50 Outstanding Marketing Thought Leaders in ANZ

Last updated: June 2026

The 50 people on this list are the marketing voices in Australia and New Zealand who genuinely deserve to be at the top of every serious conversation about the discipline in this region. Some have changed how the world thinks about brands. Others have built the country's most recognised campaigns, led the most awarded agencies, or built communities and institutions that raise the floor of marketing capability across both countries. Many are active on LinkedIn sharing their thinking in real time. All of them have a documented, verifiable contribution to marketing in ANZ that goes well beyond a job title.

As of June 2026, the marketing discipline in Australia and New Zealand is living through a moment of real consequence. Research from Kantar BrandZ found that the top 40 most valuable Australian brands posted combined growth of 25 percent in 2025, confirming that sustained investment in brand-building continues to compound into measurable commercial advantage. At the same time, the structural foundations of digital advertising are being rebuilt: attention measurement research from Adelaide is changing how media is planned, AI is reshaping how search and discovery work, and the relationship between short-term performance and long-term brand health is being renegotiated in boardrooms across the region.

The people who shape the marketing conversation in ANZ shape what boards expect from their CMOs, what CMOs expect from their agencies, and what agencies believe about how brands actually grow. The voices on this list are the ones setting the terms of that conversation right now.

Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every list, this directory surfaces the leaders who genuinely deserve to be far better known alongside those who have already earned wide recognition. The selection is built on three criteria: a documented and verifiable contribution to marketing in Australia or New Zealand, active engagement with the conversation in 2025 or 2026, and a commitment to sharing their thinking publicly. The result is a list that spans marketing scientists whose work is taught at business schools globally, CMOs behind some of the country's most significant brand transformations, agency founders building new models of creative and commercial practice, and practitioners shaping how digital, social, and organic marketing actually work in this market.

For organisations wanting to build the leadership culture that makes great marketing possible, Jonno White works with executive teams through keynotes, offsites, and facilitated sessions that build communication, alignment, and accountability across leadership functions. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's needs.

Why Marketing Thought Leadership Matters in ANZ

The marketing profession in Australia and New Zealand works at a scale that amplifies the influence of individual voices. According to IAB Australia, the digital advertising market has continued to grow in 2026 following a period of economic pressure, with market confidence returning across platforms and media owners as of early 2026. In this environment, the ideas in circulation among practitioners and researchers have direct commercial consequences, changing where budgets are allocated, which metrics are trusted, and how brands position themselves for sustained growth.

The Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 73 percent of B2B buyers globally trust thought leadership content over traditional advertising when evaluating a potential supplier. In markets as relationship-dense as Australia and New Zealand, where professional networks are tight and reputation travels fast, this dynamic is even more pronounced. The conversation about how marketing works shapes what gets funded, what gets measured, and what gets built.

The specific contribution of ANZ to global marketing thinking is more significant than its geographic size suggests. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has produced the most influential body of empirical marketing science of the past three decades. The creative effectiveness tradition built through Australian agencies, Cannes Lions-winning campaigns, and the Effies programme has demonstrated that this region can produce world-class commercial creativity. And the new generation of LinkedIn-native practitioners, agency founders, and researchers building in the digital marketing space are raising the quality of the regional conversation in real time.

If your role touches brand, growth, digital, media, or any form of commercial communication, at least twenty of the people on this list should already be in your professional network. For more on building the executive team culture that makes marketing effectiveness possible, check out my blog post '50 Outstanding Consulting Thought Leaders in ANZ' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/consulting-thought-leaders-anz.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, a documented and verifiable contribution to marketing in Australia or New Zealand, through published work, an executive track record, a recognised credential, or active practitioner engagement in the discipline. Second, active engagement with the marketing conversation in 2025 or 2026 through LinkedIn content, conference speaking, media commentary, or published writing. Third, a deliberate effort to represent the full breadth of what marketing means in this region, from academic researchers and corporate CMOs to agency leaders, digital practitioners, community builders, and New Zealand voices that often receive less coverage in Sydney-dominated industry media.

Category 1: Marketing Science and Evidence-Based Brand Strategy

The single most significant contribution Australia has made to global marketing thinking is the body of empirical research produced from Adelaide. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia is the world's largest centre for research into marketing science, and its work has fundamentally changed how serious marketing organisations approach brand growth, targeting, media planning, and measurement. Engaging with their work is not optional for any serious marketing practitioner.

1. Byron Sharp

Research Professor and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Byron Sharp leads the world's largest centre for marketing research and has done more than any single person to replace marketing intuition with empirical evidence. His book How Brands Grow, published by Oxford University Press, challenged fundamental assumptions about brand loyalty, audience targeting, and marketing efficiency using data from real purchase patterns across thousands of categories. The book demonstrated that brand growth comes primarily from reaching light buyers rather than deepening relationships with heavy buyers, that distinctive brand assets build memory structures that drive sales, and that most loyalty programmes do not produce the business results their proponents claim.

Sharp continues to publish actively from Adelaide, with peer-reviewed research in 2025 and 2026 covering distinctive brand asset performance across industries, packaging design, and buyer behaviour modelling. His LinkedIn presence reflects ongoing engagement with practitioners who are applying his research to current challenges including AI-driven content fragmentation and the implications of platform behavioural data for mental availability measurement.

2. Jenni Romaniuk

Research Professor and Associate Director (International) of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Jenni Romaniuk has built a body of work that translates the foundational science of brand growth into actionable tools that marketing teams can use directly. She is the developer of the Distinctive Asset Grid, a framework for assessing the strategic potential of brand identity elements that is now used by companies globally. Her book Building Distinctive Brand Assets, published by Oxford University Press, is the most practically complete guide available to building and protecting the memory structures that make brands retrievable at the moment of purchase. She co-authored How Brands Grow Part 2 with Byron Sharp, and her most recent book Better Brand Health provides a complete framework for measuring brand strength within the How Brands Grow world.

