2024 Women of Excellence, Business Excellence
Swati Bothra
Senior Director, Digital Marketing and Retail Media
BJ’s MediaEdge
Swati Bothra led the launch of BJ’s MediaEdge retail media program, assembling a team of more than 10 members in just three years. She increased revenue by more than 300% month over month in just 10 months, and oversaw an active vendor jump of 83%, all while increasing return on ad spend by two times the original figures.
Bothra was the main driver in creating a new operating model and way of working with her team. She facilitated her vision to request more support for the team including process automation, better technology, deeper analytics and reporting, and a focus on strategic sales. Through this, she ensured that her team was equipped with retail media training, experiences and infrastructure needed to scale the program successfully.
Innovation is at the heart of Bothra’s vision to succeed, and she has focused on generative AI and omnichannel to expand the program. Working with Microsoft, she tested and rolled out a generative AI creative solutions feature called Creative Studio, which streamlined the creative approval process for brands from start to finish and significantly reduced handoffs and the time required to launch creatives. She also added new self-service options such as the Smart Suite feature, which allowed brands to automatically optimize campaign bids at scale. Focusing on an omnichannel experience, she positioned her team to drive strategies across onsite, offsite, social and in-store, which is currently in build.
Stephanie Bunnell
Senior Vice President, Marketing
Aki Technologies, Media by Inmar Intelligence
Since joining Aki Technologies in 2019, Stephanie Bunnell has supported the closing of its largest brand deals in the company’s history, including its first agency of record deal in 2023, and contributed to year-over-year revenue growth that has reached up to 80%. She consistently creatively shapes industry-leading advertising campaigns and pioneers technology and research that sets a new standard for how top brands and agencies inspire their audiences.
By leading Aki’s marketing team and in-house creative agency, Bunnell’s impact extends beyond B2B marketing to her clients’ customers. Her team builds advertising creative for several household CPG brands, with strong campaign results.
Client Primal Kitchen recently achieved a 46% sales lift with CTV ONE, an advertising product that combats CTV’s top problem, repetitive ads, through dynamic creative diversification. Bunnell pioneered the product, showing her ability to influence advertising technology that elevates viewers’ experiences, drives business outcomes and wins partners’ trust.
She is known for her constant pursuit of the next intersection of technology and consumer behavior, and how that impacts the company’s positioning to service their clients better. Bunnell has helped bring Aki to the forefront of the ad tech conversation with 36 award wins since 2020.
She also mentors under-represented groups and supports her local advertising community through her volunteer work with the Bay Area Advertising Relief Committee and sfBIG.
Alicia Crespin
Director, Omnichannel Retail Marketing, Walmart
Mattel Inc.
Alicia Crespin steers the Omnichannel Retail Marketing team for Walmart at Mattel. Her leadership in partnership with Brian Greczyn, the team’s sales lead, has resulted in Walmart being positioned as the company’s largest growth account this year, as of July. She has been credited with transforming her team with a strong focus on driving strategy for the most important areas of the business, including out-of-aisle.
Crespin helped secure Mattel as a strategic partner to Walmart through thought-leadership initiatives. She led the planning for the first CEO meeting, and offered insights and impactful merchandising displays to strengthen the company’s relationship with the retailer. She was also instrumental in the success of the “Barbie” movie at Walmart, and led the execution of a cross-category $11 million-plus pallet train as well as a groundbreaking marketing collaboration called “Welcome to Barbie’s Walmart.”
Prior to her current post, she led the Target Omnichannel Retail Marketing team at Mattel. With Crespin at the helm, the account experienced exponential growth and Mattel won back-to-back “Partner of the Year” awards. Crespin, who assumed her current role in May 2023, is a highly valued thought partner in the organization and embodies the ONE Mattel spirit. She leads multiple cross-account initiatives that help optimize processes, consistently elevates and promotes her team, and is involved in several key company initiatives, such as planning the toy maker’s 80th birthday.
Rulynn Hansen
Senior Vice President, Account Director
Arc Worldwide
Rulynn Hansen has spent more than 25 years in the agency world. Her experience spans across food service, brand and shopper marketing for companies such as PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Burger King, Clorox, Zespri and, most recently, Colgate-Palmolive. She mixes fearlessness, passion and compassion in her role, continuously working to identify new opportunities to grow the business.
