2025 Women of Excellence Profiles: Industry Impact

Tammy Ackerman

Vice President, E-Commerce and DTC Marketing
Treasury Wine Estates

Over the past five years, Tammy Ackerman has built Treasury Wine Estates’ e-commerce capabilities from the ground up, developing scalable strategies and breakthrough partnerships that now anchor the company’s digital commerce success. Her work has reshaped internal and industry-wide standards for omnichannel activation, digital shelf excellence and consumer engagement. Her leadership has driven sustained growth across third-party platforms, retail sites and TWE-owned channels.

Ackerman is widely recognized as a thought leader in digital transformation. She has been a speaker at premier industry events, including Groceryshop, P2PI LIVE and the Digital Shelf Summit. Through these stages and frequent webinars, she shares forward-thinking insights on collaboration, consumer marketing and digital shelf optimization, helping elevate the conversation and capabilities across the entire category.

She is a driving force for systemic change as an advisory board member of P2PI’s BevAlc Commerce Initiative. There, she is championing a bold effort to raise digital content standards across all retail platforms, an initiative that is redefining consumer experience and fostering unprecedented collaboration among brands, retailers, agencies and wholesalers.

Ackerman is not only an advocate for the TWE portfolio, but for the broader industry. She actively shares best practices, pilots innovative programs with wholesalers and consistently pushes the industry to adopt a more consumer-first mindset. Her guiding principle, “keep consumers at the center of everything we do” is reflected in every initiative she leads.

Barbara Connors

Vice President, Strategy & Activation
84.51°/Kroger Precision Marketing

Barbara Connors specializes in data-driven decision-making, omnichannel strategy and retail-CPG collaboration. She assumed her current post in March, and she drives strategic integration between Kroger’s business priorities and those of 84.51°'s CPG clients, delivering mutual value through innovative, customer-centric insights and activation solutions.

Connors has actively shaped the evolution of the grocery retail and the CPG industry through thought leadership and strategic advisory. She has been featured in various publications, including The Wall Street Journal and Progressive Grocer, and podcasts with NRF, Retail TouchPoints and WARC. She was a keynote speaker at the Category Management Association Conference in 2021 and 2022, and a breakout speaker in 2025, while also being a featured panelist at Groceryshop in 2022 and 2024. She has also been a presenter for numerous industry webinars with CMA|SIMA, the Path to Purchase Institute and others. 

She led omnichannel research cited in the Harvard Business School publication “Digital Commerce and Delivery: Preparing Food and Retail Value Chains for a 50-50 World.” She was named to Progressive Grocer’s Top Women in Grocery in the Senior Executive Category in 2022, and Path to Purchase Institute’s 40 Under 40 in 2023.

Connors exemplifies what it means to lead with vision and industry-wide impact. Through her work, she not only drives business results but reshapes the way grocery retail and CPGs leverage data to serve consumers. Her leadership continues to influence change, elevate standards and empower the next generation of industry leaders.

Prior to her nearly 11-year tenure at the company, she was with Dunnhumby for seven years. 

Cristina Costa

Senior Director and Head of Adult Beverage
Inmar Media

Cristina Costa leads transformative omnichannel programs for top-tier clients, including Diageo, Anheuser-Busch and Moet Hennessy. Her ability to merge precision targeting with culturally resonant creative has resulted in campaigns that not only outperform ROI benchmarks, but also shift category expectations. Her work has earned top industry honors, including Platinum MarCom Awards, an AVA Digital Award, a Stevie Award and a Communicator Award. 

Under her leadership, Inmar’s BevAlc media practice has become a high-growth, high-visibility vertical. Costa is the top billing sales executive in Inmar’s media team history and has consistently delivered record-breaking results. She has introduced new ways of integrating content and commerce to address BevAlc’s evolving challenges, from regulatory complexity to shifting consumer behaviors. Her strategic frameworks have been adopted across client portfolios, creating ripple effects that extend across the category. 

In the past year alone, she delivered more than $10 million in attributable BevAlc media revenue, representing significant year-over-year growth for both her portfolio and the category at Inmar. Her campaigns consistently outperformed ROI benchmarks and played a key role in expanding the company's alcohol client base during a highly competitive market cycle.

With deep experience on both the brand side and provider side, Costa brings a 360-degree perspective to her work. This vantage point enables her to anticipate needs, identify white space and deliver solutions that resonate across stakeholders. It also fuels her presence in thought leadership circles, where she distills these insights into actionable strategies. Her influence is visible not only in campaign outcomes, but in the growing adoption of the frameworks and approaches she champions.

