2024 Women of Excellence, Innovator

Kristen DiCorleto

Head of Marketing
CVS Media Exchange (CMX)

Kristen DiCorleto has headed up CMX’s marketing efforts since March 2023. Responsible for its recently revamped go-to-market approach, including sales enablement and learning and development, she has established CMX as a best-in-class retail media network through initiatives that aim to enhance measurement transparency and standardization within the industry.

DiCorleto’s team has increased from fewer than 10 team members at the organization’s inception to more than 100 today. She oversees a portfolio of an average of more than 80 CPG supplier partners each year, representing a 43% increase in the average number of CPG supplier partners in the CMX ecosystem each year. She also runs an average of more than 280 CMX campaigns annually, resulting in steady 32% business and revenue growth year over year, and a 76% revenue growth rate year over year in 2023.

DiCorleto was awarded the CVS Breakthrough Award in 2020 for the launch of CMX while serving as the executive director, digital marketing strategy and innovation at CVS Health. She then moved to general manager and executive director of CMX in 2021.

She also played a major role in the launch of a data clean room collaboration with Pinterest and LiveRamp, positioning CMX as the first health and wellness retail media network to embark on this partnership — and bringing greater campaign transparency and attribution to partners. She has worked on measurement standardization in the industry through collaboration with IAB, with CMX serving as the first health and wellness retail media network to measure and report attributed sales based on viewable impressions.

Molly Hjelm

Head of Ad Sales, DG Media Network
Dollar General

Molly Hjelm and her team leverage DGMN’s reach to position Dollar General as a brand that puts the customer first, and they develop media channels that allow the retailer’s partners to develop campaigns based on data-driven insights. Part of the largest and fastest-growing retailer in the U.S. by store count with more than 20,000 stores across 48 states, DGMN has access to more than 90 million customer profiles through Dollar General. 

Hjelm has transformed DGMN’s go-to-market strategy and enhanced the value that DGMN generates for its advertiser partners by putting shopper data at the center of the conversation. Her push to “democratize” shopper data within DGMN by commissioning user-friendly reporting to dissect causes of growth and decline has helped her team identify business pain points proactively on behalf of partners and address them via media that drives conversion outcomes. These insights, paired with DGMN’s strong portfolio of partnerships, and with first-party targeting and measurement help to connect the dots between insights and activation, ultimately driving greater in-store sales for advertisers and Dollar General.

Hjelm has also built omnichannel partnerships with CPG and non-endemic advertisers, providing access to the retailer’s audiences and inventory in the tech stack of their choice via The Trade Desk and Criteo. She was instrumental in deploying DGMN’s partnership with The Trade Desk to provide incremental reach to Dollar General’s audiences, leveraging programmatic ad-vertising across growing channels such as Connected TV. She also helped launch first-to-market partnerships with Meta, YouTube, DoorDash and Ibotta.

Erin Mitten

Director of Product Strategy, Data Intelligence
Arc Worldwide

Erin Mitten’s brainchild, the Retail Media Network Insights Engine, not only simplifies data analysis but also empowers teams to uncover actionable insights quickly. She leads the Arc Data Intelligence team in the creation of flexible solutions that can collect data across channels and integrate with new technology, and she sees this as essential to Arc Worldwide clients’ ability to remain adaptable and capitalize on new opportunities. 

Mitten concepted the RMN Insights Engine, engineered the architecture, built the product roadmap, and then developed, championed and sold it internally. She also  established data partnerships with retailers, built and integrated data pipelines from retailers, and on boarded clients. The tool compares incrementality of RMN performance and unlocks the siloed, disparate data sources that contain the information marketers need from their RMN, DSP or vendors and puts it into an easy-to-use, AI-driven dashboard to help marketers understand their program’s performance and make decisions moving forward. 

The real-time, on-demand, commerce program performance analysis has seen measurable growth and acceptance across Arc, Publicis Groupe and their client partners. Since its inception, the tool has analyzed more than 10 million rows of data for insight generation and benchmark development. Upward of 80% of users across multi-agency and client partners access the tool on a weekly basis to drive optimizations and planning.