Romaniuk has also served as Executive Editor (International) of the Journal of Advertising Research and is in high demand as a keynote speaker, with the Ehrenberg-Bass How Brands Grow for Executives programme running in Singapore, France, and the United States in 2026.

3. Karen Nelson-Field

Founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence and Professor of Media Innovation at the University of Adelaide, Karen Nelson-Field spent a decade at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute before founding her company in 2017. Her work has established attention measurement as a credible, empirically grounded alternative to impression-based metrics that have demonstrably misled advertisers about where they are actually reaching people. Her book The Attention Economy and How Media Works sets out the full research foundation for understanding how human attention processing in advertising is shaped by platform design, device context, and ad format. Named number one in B&T's top data scientists in Australia, she has presented her research at Cannes Lions and SXSW.

In 2025 and 2026, her research across five countries on the relationship between attention, mental availability, and misattribution to competitors has provided media planners and brand teams with the most rigorous independent evidence available on where advertising spend is and is not working.

4. Mark Ritson

Founder of the Marketing Week Mini MBA, Mark Ritson holds a PhD in marketing and spent 25 years teaching on MBA programmes at London Business School, Melbourne Business School, and MIT before creating the programme that has trained almost 20,000 marketers globally. Based partly in Melbourne, Ritson is arguably the most influential single voice on marketing strategy in Australia and New Zealand. His Marketing Week column, which has won the PPA Business Columnist of the Year award four times, combines academic rigour with the directness of someone who is willing to say what most marketing commentators are not. His identification of Brent Smart's NRMA brand transformation as work worthy of Harvard or Stanford case studies gave ANZ practitioners a globally credible validator for the quality of work being produced in this market.

For the region's marketing practitioners, Ritson's specific value is the combination of evidence-based strategic thinking and an ability to cut through the proliferation of tactical noise that dominates much digital marketing commentary. His frameworks on brand strategy, market orientation, and the long versus short investment balance are the most widely shared teaching materials in the Australian marketing profession.

5. John Dawes

Associate Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, John Dawes focuses on the empirical study of buyer behaviour, customer retention, and the application of marketing science to real business decisions. His research on customer loyalty patterns, cross-category buying behaviour, and the conditions under which the Pareto law applies to different customer portfolios has given practitioners evidence-based answers to questions that previously relied on vendor benchmarks and assumption. Co-authoring peer-reviewed papers with Byron Sharp in 2025 and 2026 on predicting transitions in buyer behaviour, Dawes is the most accessible bridge between the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's academic rigour and the working marketer's need for practical guidance.

Category 2: Chief Marketing Officers at Scale

The CMOs in this category are responsible for some of Australia's most visible and commercially significant brands. What distinguishes them from a standard power list is their documented contribution to the public marketing conversation, through industry speaking, media commentary, or a body of work that has demonstrably advanced how practitioners understand their discipline. Every one of them has delivered campaigns or brand transformations recognised at Cannes Lions, the Effies, or the B&T Awards.

6. Mim Haysom

Executive General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience at Suncorp Group, Mim Haysom leads the marketing function for nine insurance brands including Suncorp, AAMI, GIO, APIA, and Shannons. Her strategic work at Suncorp represents one of the most sustained and commercially proven examples of purpose-driven marketing in Australia, built around disaster resilience and producing campaigns including One House and Haven. Suncorp won the Australian Grand Effie under her leadership, the Haven campaign won at Cannes Lions in 2025 and the Best Tech and AI Campaign at the 2025 B&T Awards, and her team was named Marketing Team of the Year at both the B&T Awards and the AWARD Awards. She joined the AANA Board in early 2025.

What makes Haysom a genuine thought leader rather than simply an effective executive is her willingness to explain her thinking publicly. Her account of how she built the commercial case for creativity inside Suncorp, starting from a significant budget cut in her first two weeks in the role, is one of the most practically useful descriptions of how senior marketers earn board trust.

7. Jo Boundy

Chief Marketing Officer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Jo Boundy joined CBA from Qantas in 2022 and has built a marketing function that has become one of the most innovative in Australian financial services. Her development of CommBank Connect, Australia's first bank retail media network, turns CBA's owned channels including ATMs, branches, the app, and email into a data-driven media network. She also made the bold creative decision to redirect advertising budgets toward producing The Brighter Side, an eight-part television series on Channel 10 that reached over 2.2 million viewers through broadcast and 10 million through digital amplification, for approximately the cost of two conventional television commercials.

Jo Boundy has been named on the B&T CMO Power List and is an Advisory Board member of ADMA. In June 2026, CBA appointed Howatson+Company as its new external creative agency, reflecting her continued evolution of the bank's creative model.

8. Jenni Dill

Chief Marketing Officer at the Arnott's Group, Jenni Dill leads marketing for one of Australia's most beloved FMCG portfolios, including Tim Tams and Shapes, with over 25 years of experience spanning PepsiCo, McDonald's, and now Arnott's. Her response to cost-of-living pressures in 2025 was strategically inventive: rather than a broad-based paid media drive, her team produced the Arnott's cookbook, demonstrating new applications for the product range and giving consumers genuine value. Her masterbrand campaign Little Moments, developed with Spark Foundry, reached 40 to 45 percent of all TV viewers over 25 per month and delivered a return on investment placing Arnott's in the top ten percent of FMCG campaigns measured in Australia.

A regular on the B&T CMO Power List and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Dill brings a commercial depth to the CMO role that is rare: the ability to speak to boards about marketing as a business driver, not a communications function.

9. Susan Coghill

Chief Marketing Officer at Tourism Australia, Susan Coghill is responsible for positioning Australia as a travel destination across dozens of international markets simultaneously. Her Come and Say G'Day campaign has become one of the most recognised and effective national tourism campaigns of the past decade. Tourism Australia's research shows that tourism brand reputation directly shapes national perceptions across intent to visit, intent to invest, and intent to study. In 2025, the campaign's brand character Ruby the Souvenir Kangaroo was used by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for Osaka World Expo 2025, confirming the campaign had achieved genuine national brand utility beyond its tourism brief.

