: How do you scale intelligence, creativity, and performance without losing the human connection that brands are built on?

In this bonus episode of The CMO Podcast, recorded live on the C Space stage at CES, Jim sits down with Yannick Bolloré, Chairman and CEO of Havas — one of the world’s largest global communications groups — to explore exactly that.

Yannick and Jim explore how Havas is navigating one of the biggest transformations our industry...

When you think about the technology that connects our world—the phones in our hands, the cars we drive, the networks powering everything around us—there’s a good chance Qualcomm is behind it.

Jim's guest this week is Don McGuire, Global Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Communications Officer of Qualcomm. Since becoming CMO in 2021, Don has helped transform Qualcomm’s narrative, elevating the company from “the tech behind the tech” into one of the most respected innovation brands in the world, while turning Snapdragon into a globally recognized consumer brand.

Before Qualcomm, Don spent 25 years shapin...