Marketing leaders have always been vital to the long-term success of beloved brands. But never before has the CMO position been more complex—and more essential to driving business results.
This year’s honorees come from a wide variety of product categories—from toys and games to media, beauty, and food—but all demonstrate remarkable skill in navigating a diverse media landscape with platforms and campaigns that deepen their brands’ cultural impact, strengthen audience relationships, and achieve meaningful business outcomes.
These leaders were selected based on the ambition, sophistication, innovation, and performance of their brand initiatives throughout the year. Here are Fast Company’s 2025 Brands That Matter CMOs of the year.
Kristyn Cook, State Farm
One of State Farm’s best brand insights is that nobody cares about insurance until they need it. So CMO Kristyn Cook and her team help people care by creating advertising that is as entertaining as possible. Cook is strategic and ambitious. That means creating a hilarious tie-in with Apple’s hit show Severance, enlisting Jason Bateman to be his own, less-than-ideal version of Batman for March Madness, and pitting gaming creators like Kai Cenat, Ludwig, Mark Phillips, and Berleezy against each other in a combination of gaming and IRL challenges for Gamerhood. The show’s third season from last summer attracted more than 23 million views, and in September, season four landed on Prime Video after getting more than 27 million views on YouTube and Twitch. As she told us back in March, “We like to move at the pace of culture.”
George Felix, Chili’s
Tamera Ferro, Sol de Janeiro
Tamera Ferro may have departed her role as chief marketing and growth officer at skincare and fragrance brand Sol de Janeiro in September 2025. But her work during her six-year tenure—in which she helped Sol de Janeiro grow from $38 million in sales to more than $1 billion—earned her a spot as a CMO of the year. Her success at the helm of the brand was due largely to Ferro and her team’s ability to identify the best places to reach its fans. While those places include TikTok and Instagram—where the brand has 6 million collective followers—Ferro also worked to expand the platforms where fans could encounter the brand, from Roblox to Coachella. Her approach to social media turned the brand into one of the internet’s buzziest, driving a 94% increase in social conversation and generating more than $330 million in earned media value. In May, Ferro oversaw the global Sephora launch of Body Badalada, Sol de Janeiro’s vitamin-infused lotion designed to cater to Gen Z by offering scent and hydration. The product campaign included a spot starring model Juliana Nalú; an original “Badalada Anthem” from producer Honey Dijon; and a traveling Brazilian street fair–inspired celebration called the Badalada Bloco. It was a campaign that distilled Ferro’s philosophy for reaching people, as she summed it up to TikTok in June: “Stop chasing trends and just start liking people. Figure out what they want, what you can do for them, and how to talk to them.”
Morgan Flatley, McDonald’s
Morgan Flatley has revolutionized how the world’s most famous fast-food brand shows up in culture, starting way back in 2020 with Travis Scott’s Famous Order. Over this past year, Flatley has taken her fan-led approach around the world. The Chicken Big Mac campaign featuring Kai Cenat on Twitch was McDonald’s first completely unscripted campaign and saw fans tune in for 3.5 hours of brand content. With 30 million streams and 500 million views, it was Twitch’s most successful QSR campaign ever, generating 35 billion earned impressions. The brand’s Minecraft Movie Meal, featuring both kid and adult happy meals, dropped in March 2025, and its 36 million collectibles sold out in nearly all 100 markets within two weeks. In France, a collab with Hot Ones brought the iconic YouTube show’s spicy sauces to the country, selling more than 6 million sauces and boosting sales by more than 80%.
Diana Frost, Kraft Heinz
Jackie Jantos, Hinge
Marian Lee, Netflix
Victoria Lozano, Crayola
As someone who’s been at Crayola since 2009 in various marketing capacities, CMO Victoria Lozano knows what the core of the 122-year-old brand is and has made it her job to find organic ways to grow its presence in people’s lives. That has meant finding areas for the brand to be more than just about art supplies and about fostering creativity among children—whether digitally through the brand’s top-downloaded Crayola Create and Play app or IRL in the libraries of elementary schools during Crayola Creativity Week. In 2025, Lozano more than doubled the number of children reached by Crayola Creativity Week, reaching students in more than 120 countries. She also grew the brand’s app to more than 3 million monthly active users. Lozano has expanded the company’s activations, generating $100 million in earned media value and 11.4 billion impressions. Her work is proof that established brands can innovate on their central product to meet the times—while still excelling on product. Crayola’s Marker Airbrush, introduced in February 2025, is a 2026 Toy of the Year Awards finalist in the Creative Toy of the Year category.
Marcel Marcondes, AB InBev
As the global chief marketing officer for AB InBev, Marcel Marcondes oversees more than 500 beer brands around the world, and Corona is arguably the company’s most famous. This past year was the brand’s 100th anniversary, and it was celebrated in style. For the Paris Games, nonalcoholic Corona Cero became the lead brand for AB InBev’s first-ever global beer sponsor of the Olympic Games. Corona also launched the Beach 100, a guide of the top 100 beaches in the world, and a multiyear sponsorship of a renowned concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. This year it was headlined by Lady Gaga and gathered more than 2 million people, becoming among the top five most-attended concerts ever. And in September, Marcondes struck an unprecedented, wide-ranging partnership deal with Netflix, getting Corona and its other brands front and center in Netflix’s push into live sports, as well as early access to placement and integration into other Netflix programming, such as shows and movies.
Lisa McKnight, Mattel
It’s one thing for a person’s brand work to become standard for a single brand, but Lisa McKnight’s work for Barbie—which doubled its sales between 2016 and 2021, helped along by a hit movie—has become the playbook for every brand at Mattel, where McKnight wrapped her 27-year tenure this fall. In the past year, McKnight and her team put that playbook to work on Uno and Hot Wheels, both of which are 2025 Brands That Matter honorees. With Uno, McKnight and her team positioned the decades-old card game as a social media star, partnering with content creator Legendary Jay for a series of TikToks and opening pop-up Uno Social Clubs throughout the U.S. to underscore the IRL appeal of the game. It even appeared at Pharrell Williams’s post–Met Gala party and got a special-edition makeover from pop star and Uno fan Billie Eilish, showing that even the cool kids are not immune to the joys of a well-played reverse card. Hot Wheels, meanwhile, became a brand canvas for the likes of Gucci, MSCHF, and Daniel Arsham. The brand also showed up in fans’ towns via the Hot Wheels Legends Tour, which broke records in 2024 and sold more than 60,000 of the brand’s die-cast cars. McKnight’s Hot Wheels work put the brand in a position of strength for its forthcoming film adaptation, which brought on Wicked‘s Jon M. Chu as its director over the summer.
This story is part of Fast Company’s 2025 Brands That Matter. Explore the full list of honorees that have demonstrated a commitment to their brand’s purpose and cultural relevance to their audience. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.