Active on LinkedIn, Coghill shares perspectives on AI's role in marketing, the responsibility of stewardship over a long-heritage national brand, and the challenge of maintaining creative confidence in a profession increasingly pulled toward automation.

10. Michelle Klein

Chief Brand Growth and Marketing Officer at Westpac Group, Michelle Klein moved from IAG's Chief Customer and Marketing Officer role to Westpac in late 2025. Before returning to Australia, she spent almost a decade at Meta as Vice President of Global Business and Product Marketing, and her career before that included senior roles at Diageo, British Airways, Orient Express, and Armani across five continents. Named third on Mi3's CMOs of the Year list for 2026, Klein has become one of the clearest voices in the country on the relationship between brand and commercial growth.

Her articulation of brand as a growth lever rather than a lagging indicator, and her argument that marketing should operate with the precision and deliberateness of a business system, represents a strategic clarity that has made her public commentary among the most quoted in the Australian marketing profession in 2025 and 2026.

11. Brent Smart

One of the most accomplished brand builders this country has produced, Brent Smart stepped down as Chief Marketing Officer of Telstra in April 2026 after nearly four years during which he oversaw a creative transformation widely regarded as one of the most successful in Australian marketing history. Under his leadership, Telstra produced over 120 major creative awards including eight Cannes Lions and four Effies, and the Wherever We Go brand platform became one of the most recognised campaigns in the country. Before Telstra, Smart had led the transformation of the NRMA brand from Australia's 36th strongest to its fifth, creating over $400 million in brand value and winning the Grand Effie in 2021.

His career includes leading Colenso BBDO in New Zealand, serving as CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi New York, and more than a decade in CMO roles at IAG and Telstra. As of June 2026, Smart is taking time between roles before his next chapter. His body of work and public commentary on creative excellence and brand-building discipline make him one of the most important voices in the region regardless of what role he holds next.

12. Dean Norbiato

Head of Marketing at KIA Australia, Dean Norbiato is in his seventh year leading marketing at a brand that has made one of the most remarkable journeys in Australian automotive history, growing from a challenger brand to a firmly established incumbent. Named on the B&T CMO Power List in 2026, Norbiato represents the long-game discipline that brand-building requires: the patience to hold a brand voice, resist short-term tactical pressure, and be rewarded with genuine market penetration over time. As Chinese marques intensify competition in the Australian automotive market, his stewardship of KIA's brand consistency through a period of structural market change is one of the more instructive case studies in the country.

13. Jenny Melhuish

Chief Marketing Officer at ALDI Australia, Jenny Melhuish has demonstrated what marketing leadership looks like when the brief is to deepen and steward a brand idea rather than reinvent it. ALDI's Good Different brand platform, created by BMF and in market for nearly 25 years, has continued to strengthen under her leadership through disciplined creative stewardship. Her conviction that a great brand platform compounds over time and that the marketer's job is to find fresh executions rather than replace the idea itself reflects a confidence in fundamentals that distinguishes truly strategic CMOs from those who change things for the sake of change. Named on the B&T CMO Power List in 2026, Melhuish is identified by B&T as a CMO who is thinking in years rather than months.

14. Annabel Fribence

Chief Marketing Officer at McDonald's Australia since April 2025, Annabel Fribence returned to the QSR category she has spent most of her career in, having previously led marketing at KFC for nine years across Australia and Asia before a stint as CMO at Westpac. Her tenure at McDonald's has already produced significant decisions, including ending the brand's 54-year creative relationship with DDB Sydney, her first major agency move as CMO. Named on the B&T CMO Power List in 2026, Fribence's approach to marketing centres on what she calls fan truths: insights grounded in authentic understanding of how customers connect with products, combined with a creative bravery she describes as the willingness to make choices that feel unfamiliar rather than safe.

Her track record of producing culturally connected, commercially effective campaigns across several of Australia's most competitive categories makes her commentary on creative effectiveness worth following closely.

15. Georgia Hack

Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at L'Oreal ANZ, Georgia Hack joined the cosmetics giant in 2023 from David Jones and is responsible for customer insights and analytics, CRM, loyalty, customer experience, e-commerce, media, advocacy, and social engagement across L'Oreal's portfolio of brands in Australia and New Zealand. Her appointment as a mentor in The Marketing Academy Australia's 2026 Scholarship Programme confirms her standing among the country's most respected senior marketers. Her consolidation of L'Oreal ANZ's influencer marketing under WPP Beauty Tech Labs in 2025, described as a move to scale influencer activity and connect with diverse communities in more meaningful ways, reflects an integrated approach to digital and traditional marketing that has positioned L'Oreal ANZ as one of the more sophisticated beauty marketing operations in the region.

Category 3: Digital Marketing, SEO, and Organic Growth

The practitioners in this category have built their authority through direct, verifiable work in the disciplines that determine how brands are found, engaged with, and trusted in digital environments. As AI rewrites the foundations of search and discovery, their voices have become more important, not less. The marketers who understand how organic visibility, attention, and content distribution actually work in 2026 are the ones whose clients are not being left behind by structural changes in how people find information online.

16. Jes Scholz

Based in Sydney, Jes Scholz is one of the most consistently original and technically rigorous voices on organic marketing and SEO in Australia. As the founder of Jes Scholz Consulting, she delivers audience development strategies for enterprise businesses focused on entity optimisation, smart content distribution, and the rapidly shifting intersection of AI and search. Her writing for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal has addressed some of the most consequential questions facing digital marketers in 2025 and 2026: how AI is changing crawling and indexing, how to measure organic performance in an AI Overviews world, and how brands can build genuine authority signals that sustain visibility across search, discovery, and AI-driven interfaces.

She spoke at the Sydney SEO Conference 2025 and is one of the very few Australian practitioners engaging seriously with Generative Engine Optimisation as a distinct discipline from traditional SEO.

