Melissa Baldwin
Retail Media Account Executive & Strategic Partner Lead
Google
Melissa Baldwin joined Google in mid-2020 and has led its big-box relationships for the retail media team since then. She has more than 10 years of experience in the field and continues to elevate the importance of retail media in the larger advertising ecosystem. She became a trusted advisor to retail leaders across North America, including Walmart, Best Buy, Roundel, Nordstrom and others. She’s an advocate for the strengthening of relationships between retailers and brands through transparency and using technology to enable data sophistication, audience development, and best-in-class reporting and optimization.
She began her career at Liberty Media, Kohl’s and Westfield Malls, working across key stakeholders to build out retail media businesses. When the concept of a retailer becoming a media business gained momentum, her teams demonstrated to brands the value of investing in retailers’ first-party data and site traffic through media.
In 2019, Baldwin shifted gears to supporting retailers via the tech/media side of the retail media ecosystem. As senior director of retail media at Criteo, she led the North American sales team, owning relationships with more than 40 retailers and delivering double-digit growth for her division.
Jennifer Fowler
Director, Shopper Solutions
Henkel
Jennifer Fowler has a talent for uncovering opportunities that grow product categories and drive results. Her innovative work on “We Speak Laundry,” a first-of-its-kind shopper marketing program designed specifically for Walmart, attracted 37.8% new buyers to Henkel brands, which resulted in a 12.8% incremental sales lift.
As a team leader, Fowler has guided the development of industry-leading proprietary research. In a study called “Loads of Opportunity,” she and her team discovered new category insights that laid the foundation for innovative go-to-market solutions that have since reshaped the way in which people shop for and purchase laundry products.
She strives to lead her team to reimagine marketing in the laundry category, while creating award-winning campaigns. In 2021, the insight that 55% of parents consider laundry a chore led Henkel to partner with The Mars Agency to position its All detergent as a brand that can help shoppers “Put life before laundry.”
Fowler began her career as a brand design coordinator at Kimberly-Clark before taking on consumer and shopper insights roles at Pactiv. In 2011, she joined Henkel, focusing on insights, and now is the director of shopper solutions.
Beth Ann Kaminkow
Global CEO and New York CEO
VMLY&R Commerce
Beth Ann Kaminkow has a proven track record of reimagining commerce strategies at the intersection of physical, digital and mobile. She is passionate about driving the elevation of commerce as central to brand and customer experience, and she believes creative commerce holds the most untapped creative potential to grow brands and people. As global CEO of VMLY&R Commerce, and New York CEO of VMLY&R, she oversees 1,000 creatives, strategists, data scientists and analysts from across the agency’s companies and brands.
Kaminkow has touched every aspect of marketing with both client and agency side experience during her more than two decades in the industry. She served as TracyLocke’s first president and CEO in the agency’s 100-year history, went on to be the first global chief marketing officer of Westfield, CEO for Kantar Consulting Americas, and global CEO at Geometry Global, where she oversaw the launch of the industry’s most sophisticated connected commerce platform and led the integration to VMLY&R.
She was named jury president by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2022 for its first-ever Creative Commerce Lions, an evolution from e-commerce that she instigated to recognize the disruptive power of commerce channels in driving real business growth. Instead of “above the line” and “below the line” work, it signals a movement toward a further blurring between sales and marketing roles across organizations.
Amy Lanzi
Chief Operating Officer
Publicis Commerce
Amy Lanzi was also awarded Executive of the Year. Click here to read her story.
Jessamine McLellan
Lead – Campari Academy
Campari America
As a certified sommelier with a science degree, Jessamine McLellan has helped bring various new spirits products to the U.S. and global marketplace. She is a co-founder and educational lead of Campari Academy, Campari Group’s educational center of excellence that is a state-of-the-art facility for training suppliers, distributors and hospitality professionals.
McLellan has created more than 10,000 hours of digital content, all of which can be accessed by professionals across all three tiers of the beverage alcohol business. She joined the company four years ago and has since trained more than 5,000 distributor sales representatives to continue to raise industry standards on spirits and cocktail training throughout the country.
McLellan’s team operates the four bars inside Campari America’s headquarters and hosts weekly events that showcase mixology mastery for professionals both inside and outside the industry. She designs and oversees events for clients, and also serves as the lead of an internal consultancy that helps the global team develop and launch new and innovative spirits into the marketplace.
As a partner to the faculty at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Business Hotel School, she has taught seminars on menu and drink development, spirits history, and hospitality and service. She has been recognized for her work mentoring graduate students on their independent projects.
Allisha Watkins
Co-Founder and Chief Sales Officer
Paradox
Creating new opportunities has always been in Allisha Watkins’ DNA. She and Amanda Whittaker co-founded women-owned and women-certified marketing agency Paradox nearly four years ago. Watkins now serves as its chief sales officer.
The company’s growth has been fueled by her ability to foster long-term client agreements, establish strong partnerships in the market with service providers and develop strategic growth plans that deliver more sales for clients. Its revenue and team size doubled in 2020 amidst the pandemic, and the company expanded its capabilities across all retail channels (the team also opened a physical office).
Watkins began her marketing career as a national account leader for Procter & Gamble at Marketing Drive, with marketing responsibility for the launches of Prilosec OTC, Always, Tampax and Vicks. She then led Kellogg’s brands through innovation, partnerships and breakthrough platforms, while still at Marketing Drive. She was also a senior consultant at C-Space, where she developed and led a multimillion-dollar internal proprietary research program for Walmart Global Customer Insights, ultimately executing more than 600 research projects that have shaped the Walmart business today.
She went on to be a team lead for shopper marketing at Mars Inc. and led major global brand platforms, including a multi-year partnership with the NFL’s Super Bowl, NASCAR and other entertainment properties. She and her team earned the first-ever Mars Effie and Reggie awards as well as its National Sales Achievement Award before she founded Connected Commerce and started her own consulting journey.
HONORABLE MENTION:
Yolanda Angulo
Director, Customer Marketing
Mondelez International
Yolanda Angulo has been in the industry for 30 years at Nabisco, Kraft Foods and Mondelez. She began working in consumer promotions and customer marketing at Nabisco, and then moved to Kraft to lead all multicultural go-to-market strategy for five years before leading its shopper marketing business and honing her shopper marketing and media expertise. From there, she joined Mondelez to head its shopper marketing efforts for East Coast customers.
Today, she leads the retail media, e-commerce integration, brand connectivity and test-and-learn projects for Mondelez. She is a well-respected voice in the industry and has done a number of speaking engagements with different partners over the past two years, bringing knowledge, expertise and authenticity to her discussions.