As a leader of Arc’s Colgate team, Hansen has overseen exponential growth in fewer than three years, and has not only managed the expansion of the team, but has instilled in every member a sense of ownership and pride in its continued growth and potential.
More than just building business at Arc, Hansen is seen as Colgate’s go-to partner, collaborating with its team to challenge current ways of working and help it transform and grow as an organization. Under her guidance, the team has implemented continuous improvement strategies that include the evolution of its annual omni-customer marketing planning process, resulting in a best-in-class approach.
Hansen has also led the creation of omni-commerce platforms that were crafted with retailer-centric experiences in mind. Often spanning categories, these strategic efforts inspire basket-building and drive retailer engagement by providing a consistent approach for Colgate in the market.
Hansen joined Arc in late 2020 after nearly seven years at Catapult Marketing. Prior, she held roles at Alcone, AMP, TracyLocke, Geometry Global, Integrated Marketing Services and Epsilon.
Katie Streeter Hurle
Chief Strategy Officer
Threefold (SMG)
Katie Streeter Hurle has been instrumental in the growth of SMG for nearly 15 years. She helped transform the business from a small startup to a global entity with nearly 400 retail media experts, encompassing the Threefold, Capture and Plan-Apps agencies. Her ability to raise SMG’s profile at a senior level has unlocked new business opportunities on both the retailer and brand sides. A recent notable achievement was winning the Asda partnership earlier this year. SMG’s thought leadership and clear expertise were cited as key factors in the retailer’s decision to move its retail media network to an SMG-managed model.
Hurle has also played a pivotal role in the development of Threefold, the agency’s managed retail media network service model for retailers, which currently operates more than 40% market share of non-Amazon retail media networks in the U.K. She led the development of SMG’s 3-point plan (3PP), which shaped the company’s long-term strategic direction and was instrumental in driving the growth of SMG’s expanded marketing function in Europe and North America.
Hurle’s guidance has also led to SMG being named a best company to work for by Best Companies for eight years, earning the highest accreditation this year. It was named a Top 5 Agency to work for in 2023, and it has garnered multiple industry awards for its contributions to commerce marketing.
Prior to SMG, Hurle spent nearly three years as a shopper marketing manager at Procter & Gamble.
Claudia Johnson
Chief Client Officer
Flywheel, a division of Omnicom
Claudia Johnson has helped lead the transformation of Flywheel since it integrated 11 different companies to provide solutions for specific segments of the digital commerce value chain, in part by replacing Flywheel’s engagement model with her Partnership Acceleration model. In late 2022, she established a global cross-division engagement model for Flywheel to elevate its business interactions within an identified client group.
To expand the model beyond this initial test, Johnson sourced external leaders with deep knowledge about the omnichannel digital consumer goods world and expertise in retail media and the digital shelf. This led to the creation of Flywheel’s Partnership Acceleration team, including outside professionals from companies such as Procter & Gamble, Haleon, Dunnhumby, CVS Health, Instacart and others. To expand client stakeholder awareness of Flywheel’s strategic partnership impact, she also instituted Annual Impact Reports, providing a high-level overview of the Flywheel solutions actively being used by each client and the client stakeholders, which in turn helped broaden the awareness of the company’s solutions.
Since launching the Partnership Acceleration model just over a year ago, the portfolio has grown from nine to 14 enterprise clients, representing more than 30% share of Flywheel’s revenue. With the acquisition of Flywheel by Omnicom in January 2024, Johnson and the Partnership Acceleration team are leaders in shaping how Flywheel plays a pivotal role in the commerce capabilities of Omnicom. She was promoted to her current post of chief client officer in July.
Charel MacIntosh
Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships
Clinch
Charel MacIntosh has spearheaded numerous transformative initiatives during her time at Clinch. She builds flexible frameworks that enable brands to personalize omnichannel ads in the wake of cookie deprecation and signal loss, bringing new solutions to market to improve the way advertisers effectively serve personalized campaigns. She has also helped establish a holistic measurement solution for dynamic creative, influencing how outcomes are measured across channels, online and offline.
In the past year, MacIntosh has spearheaded more than 160 publisher certifications, driving substantial business growth at Clinch. She also built the company’s business development program from the ground up. Her foundational work ensures that the solutions Clinch offers to its clients are resilient against anticipated challenges in the media and ad serving/dynamic creative optimization (DCO) sectors, such as third-party cookie deprecation and media fragmentation.