17. Adam Franklin

Co-founder and CEO of Bluewire Media in Brisbane, Adam Franklin has been one of Australia's most consistently active voices on digital marketing, LinkedIn strategy, and content-driven business growth since co-founding his agency in 2005. His co-authored book Web Marketing That Works is an Amazon number one bestseller. Recognised as Australia's number one business blog and ranked seventh among LinkedIn Experts in the Asia-Pacific, he has taught over 35,000 business owners through his weekly Bluewire News email newsletter. As AI has reshaped the marketing mainstream, Franklin has expanded his focus to AI-powered content creation and marketing automation, delivering AI keynotes nationally and running the AI Edge programme for professional services firms.

18. Nathanial Bibby

Founder of Bibby Media Group in Perth, Nathanial Bibby founded what is described as Australia's first LinkedIn marketing agency and has built it into one of the leading LinkedIn-focused digital marketing firms in the Asia-Pacific. Named the number one LinkedIn Expert in the Asia-Pacific by the Social Media Marketing Institute and a two-time winner of Best Use of LinkedIn at the Social Media Marketing Awards, Bibby has spoken in 18 countries across over 120 industries. His podcast and Monday Night Live video series bring LinkedIn strategy and digital marketing thinking to a broad ANZ audience on a regular basis.

19. Aisling McMahon

A senior leader at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for Australia and New Zealand, Aisling McMahon works at the intersection of B2B marketing strategy, thought leadership, and LinkedIn's own Economic Graph research. Her role gives her a unique vantage point on how Australian and New Zealand brands are using LinkedIn to build demand, engage buyers earlier in the sales cycle, and activate executive and employee voices as authentic marketing assets. Speaking at the Generate Summit 2026, McMahon focused on the shift from brand-only messaging to people-powered influence. Her access to LinkedIn's research data on ANZ buyer behaviour gives her commentary a factual grounding that most practitioners cannot match.

20. James Norquay

Founder of Prosperity Media in Sydney, James Norquay is one of Australia's most knowledgeable and active SEO practitioners, building his profile through conference speaking, published writing, and the consistent output of his agency's work with Australian and international brands. A regular speaker at Australian SEO conferences including the Sydney SEO Conference 2025, Norquay has built Prosperity Media into a business with a reputation for results-focused, transparent SEO strategy. His specific contribution is bridging the gap between enterprise SEO strategy and the practical realities facing mid-market Australian businesses.

21. Jenn Donovan

Founder of Social Media and Marketing Australia and host of the Small Business Made Simple podcast, which ranks in the top one percent of podcasts globally, Jenn Donovan is Australia's most recognised marketing voice for small business owners, particularly those in rural and regional communities. Based on a farm near Mulwala in New South Wales, she has built a consultancy, annual conference, community, and publishing operation reaching tens of thousands of small business owners. Her book Small Town Big Impact is the only marketing book in Australia focused specifically on regional business. As co-founder of Buy From a Bush Business, the viral Facebook group that drove millions of dollars in sales to regional businesses during the 2019 bushfire crisis, Donovan has demonstrated that marketing expertise applied with genuine community commitment can produce outcomes no conventional campaign could match.

Category 4: Brand Strategy, Agency Leadership, and Creative Effectiveness

The practitioners in this category have built their authority through the work of helping brands become more distinctive, more commercially resilient, and more effectively communicated. They span independent brand strategists, agency founders, and practitioners building new models of integrated creative and media practice. What connects them is a shared conviction that brand strategy is a commercial discipline, not a communications function.

22. Kate Dinon

Partner at Character + Distinction, which merged into the Rally group in late 2025, Kate Dinon is one of Australia's most thoughtful brand and communications strategists. Co-founding Character + Distinction in Melbourne in 2017, she has worked with culture-shaping clients including Culture Amp, Rokt, Luxury Escapes, Chobani, and Heaps Normal. An interim stint as VP of Brand and Communications at Culture Amp gave her direct experience building category leadership at one of Australia's most recognised technology exports. Her forthcoming book Slow Brands is being built around the concept of enduring brand-building in a world of sameness, addressing the structural pressures toward short-term performance at the cost of distinctiveness.

As a seed-stage investor through Protagonist Capital, Dinon also brings the founder's perspective on how brand decisions compound from the earliest stages of a business's life.

23. Margie Reid

CEO and Partner at Thinkerbell, one of Australia's most creatively decorated independent agencies, Margie Reid has spent eight years building a business that has grown from a fast-moving startup to a team of over 180 people across Australia and New Zealand. Under her leadership, Thinkerbell was named AdNews Independent Agency of the Year in 2025 and B&T Advertising Agency of the Year in 2023. Reid was named number one CEO in B&T's Best of the Best of Independent Creative Agencies in Australia in 2024 and joined the IMAA Board of Directors in 2026. Her full-service model, integrating brand, creative, media, and earned media into a single offering she calls Measured Magic, represents a genuine structural alternative to the fragmented agency models that most large advertisers still use.

24. Adam Ferrier

Co-founder of Thinkerbell and one of Australia's most recognisable consumer psychologists and advertising thinkers, Adam Ferrier has spent over a decade producing accessible and evidenced public commentary on advertising effectiveness. His book The Advertising Effect, published by Oxford University Press, applies consumer psychology to the practical challenges of making advertising work and has become required reading for creative strategists in ANZ and internationally. His writing, speaking, and media appearances have made him the most visible translator of academic behavioural science into advertising practice in the Australian market.

25. Rich Curtis

CEO of FutureBrand Australia, Rich Curtis leads one of the most active brand consultancy practices in the country and is the author of the FutureBrand Index, an annual study measuring brand strength across consumer perception dimensions that is one of the most quoted pieces of original brand research in Australian marketing. His commentary on why brand perception increasingly drives purchasing, employment, investment, and trading decisions, and on the specific threats to brand strength including data breaches, poor customer service, and leadership failures, reflects a distinctive perspective on the relationship between organisational behaviour and brand value.