Asli Karacula 

Head of D-Commerce, Grocery, Value and Drug Channel
Unilever

Asli Karacula launched Unilever’s first Digital Days, a groundbreaking initiative that united customer digital teams and company d-commerce experts under one roof to co-create winning digital strategies that deliver for the customer, the shopper and the business. Her ability to bring cross-functional teams together to unlock collaborative growth is a key to her success.

Karacula also enhanced Unilever’s ability to measure investments in d-commerce. In partnership with Kroger, she led a Clickstream data partnership, making Unilever the first supplier to form such an extensive collaboration with Kroger. This initiative fueled data-driven growth for Kroger.com, driving smarter targeting and meaningful engagement with shoppers.

Beyond her business impact, Karacula is a passionate advocate for talent development. She has mentored and coached her team members to grow into key positions of d-commerce in the organization. She always finds the time to contribute, teach and help her colleagues gain a deeper understanding of the d-commerce space. She is a trusted servant leader, empowering her teams and her networks to perform at their best.

Karacula started her CPG career in Turkey at P&G. After moving to the U.S. eight years ago, she joined Unilever in 2022. In just three years, she has become a standout force in digital commerce, driving transformation and delivering exceptional business results across the grocery, value and drug channels. Starting her journey by leading grocery d-commerce, she now oversees a broader portfolio, building a strong, fast-growing business with a future-forward vision.

Jessica McWade

Director, CMX Client Solutions
CVS Health

A founding member of CVS Health's retailer media network, Jessica McWade has played a central role in scaling CVS Media Exchange (CMX) from pilot phase to omnichannel maturity, driving strategic programs that not only deliver results but help redefine how retail media integrates into a larger enterprise.

McWade serves as the connective tissue between CMX and the broader CVS ecosystem, ensuring that retail media solutions ladder up to enterprise priorities, resonate with internal stakeholders and enable advertisers to engage shoppers more meaningfully across channels. Her work spans campaign innovation, category expansion, internal education and organizational alignment. Her efforts have resulted in industry-leading campaign performance, breakthrough strategies for emerging brands and strong internal adoption across merchandising, marketing and leadership teams.

Before joining CMX in 2020, McWade built a decade-long marketing career spanning loyalty, branding, enterprise campaigns and strategic partnerships. At CVS, she led integrated campaigns across paid, earned and owned channels, built supplier partnerships and helped drive high-impact initiatives, including the company’s landmark tobacco removal effort, where she oversaw advertising development and coordinated execution across internal stakeholders. 

Earlier in her career at Staples, she held account strategy roles supporting global branding, social media, loyalty and B2B marketing. She became a strategic partner to internal clients, shaping briefs, guiding creative development and aligning cross-functional teams to deliver insight-driven work.

Across both organizations, McWade earned a reputation as a connector and change agent, known for balancing creativity with discipline and bringing clarity to complex initiatives. Today, she continues to lead beyond her role through her involvement in the Women in Retail Leadership Circle, reinforcing her commitment to industry collaboration and progress.

Jennifer Peters

Director of DTC, Martech, and Digital Compliance
Olly

With more than a decade of leadership in marketing and technology, Jennifer Peters has spearheaded innovative marketing strategies, notably pioneering advanced lookalike modeling to optimize audience targeting. This approach has enabled brands to achieve impactful results with efficient budgets, redefining how companies connect with consumers and setting new benchmarks for precision and effectiveness in retail marketing. Her initiatives have not only strengthened Olly’s market presence but also influenced broader industry practices, establishing her as a catalyst for systemic change.

Peters is a respected voice, frequently speaking at industry events where she shares actionable insights on emerging consumer behavior trends and marketing innovations. Her presentations distill complex strategies into practical best practices, inspiring peers and guiding brands toward greater efficiency and impact. Through active participation in industry share groups, she fosters collaboration, encouraging the exchange of ideas that drive innovation across the sector. Her mentorship of emerging professionals has further amplified her impact, as she's nurtured the next generation of marketing leaders and cultivated a culture of forward-thinking excellence.

Peters’ ability to combine visionary strategies with tactical execution has reshaped industry standards, particularly in data-driven marketing and consumer engagement. Her work at Olly, coupled with broader contributions through speaking engagements and mentorship, has created a ripple effect, advancing the retail marketing landscape.