Misunderstood Marketing — May 2026
Adweek called this year's class of marketing honorees "fiercely human amid rapid change." That framing is worth sitting with for a moment—not because it's wrong, but because of what it reveals about where the industry's anxiety actually lives.
When a publication has to reassure its readers that top marketers are still human, the subtext is that the question has become worth asking. The Adweek 2026 Marketing Vanguard list is a genuinely useful document—not primarily for who made it, but for what the honorees collectively reveal about the job right now. Three things jumped out that B2B marketers in particular should pay attention to.
The "Next Leader" picks are a job description in disguise
Every honoree named a successor-in-waiting. Read those paragraphs as a set and a pattern emerges that nobody stated outright: the people being elevated are almost all hybrids. They hold brand instincts in one hand and a P&L in the other.
Land O'Lakes CMO Heather Malenshek picked Catherine Fox, her VP of enterprise marketing, specifically because Fox "came from a business and P&L leadership role." Ulta Beauty CMO Kelly Mahoney spotlighted Erin Houg as "data-led, guest-obsessed, and relentlessly focused on growth." EY's John Rudaizky chose Sian Brigg, who combines "strategic clarity, creative instinct and the ambition and heart she brings to every challenge." Samsung CMO Allison Stransky named Salman Taufiq for his ability to "think both strategically and creatively."
The pattern isn't subtle. The next generation of marketing leadership is being selected on one criterion above all others: the ability to translate brand purpose into business outcomes. Not brand or business. Both.
For B2B marketing teams, this matters because the debate has too often been framed as a binary. Brand versus demand. Awareness versus pipeline. The Vanguard successors suggest that framing is obsolete at the top of the house—and that it should be equally obsolete in B2B, where the tendency to default entirely to demand generation has left brand as an afterthought.
The CMO who can only run campaigns is being replaced. So is the one who can only tell a story. The promotion goes to whoever can do both and prove it in a board meeting.
The "fiercely human" theme is defensive positioning—and B2B should notice
The editorial framing isn't accidental. Adweek chose it deliberately, and the honorees leaned into it. Intuit CMO Thomas Ranese articulated the clearest version: AI handles the "what," humans provide the "so what." Ancestry CMO Attica Alexis Jaques described her platform as "blending AI, data and culture." Mozilla's John Solomon, who joined the browser company in December, said that "brands win when they define the conversation rather than react to it."
That last line lands differently in 2026 than it would have three years ago. Defining the conversation used to mean earned media strategy and thought leadership. Now it also means deciding whether your brand's voice gets heard at all in an environment where AI-generated content is flooding every channel and AI-powered search is reorganizing what buyers find before they talk to a human.
The "fiercely human" positioning is a response to that pressure. It's the marketing industry telling itself—and its clients—that the thing AI cannot replicate is the one thing worth paying for. That argument has merit. It also has a shelf life. The marketers who survive the next three years won't be the ones who resisted AI in the name of humanity. They'll be the ones who used AI to do the mechanical work faster and invested the time saved into the judgment that machines cannot provide.
B2B buyers notice the difference between a company that has a genuine point of view and one that is producing content at volume. In a world where content volume is now essentially free, point of view is the only scarce resource. "Fiercely human" is the consumer marketing industry's way of saying that. B2B teams should be saying the same thing, more bluntly, to their own stakeholders.
The B2B CMOs on this list did something the B2C ones didn't have to
Four of the twenty honorees lead marketing for predominantly B2B or B2B-adjacent organizations: Lara Balazs at Adobe, Emily Ketchen at Lenovo's Intelligent Devices Group, John Rudaizky at EY, and Sumit Virmani at Infosys. The businesses and challenges are very different, but all four did something that most of their B2C counterparts on the same list didn't need to do: they made marketing's value legible to an organization that wasn't naturally inclined to believe in it.
Balazs is the sharpest example of what applied AI literacy looks like at the CMO level. Drawing on hands-on experience with AI at Intuit before joining Adobe, she embedded AI tools across the marketing organization to accelerate the full creative process from ideation to execution. Critically, she tied every campaign to product adoption, engagement, and revenue metrics—shifting the budget conversation from defense to growth. That is a B2B marketer's problem stated precisely: marketing always starts on defense until the numbers make defense unnecessary.
Ketchen co-founded the Lenovo AI Council and drove a data-led reorganization that introduced tighter return-on-investment metrics across a business generating more than 75% of Lenovo's $69 billion in annual revenue. Rudaizky built campaigns tied directly to pipeline—the "Face of the Future" work generated a billion-dollar pipeline for EY. Virmani has made Infosys the fastest-growing IT services brand globally, anchoring the story on trust rather than transformation hype.
None of these is a brand play floating free of commercial accountability. All four are examples of B2B marketing leadership that has earned its seat at the table by speaking the language of the business, not just the language of marketing.
That is the persistent structural challenge of B2B marketing that doesn't fully exist in B2C. A consumer brand CMO operates in an environment where the connection between marketing and revenue, while still difficult to prove precisely, is broadly accepted as real. A B2B marketing leader often starts from a position of having to justify the function itself. The Vanguard B2B honorees didn't try to change that dynamic. They worked within it and won.
"The promotion goes to whoever can run a campaign and defend it in a board meeting. The Vanguard list is a snapshot of what that looks like in practice."
What B2B marketers should actually take from this
The Vanguard list skews B2C, as it always does. Consumer brands have bigger budgets, louder campaigns, and more culturally visible moments to point to. That doesn't make the lessons transferable only at the margins.
Three things are worth borrowing directly.
First: measure succession readiness on the hybrid standard. If the next person in line on your team is only a demand-generation operator or only a brand builder, that is a risk worth addressing now.
Second: take a clear position on AI's role in your marketing before someone else defines it for you. Ranese's "AI does the what, humans do the so what" is simple enough to use in a team meeting, a budget conversation, or a client briefing. Having that clarity of division lets you invest AI savings in the places where human judgment compounds.
Third: if you are in a B2B environment where marketing's legitimacy is still contested, the path forward is not to win the argument about brand value in the abstract. It is to build the pipeline story so clearly that the argument becomes unnecessary. That is what Balazs, Ketchen, Rudaizky, and Virmani are doing at scale. The same approach works at a tenth of the budget.
The industry's anxiety about being "fiercely human" is real. The response to that anxiety, though, is not reassurance. It is specificity about what human judgment actually produces that AI cannot—and then proving it in the numbers.
Source
Hardin, Brandon. "The 2026 Marketing Vanguard Awards: Fiercely Human Amid Rapid Change." Adweek, 5 May 2026, adweek.com.