26. Dalton Henshaw

Founder of Rally, the Melbourne-based operator-investor hybrid that acquired Bullfrog and Character + Distinction in late 2025, Dalton Henshaw is one of the most entrepreneurially active and publicly vocal figures in the Australian independent marketing agency space. He launched Bullfrog at 26 in 2020 and in five years led it to become one of AFR's Most Innovative Companies in Media and Marketing and a recipient of global and local creative awards. His thesis for Rally, that the next generation of outperforming businesses will be those that monetise cultural capital and build brand-driven advantages rather than performance-led funnels, positions him as one of the clearest voices on the commercial case for brand in the Australian independent agency space.

27. Kim Anderson

Chief Executive Officer of Bullfrog, Kim Anderson joined the agency in August 2025 after serving as Chief Marketing Officer for FIFA Women's World Cup Australia, where she oversaw marketing for one of the most significant sporting events ever held in this country. Her appointment to lead Bullfrog was made with the explicit intention of bridging the gap between brand-building and commercial outcomes, bringing CMO-level client credibility into the agency's leadership. Her career has included senior marketing and commercial leadership roles at Vodafone, Optus, and 3 Mobile, giving her a rare combination of large-enterprise commercial experience and purpose-led brand conviction.

28. Fleur Brown

Chief Industry Engagement and Marketing Officer at the Australian Retail Council (ARC), which launched in February 2026 following the merger of the Australian Retailers Association and the National Retail Association, Fleur Brown leads the industry affairs portfolio for Australia's $444 billion retail sector. Before joining the ARA, she founded the award-winning Launch Group agency responsible for government and investor relations and advocacy for major Australian brands. She has also served as a director of TechSydney, a founding team member of StartupAUS, and a founding director of TEDxSydney, and she is the author of The Business of Being You.

Category 5: Industry Leadership, Media, and Infrastructure

The people in this category lead the organisations that shape the structural conditions for effective marketing in ANZ. They run the industry bodies that set standards, lead the media agencies that manage the region's largest advertising investments, and produce the research and editorial that grounds the industry's understanding of itself. In a period of significant structural disruption to media, measurement, and digital infrastructure, institutional voices that can separate signal from noise are performing an indispensable function.

29. Gai Le Roy

Chief Executive Officer of IAB Australia, the peak advocacy, research, and standards body for digital media and advertising, Gai Le Roy has spent over 30 years in media with her career in digital advertising stretching back to the era of pop-up ads and display banners when the medium was still being invented. Her commentary on marketing measurement, the Future of Measurement project, privacy reform, publisher sustainability, and the practical realities of AI and agentic innovation in advertising provides the industry with the most reliable institutional perspective on how digital advertising is evolving in Australia.

30. Josh Faulks

Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), Josh Faulks is the leading institutional voice on marketing policy and advertising standards in Australia. His commentary on the regulation of advertising content, the economics of the Australian advertising market, and the strategic importance of long-term brand investment has been widely cited by senior marketers and media buyers. In early 2026, signalling returning confidence in the marketing economy, Faulks framed 2026 as a year when strategic investment in brand and long-term positioning would become critical to business growth.

31. Sophie Madden

Chief Executive Officer of the Media Federation of Australia (MFA), Sophie Madden is one of the most important institutional voices on the role of media agencies in Australia's marketing ecosystem. Her commentary at major industry events in 2025 and 2026 has positioned the MFA's role as helping brands navigate increasing complexity, optimise investment, and drive growth in challenging conditions. As media agencies face pressure from AI planning tools, retail media growth, and shifting consumer attention patterns, Madden's institutional perspective provides the most reliable anchoring for practitioners making significant media investment decisions in the region.

32. Aimee Buchanan

Chief Executive Officer of GroupM ANZ, Aimee Buchanan leads the largest media agency group in Australia and New Zealand, with responsibility for the media investment, data, and technology capabilities of an organisation that manages a substantial portion of the country's total advertising spend. Her commentary on advanced media planning, responsible media investment, and the data-led transformation of the ANZ media agency sector is consistently engaged with by the most senior brand teams and media buyers in the market.

33. Peter Horgan

Chief Executive Officer of Omnicom Media Group ANZ, Peter Horgan leads one of the largest media agency groups in Australia and New Zealand. His commentary on data-led transformation, the integration of creative and media thinking, and the evolving commercial relationships between brands, agencies, and platforms draws on two decades of senior leadership in the ANZ media sector. For senior marketers navigating a media landscape that is changing faster than most strategic planning cycles can accommodate, Horgan's perspective on where the industry is heading is one of the more grounded and practically useful available.

34. Jacquie Alley

Chair of the Independent Media Agencies of Australia (IMAA), Jacquie Alley provides institutional leadership for the independent media agency sector, which represents an increasingly significant alternative to the large holding company agency groups that have traditionally dominated Australian media buying. In her role overseeing the IMAA Board, she sets the strategic direction for an organisation that advocates for independent agencies, runs professional development programmes, and builds industry standards that benefit both independent agencies and their clients. Her leadership of the IMAA through its strategic evolution in 2026, including the appointment of Margie Reid to the board, reflects a deliberate effort to expand the body's influence and relevance.

35. Nadia Cameron

Editor of Mi3 Australia, Nadia Cameron has done more than any other journalist or editor in the Australian market to bring the internal strategic conversations of senior marketers into public discourse. Mi3 under her editorial leadership has become the most important specialist publication for senior marketing practitioners in Australia, with the CMO Awards, CMO50 list, and consistent breaking news providing the factual foundation on which the broader industry conversation operates. Her direct access to the most senior CMOs in the country and her editorial commitment to substantive, evidence-based reporting gives Mi3's output a quality and reliability that is exceptional in the current Australian media landscape.

Category 6: Marketing Education and Community Building

The people in this category have made their most significant contribution through building the infrastructure that allows the marketing profession to learn, connect, and raise its standards across ANZ. In a profession that is changing faster than most practitioners can track independently, the organisations and people who curate, synthesise, and distribute the most useful thinking perform a function that is as strategically important as producing original research.