Under her leadership, Clinch became the first client-side ad server in 2024 to incorporate UID2, an identity solution pioneered by The Trade Desk. She also drove Flight Control’s integration with Google Ad Manager’s Creative Transcoding API, allowing Clinch to deliver personalized video ad content, enhance the viewing experience for users, and ensure better outcomes for advertisers and publishers.
MacIntosh has also played a crucial role in developing industry standards and best practices, such as the IAB’s Retail Media Buyer’s Guide, as well as supporting the professional growth of women and minorities.
Shannon Randlett-Romano
Vice President, Sales and Vertical Strategy
Therabody
Shannon Randlett-Romano joined Therabody in 2022 and has been transformative both within the sales organization and cross-functionally during her tenure. She created a collaborative approach for U.S. sales and execution that aligns with key partners’ go-to-market strategies, and she partnered internally on new consumer strategies to support returning consumer demand to the handheld massage and adjacent categories and increase Therabody conversion.
She also led the development of omnichannel strategies that shifted trends over the past year to neutralize year-over-year declines in 2023 and deliver growth in 2024. Her efforts helped improve year-over-year brand share in the handheld massage category by more than 25%.
Randlett-Romano has effectively helped Therabody become a data-driven organ-ization that uses a range of insights and a developing business-intelligence practice for go-to-market planning and decision making that impacts all parts of the business. She spearheaded the analysis to create a more than 10% year-over-year improvement in profitability with key wholesale retail partners, and deployed use of P&L across sales channels. It has been adopted corporately as a tool to set new product MSRP, determine promotional programs, negotiate new partner programs, identify product development priorities (COGS vs TAM and return issues), optimize marketing investments/spend and assess cost/benefit of new opportunities.
Prior to joining Therabody in 2022, she spent time at SharkNinja, iRobot, LifeStraw and Echelon Fitness Multimedia in marketing and retail strategy roles.
Jackie Stone
Chief Marketing Officer
Afia Foods
Jackie Stone coordinates all marketing efforts for Afia in the U.S. As the Eastern Mediterranean food brand expands its footprint into key retailers, including Target, Costco, Whole Foods Market, Kroger, Publix and H-E-B, Stone uses a data-centric approach in positioning the brand and maximizing customer impact. The brand’s growth on Instacart, which services 90% of Afia’s retail doors, marked a six times return on ad spend and 56% year-over-year growth in existing doors.
Within Whole Foods Markets, marketing efforts have resulted in a record-high of 13.9 times return on ad investment as of April 2024. Her work has resulted in Whole Foods seeing the most online sales of any retailer where Afia is sold, and online sales now represent 24% of Afia’s total Whole Foods business. As a result, the company saw double the SKU count in May 2024 across all Whole Foods regions.
Stone focuses on new tools and services to capture insights, as well as increasing social-driven word of mouth and product trial to help grow the brand and the innovation pathway. In one month, her efforts gained more than 2,000 new product trials of Afia’s new frozen entrees at Publix. This work also led to insights that are being used to support future innovation work. She has been with the company since January 2023.
Pamela Young
Head of Sales
CVS Media Exchange (CMX)
Pamela Young has a passion for connecting media and commerce. She began her career managing brand marketing for various regional casino and hotel properties. She then led CPG efforts at Vericast for seven years, guiding a team to refine business strategies and measurement practices for major CPG brands across the food and beverage and personal care categories.
In 2021, she became a founding member and leader of the sales team at video commerce solution, Firework, where she was a core revenue driver and led the development of its first global enterprise partnerships with major organizations across the CPG, entertainment and publishing sectors.
Young joined the CVS Health leadership team as an executive director in 2023 amidst the rapid growth of the retail media industry and then the CMX team. Leading sales efforts for the past year, her contributions have directly resulted in growth across the business, its revenue and its partner portfolio, further positioning CMX as a leading health and wellness retail media network.
She spearheaded the brand relaunch and amplified CVS Pharmacy’s voice across the market to highlight the value of each part of the organization. She also grew the CMX sales team four-fold and converted 900% more CMX campaigns from RFPs to activations compared to the previous year. She also increased the average CMX campaign size by 107% in this time, and delivered a CMX revenue growth rate of 200% in 2023 compared to the previous year.