Mitten also acts as an Ambassador for Google’s Women Techmakers and is an active member of Chicago’s Google Developer Group, where she speaks, collaborates and learns as part of a variety of teams within the organization.

Heather Nichols

CEO
Acorn

With Heather Nichols at the helm of Acorn Influence since August 2023, the solution provider and hub of New Engen’s influencer marketing practice has experienced unprecedented growth and success. Nichols recognized the need for a comprehensive influencer capability with omnichannel scale and led the launch of its full-service solution, Canopy by Acorn, which extends creator content across the entire marketing funnel. It empowers brands to unlock incremental digital scale, accurately measure the impact of their influencer endeavors, and cultivate genuine relationships with consumers. 

She also played a pivotal role in establishing New Engen and Acorn’s access to inventory and first-party data within Walmart’s Demand Side Platform (DSP), which combines first-party audiences with the control and scale of off-site programmatic ads. 

Nichols joined Acorn in May 2020 as its chief resource officer, a post she held for two years before becoming general manager and, one year later, CEO. Under her leadership, the company has managed and provided services for many top CPG companies and quick-service restaurant chains. It also boasts threefold growth since 2020.

She led business development efforts at Collective Bias for nearly three years before moving to Ogury in sales and partnerships roles. Her commentary on trends and breaking news in the media landscape has been featured in various publications, most recently in Digiday and Modern Retail, where she discussed the impact of a potential TikTok ban on influencers.

Asha Tantuwaya

Group Strategy and Insights Director
VML

Asha Tantuwaya assumed her current post in May 2023. She is passionate about demonstrating the efficacy of media in driving incremental sales, achieved through the deployment of sophisticated attribution models and predictive solutions. The innovative tools she has spearheaded not only validate marketing strategies, but also empower businesses to reallocate budgets dynamically in alignment, meeting their overall business growth objectives.

Tantuwaya recently championed the development of a framework that illuminates how creativity can catalyze business impact in commerce channels beyond the reach of paid retail media alone. She led her team in exploring the interplay between sales and two variables, paid media and earned media, to calculate the ROI of creativity in commerce. With the prioritization of creative commerce among shopper practitioners, this approach facilitated the quantification of the “Creative Multiplier Effect,” showcasing that amplified messaging and buzz generated through earned media channels drives both brand equity and sales/conversions.

Tantuwaya and her team also surfaced the insight that led to an award-winning campaign, OreoCodes, where VML Commerce sparked a sales surge and ignited social buzz for client Mondelez as shoppers scanned bar codes for exclusive deals. The campaign yielded a +326% multiplier effect, showcasing the powerful synergy between creative ideas and earned media amplified with paid media.

Tantuwaya joined VML just over five years ago in marketing science and has more than 13 years of analytics expertise across retail media, shopper marketing and customer insights.

Tanya Valle

Commerce Media, Senior Manager & Solutions Lead
Tinuiti

Tanya Valle joined Tinuiti more than seven years ago and has led the commerce media strategy for client Poppi since 2021, scaling its business from Amazon to more than 15 retailers. Her strategy on Instacart was featured in a case study, securing Tinuiti’s first Instacart case study. First-time buyers increased 269% and repeat buyers increased 704%. 

With a complex digital media channel mix and Poppi’s growth in in-store distribution, Valle also helped answer the question of whether digital media was having a positive impact on in-store sales. She worked in partnership with Crisp, a platform that collects, connects and analyzes retailer sales data, and Tinuiti’s internal analytics and insights team to create an attribution model that tracks the influence of digital campaigns on in-store sales. It allowed Tinuiti and Poppi to understand, at the channel level, the influence digital retail channels are having in-store at the retailer level.

Valle also led the development of the go-to-market media strategy for Gap Inc. when it launched on Amazon in Q4 of 2022 with a strategy that included media support for more than 40 categories, encompassing paid search and display strategy to drive both brand and product awareness on the platform. 

By leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud insights after the brand launched on Amazon, Valle and her team’s analysis resulted in investment across Amazon media properties of streaming TV, online video, standard display and paid search. This strategy has been standardized at the agency for brands that are new to selling on Amazon.