36. Sherilyn Shackell

Founder and Global CEO of The Marketing Academy, Sherilyn Shackell created the most prestigious development programme for senior marketers in the English-speaking world, with programmes now running in the UK, Australia, the US, and through a global Fellowship programme. The Marketing Academy Australia Scholarship directly shapes the development of the most promising emerging marketing leaders in the country, connecting them with mentors including the most senior CMOs on this list. The 2026 cohort includes marketers mentored by Jo Boundy, Margie Reid, Jenni Dill, Susan Coghill, and Leandro Perez, among others.

37. Leandro Perez

Chief Marketing Officer ANZ at Salesforce and an alumnus of both The Marketing Academy Scholarship and Fellowship, Leandro Perez brings a perspective on B2B marketing and marketing technology grounded in one of the most sophisticated marketing organisations in the world. His role gives him direct visibility into how the most technologically advanced marketing teams in Australia and New Zealand are using CRM, AI, and data infrastructure to drive pipeline and customer lifetime value. As a mentor in The Marketing Academy's 2026 Australian cohort and as a regular speaker on B2B marketing strategy, Perez translates enterprise marketing technology capability into frameworks that organisations at every stage of maturity can learn from.

38. Chanel Clark

Founder of The Marketing Club AU/NZ, Chanel Clark has built one of the most active peer learning communities for marketing practitioners across Australia and New Zealand, focused on professional development, mental health awareness, and genuine peer-to-peer learning among marketers at every career stage. Her community-building work represents thought leadership at the infrastructure level: by creating the conditions for learning and connection, she raises the floor of marketing capability across the region for practitioners who often lack access to the peer networks available in major metropolitan markets.

39. Martin Brown

Director of eBusiness, Strategy and Marketing at Nestlé Australia, Martin Brown is one of the senior marketing executives in the FMCG sector who most directly bridges digital strategy and brand marketing at enterprise scale. As a mentor in The Marketing Academy Australia's 2026 Scholarship Programme, Brown brings to the next generation of ANZ marketers a perspective on how one of the world's largest FMCG companies approaches the integration of data, digital, and brand strategy in the Australian market. His specific contribution is the practical translation of global FMCG marketing intelligence into the specific dynamics of the Australian grocery landscape.

40. Nicole Bardsley

Head of Marketing ANZ at Uber and Uber Eats, Nicole Bardsley is one of the most recognised senior marketers in Australia's technology and platform sector, appearing on both the 2025 and 2026 B&T CMO Power Lists. With over 20 years of experience delivering brand and customer growth strategies across retail, media, telecommunications, and financial services, she joined Uber in 2024 and has applied that experience to one of the most competitively contested marketing environments in the country. Her presence at the Marketing Leaders Summit 2026 as a featured speaker reflects the standing she has built across the ANZ marketing community.

41. Vandita Pandey

Chief Marketing Officer ANZ for PepsiCo's snacks and beverages division, Vandita Pandey is one of the senior FMCG marketing leaders in Australia, having appeared on B&T's CMO Power List for her work driving brand growth for one of the world's most recognised food and beverage portfolios in the local market. Her experience managing brand portfolios that span both global iconic brands and locally relevant adaptations reflects the specific challenge facing major FMCG marketers in ANZ: maintaining global brand consistency while responding to the specific cultural and competitive dynamics of the Australian and New Zealand markets.

42. Anubha Sahasrabuddhe

Chief Executive Officer of Lion, one of Australia's largest and most complex beverage businesses with a portfolio spanning beer, wine, dairy, and non-alcoholic drinks, Anubha Sahasrabuddhe is both an executive marketer and a CEO whose decisions shape how some of Australia's most recognised beverage brands are built and positioned. Her appointment as a mentor in The Marketing Academy Australia's 2026 Scholarship Programme reflects her standing as one of the senior leaders whose thinking is shaping the next generation of Australian marketers.

43. Cam Luby

Chief Marketing Officer at Lyka, the Sydney-based premium pet food startup that has grown to become one of the most recognised direct-to-consumer brands in Australia's rapidly expanding pet care market, Cam Luby is one of the senior marketers building brands in the digitally native, DTC-first category that is increasingly competing with legacy FMCG players for consumer spend and attention. His appearance as a mentor in The Marketing Academy Australia's 2026 Scholarship Programme confirms his standing among the country's most respected senior marketing practitioners.

44. Imogen Hewitt

Chief Executive Officer of Spark Foundry Australia, Imogen Hewitt leads one of the country's major media agencies and brings to the role a strong perspective on the integration of data, audience insight, and creative media planning. Her agency's collaboration with the Arnott's marketing team on the Little Moments masterbrand campaign, which reached 40 to 45 percent of all TV viewers over 25 per month and delivered top-decile FMCG campaign ROI, reflects the kind of agency CEO who is engaged at the level of brand strategy, not just media execution.

Category 7: New Zealand Marketing Leaders

Aotearoa New Zealand's marketing community is smaller in absolute terms than its Australian counterpart, but it produces disproportionately sophisticated thinking and some of the most creative brand work in the region. The voices in this category are building and representing marketing excellence in a market that is often underrepresented in ANZ coverage dominated by Sydney and Melbourne perspectives.

45. Stanley Henry

Founder and CEO of The Attention Seeker, Stanley Henry is the most prominent New Zealand practitioner in the organic social media and personal brand space, with a following of over 1.4 million across platforms. Founded in Auckland, The Attention Seeker has expanded to New York and is building toward a global presence, with over 55 percent of its audience in the United States. Henry's specific focus is organic social media strategy and personal brand development for businesses, and his LinkedIn and video content is the most direct, experience-driven practitioner commentary on these topics coming out of New Zealand.

He is also the founder of The Nesian Network, a community supporting Maori and Pasifika business owners and professionals, giving his thought leadership a dimension of cultural contribution beyond marketing tactics alone.

