Marketing Week’s Top 100 is a celebration of the best of marketing
Congratulations to all the marketers named as part of Marketing Week’s Top 100 2024, sponsored by Digitas. In what has been another challenging year, it is well deserved.
Marketing Week’s Career & Salary Survey provides lots of data about the state of marketing and the experience of being a marketer. Among many things revealed by the research in the early months of this year was a picture of senior practitioners being asked to do more than ever before. The list of accountabilities was getting longer and longer.
Marketing leaders are expected to be lots of things, both internally and externally. The ‘voice of the customer’ is often purported to be the primary objective and main contribution of a marketer – marketing’s ‘superpower’ – almost to the point of cliché. It’s important but it’s only half the story. They also need to hear that voice, understand it and serve needs in a way that proves profitable for the company.
Then there’s the challenge of getting to grips with data, omnichannel, social commerce, automation, marketing technology, balancing the long term and short term, increasing volume and value, innovation, distribution, advertising and, yes, AI.
Marketers don’t operate in a vacuum. The cost and complexity of doing business has increased, and therefore senior marketing leaders are being asked to clear more hurdles.
And as if that wasn’t enough, they are also internal marketers, flying the flag for marketing within their organisations – engaging, educating, and edifying their colleagues with insight into marketing’s role in the business, including those in the C-suite who matter most.
Plus they are being asked to do it with fewer resources. Recalling a separate survey we conducted among senior marketers in the spring, lower budgets were reported across all categories and sectors.
Marketers don’t operate in a vacuum. The cost and complexity of doing business has increased, and therefore senior marketing leaders are being asked to clear more hurdles – like many others in their organisations. But few outside marketing will be asked to straddle the three worlds of customers, company and colleagues, and in such challenging times.
Although some might read the above as cause for complaint, it shouldn’t be. It should be cause for celebration.
Click here to see which marketers have been selected for the 2024 Top 100
And that’s the objective of Marketing Week’s Top 100, sponsored by Digitas. An unashamed celebration of marketing and marketers. An illustration of what good marketing leadership looks like. Now in its sixth year, we cast our net wide to arrive at the 100 most effective leaders you find here. We select 10 per category grouping, ranging from health and life sciences to manufacturing. We’ve made a deliberate decision to ensure that marketing leaders from less lauded categories and sectors are presented as examples of leadership.
The 100 are not just the preferences of the Marketing Week editorial team. A long list of contenders has been pulled together from a very large group of people and the justifications for their inclusion, based on the criteria listed here, are presented for the consideration of our judges. They are a learned, experienced and connected group of people who are collectively a brilliant barometer of excellence. Huge thanks to them for their time and counsel.
And congratulations to our Top 100. Your selection follows a rigorous process that saw many of your peers just miss out. You should wear your inclusion as the badge of honour it is meant to be. You should also congratulate yourself for demonstrating the best of marketing. In challenging circumstances, with expectations of what’s possible increasing but the means to deliver often contracting, you have delivered.