46. Colleen Ryan

Partner at TRA (The Research Agency) in New Zealand, Colleen Ryan is one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on brand strategy, consumer research, and the role of emotion and humour in marketing effectiveness across the Tasman. As co-founder of The Research Business International in the UK and a long-term practitioner in both markets, Ryan brings a global perspective on how insight methodologies can be applied to the specific dynamics of the ANZ market. Her presentation of original research at Marketing Association New Zealand events in 2025 and 2026, including a study into how Kiwi and Australian audiences respond to humorous advertising, provides practitioners with data-grounded guidance on creative approaches that are in wide use but poorly understood.

47. David Visser

Chief Executive Officer of Zyber, a Shopify Plus and Klaviyo Master Platinum Agency based in New Zealand, David Visser is one of the most practically focused and publicly active e-commerce and digital marketing leaders in Aotearoa. A public speaker at over 150 industry events, he serves on the Partner Advisory Boards for Klaviyo, Rebuy, and Okendo and is a Klaviyo Community Champion. Speaking at the B2B Marketing Conference 2026 in Auckland on AI in B2B Marketing, Visser brings the operational perspective of a leader who has built and scaled a digital agency in the New Zealand market, with all of the specific client and platform realities that involves.

48. Sian Smith

A senior marketing leader based in Australia with deep experience across the ANZ region and financial services, Sian Smith brings to the marketing conversation a perspective shaped by senior roles at American Express in the UK and Australia, where she served as Vice President of Digital Marketing for the International Card business before leading the Charge Card and Loyalty portfolio in the UK. She subsequently served as the regional B2B CMO for American Express in APAC and then as Head of Marketing for Westpac Business Bank. Her experience navigating large-enterprise marketing in heavily regulated, data-intensive financial services environments gives her commentary on marketing transformation, first-party data strategy, and account-based marketing a practical grounding that is valuable for practitioners in financial services and beyond.

49. Adnan Khan

A marketing and advertising technology leader who founded the Meta New Zealand office and was among the first four APAC employees in Sydney, Adnan Khan has spent a decade and a half at the intersection of technology and marketing across Australia and New Zealand. His expertise in advertising and marketing technology, developed through leadership roles at one of the world's most important digital advertising platforms, gives him an understanding of how the digital marketing ecosystem actually works that is difficult to replicate from the advertiser side alone. As a member of the Marketing Association New Zealand community, his perspective on how technology platforms shape the marketing strategies of New Zealand businesses is uniquely informed.

50. Carolyn Young

Chief Executive of Retail NZ, the peak body representing New Zealand's retail sector, Carolyn Young is one of the most important institutional voices on the marketing and commercial challenges facing New Zealand retailers. Her commentary on the New Zealand retail landscape, including sector performance data, consumer behaviour shifts, and the strategic imperatives facing retailers in the current economic environment, provides ANZ marketers with the most reliable institutional perspective on how the New Zealand market is evolving. Her work building the Retail NZ community and her engagement with the broader ANZ retail marketing conversation give her analysis a practical texture that pure advocacy voices often lack.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The ANZ marketing landscape is deep, and this list represents the practitioners with the strongest combination of documented contribution, active engagement in 2025 and 2026, and commitment to sharing their thinking publicly. Several voices were considered carefully but ultimately not included in the final 50.

The FMCG sector in Australia produces exceptional marketing talent, and there were several CMOs from major FMCG companies who could have featured. The advertising creative community, particularly at agencies like Howatson+Company, Leo, and Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, is producing the work that gives ANZ its global creative reputation, but the individual creative directors and strategists behind that work are often less visible in public discourse than the CMOs who commission it. The marketing technology and data analytics space has several ANZ-based practitioners who deserve more public recognition than they currently receive, and the academic marketing departments at RMIT, Deakin, QUT, and the University of Auckland house researchers whose work is directly relevant to practitioner challenges.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Marketing Thought Leadership

The most common mistake Australian and New Zealand marketing practitioners make when engaging with thought leadership is treating it as passive consumption rather than active application. Following Mark Ritson's newsletter, reading Byron Sharp, and attending the Thinkerbell Space conference are only valuable if the ideas encountered in those contexts make it into actual decisions about brand strategy, media investment, and creative briefs. Most organisations do not create the structural mechanisms for thought leadership to travel from the content a team consumes into the decisions the team makes, and the result is that ideas circulate at conference level but rarely shift what happens on a Monday morning.

The second common mistake is applying evidence-based marketing research selectively, adopting the conclusions that are convenient while dismissing findings that challenge existing practice. The Ehrenberg-Bass research tradition is internally consistent: you cannot accept the mental availability framework while rejecting the finding that heavy-buyer strategies are less efficient than penetration-based strategies. The research travels as a package, and cherry-picking the parts that are comfortable produces neither intellectual clarity nor practical benefit.

The third mistake is conflating social media presence with expertise. A high LinkedIn follower count in the marketing space does not guarantee substantive expertise, and several of the most algorithmically successful marketing voices in ANZ are producing content formatted for engagement rather than accuracy. The voices on this list were selected on the basis of their contribution to the discipline, not their follower counts, and the discipline of distinguishing between the two is one of the more valuable skills a marketing practitioner can develop.

For teams wanting to build that discipline into their professional development culture, Jonno White works with leadership teams on the communication and critical thinking practices that make better decisions possible. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how he can support your team.

The fourth common mistake is treating the global marketing conversation as if it is directly applicable to the ANZ context without adaptation. The United States marketing literature dominates global output, and much of what is discussed in American B2B and B2C marketing contexts does not apply directly to a market as specific in its media dynamics, regulatory environment, competitive structure, and cultural codes as Australia and New Zealand. The voices on this list are valuable precisely because they are speaking from inside this market, not about it from a distance.

For more on building the leadership conditions that allow great marketing to take root inside organisations, check out my blog post on customer experience thought leaders at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/customer-experience-thought-leaders.

Implementation Guide: How to Get the Most from This List

The most effective approach to engaging with ANZ marketing thought leadership in 2026 is structured rather than algorithmic. Rather than following all fifty people and processing whatever surfaces in your LinkedIn feed, begin by identifying the three or four practitioners whose discipline is most directly relevant to your current marketing challenge.

If your primary challenge is brand strategy and growth, begin with Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, and Mark Ritson. Their combined work represents the most robust evidence base available on how brands actually grow, and engaging seriously with it will change how you approach every brand decision. If your challenge is media planning and measurement effectiveness, add Gai Le Roy and Karen Nelson-Field. If you are building digital and organic channels, Jes Scholz and Adam Franklin represent two different but complementary perspectives on what is working in ANZ in 2026. If you are leading or transforming a marketing function inside a major organisation, following the CMOs on this list will give you direct access to the thinking of the people navigating exactly those challenges at scale.

Follow these practitioners on LinkedIn, where the majority of them are most consistently active and accessible. Engage with their content by adding substantive comments that add something to the conversation they have started. The practitioners who respond most meaningfully to LinkedIn engagement are those who receive comments that contribute to the discussion, not those who simply generate reactions.

The ANZ marketing community is more accessible than its US counterpart. The senior practitioners on this list speak at relatively small conferences, participate in industry events that remain human-scale, and engage with people who approach them seriously and specifically. A genuine professional relationship with even one or two of the voices on this list is worth more than passive consumption of their content. Invest in making that happen through events including Thinkerbell's Space conference, the Marketing Leaders Summit, the Marketing Association New Zealand events, and the IAB Australia MeasureUp conference.

For leadership teams wanting to build the internal culture and communication conditions that make great marketing possible, Jonno White works with executive teams through keynotes, working sessions, and facilitated offsites. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how his work can support your team.

For more on PR and communications thought leadership in ANZ, which is adjacent to this list, check out my blog post at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/pr-thought-leaders-australia-nz.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most influential marketing thought leaders in Australia?

The most influential marketing thought leaders in Australia in 2026 span several disciplines. In marketing science and academic research, Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, and John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have had more influence on global marketing practice than any other Australian researchers. In commercial practice, Mim Haysom at Suncorp, Jo Boundy at CBA, and Michelle Klein at Westpac have built some of Australia's most commercially effective brand strategies. In digital and content marketing, Jes Scholz, Adam Franklin, and Nathanial Bibby are among the most active and practically useful voices. No single practitioner covers all of these areas, which is why the full list of 50 is the most useful resource.

What makes a marketing thought leader in ANZ different from a global marketing voice?

Marketing thought leaders in Australia and New Zealand bring contextual knowledge that global voices cannot provide. The ANZ market has its own specific media landscape, regulatory environment, competitive dynamics, and cultural codes. Understanding how these factors interact with global marketing trends requires being inside the market, not observing it from a distance. The Ehrenberg-Bass research is global in scope but grounded in Australian institutions. The CMOs on this list are navigating the specific dynamics of Australian consumer behaviour, the major retail duopolies, the Australian media market, and the specific relationship between brand and performance in a market where most major categories have only two or three serious competitors.

How can I engage with these thought leaders?

LinkedIn is the primary platform where the majority of these practitioners are consistently active and accessible. Following their profiles, engaging with their content by adding substantive comments, and connecting with a personalised note explaining your specific professional interest are all effective approaches. Most of the thought leaders on this list also speak at industry events including the Marketing Leaders Summit, the Thinkerbell Space conference, the Marketing Association New Zealand events, and the IAB Australia MeasureUp conference. Attending those events with a clear professional purpose is the most direct way to move from passive follower to genuine professional relationship.

For organisations looking to bring leadership development capability directly to their marketing teams, Jonno White delivers keynotes, workshops, and facilitated sessions that build the communication and alignment foundations for marketing effectiveness. Reach him at jonno@consultclarity.org.

How does marketing thought leadership in ANZ compare to the UK and US?

The ANZ marketing community punches above its weight globally for two reasons. First, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute produces the most influential empirical marketing science in the world, and the researchers who work there have more global impact than almost any comparable academic institution. Second, the Australian advertising community produces creative effectiveness at a level that is consistently recognised at global awards including Cannes Lions, reflecting both the quality of the talent and the commercial discipline required to produce work that is both creatively original and commercially effective. Where ANZ lags is in B2B marketing and marketing technology, where the US dominates both innovation and public discourse, and in the volume of original research and publishing coming from practitioner voices below the very senior executive level.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people on this list represent something that the ANZ marketing profession should be proud of. The depth of the marketing science coming from Adelaide, the quality of the creative effectiveness produced by the agencies featured here, and the commercial rigour of the CMOs building major brands at scale are all genuine world-class contributions to the discipline.

The most important thing that follows from engaging with this list is not following fifty more people on LinkedIn. It is applying the ideas in circulation among these practitioners to the specific decisions your organisation is making right now. The gap between the quality of the marketing thinking available in ANZ in 2026 and the quality of the marketing decisions that most organisations actually make is still significant, and closing that gap is the real work.

Organisations that take the thinking of these practitioners seriously, build the internal conditions for evidence-based decisions, invest in brand alongside performance, and develop the communication and leadership culture that makes all of it sustainable, are the ones that will look back on 2026 as a year they got ahead of their competitors rather than behind them.

For leadership teams wanting to build those internal conditions, Jonno White works with executive teams through keynotes, facilitated offsites, and coaching programmes that build the communication, alignment, and accountability practices that make great marketing possible over the long term. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect, and Jonno works with organisations across Australia, New Zealand, and internationally.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Kantar BrandZ: 2025 Top 40 Most Valuable Australian Brands data (25% combined brand value growth). Edelman and LinkedIn: B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study 2025 (73% of B2B buyers trust thought leadership over traditional advertising). IAB Australia: Digital advertising market confidence statements, early 2026.

Next Read

The marketing and leadership landscapes overlap in important ways, and many of the most effective marketing leaders have invested heavily in understanding how their teams communicate, make decisions, and build accountable cultures. For more on the thought leaders shaping leadership development in ANZ, read my post on '48 Thought Leaders on Leadership Training in ANZ'.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-leadership-training-anz