Marian Lee’s Netflix reaches 300 million households. Emily Prazer’s team at Formula 1 filled a 300,000-seat Las Vegas Grand Prix venue in a single weekend. Visa’s Frank Cooper III’s team processes trillions in commerce every year. However, none of them seem to face the marketing problem most Cypriot business owners have. How do you convince a customer to walk through the door of your company, even if your company runs on a team with fewer than ten people?
According to the European Commission’s 2025 Cyprus SME Fact Sheet, small and medium-sized enterprises account for 99.8% of businesses in the non-financial business sector, 81.8% of employment and 78.8% of value added. Micro-enterprises alone represent 92.3% of all businesses on the island. The marketing challenges of a Nicosia café, a Limassol legal practice, or a Paphos boutique hotel look miles different to the ones described in Forbes’s 14th annual World’s Most Influential CMO list.
Follow THE FUTURE on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and Telegram
The list, however, is still worth a read for the potential lessons to be learned. The annual list, this year published on 25 June 2026, assesses marketing leadership at the enterprise level. Forbes and its partner Sprinklr, supplemented by LinkedIn data, started with more than 1,500 executives and applied more than 10 billion data points across 20 domains, grouped into three categories: the attention generated by a CMO’s marketing work, the attention and sentiment surrounding the executive personally, and the awareness and sentiment attached to the brand. The assessment period covered April 2025 to March 2026, and only enterprise-level brand leaders were eligible. The ranking measures marketing influence, visibility, and brand salience. Profitability and return on marketing investment are separate questions it does not attempt to answer.
The 2026 top 10 reads as follows:
- Marian Lee of Netflix
- Emily Prazer of Formula 1 and the Las Vegas Grand Prix
- Frank Cooper III of Visa
- Tim Ellis of the National Football League
- Mark Weinstein of Hilton
- Chris Davis of New Balance
- Jochen Goller of BMW
- Marc Speichert of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
- Kate Rouch (formerly of OpenAI)
- Romy Gai of FIFA.
What is interesting is that most hold multiple titles, besides their CMO responsibility. Prazer, Speichert and Gai hold commercial or business roles, and Goller also sits on BMW’s board with formal roles in customer, brands and sales. Forbes describes this as evidence of a wider move of marketing overlapping with other business functions such as revenue, customer experience and organisational transformation.
Most Cyprus businesses cannot reproduce Netflix’s reach or Formula 1’s commercial ecosystem. The more useful question they should ask is which principles behind these executives’ work still apply at smaller audiences, teams and budgets.
Lesson 1: Let The Audience Participate
Here Marian Lee (Netflix) provides the most illustrated example. In a May 2025 keynote, Lee explained that the Lady Gaga song most people associate with the viral Wednesday Addams dance was never actually used in the original series. A fan paired the dance with a sped-up version of Gaga’s 2011 track “Bloody Mary” over on TikTok. According to Lee, the company contacted Lady Gaga, who then recorded her own version of the dance. The song re-entered the top 100 in more than a dozen countries.
“Fandom,” explains Lee, “solves almost all known problems.”
The lesson here is about attention itself. Fans do not necessarily follow the rulebook a company has designed for them, and marketing should give them different ways to interpret and extend the story. Netflix has applied that thinking beyond social media, transforming its shows into games, theatrical productions, merchandise, and interactive experiences.
Another example is Tim Ellis’s “Helmets Off” initiative. In a 2021 Forbes interview, Ellis said younger fans wanted more direct engagement with players as storytellers, entertainers, activists, and leaders, and this initiative aimed to highlight players’ interests and help them express their individual identities. In a later interview on the Speed of Culture podcast, he discussed fashion, music, gaming, charitable foundations, and social causes as subjects through which the league could reveal the people behind the helmets.
Lesson 2: Give Marketing A Commercial Job
Emily Prazer ranks second on the Forbes list, but her title is not Chief Marketing Officer but Chief Commercial Officer. Her responsibilities include partnerships, hospitality, consumer experiences, and other activities that turn Formula 1’s audience into a wider business rather than just a one-day event. The Las Vegas Grand Prix is the clearest demonstration of her approach. Formula 1 reports that the sold-out 2025 event drew more than 300,000 attendees, with more than 1,200 creators producing approximately 5,000 posts and 1.8 billion impressions across the weekend.
What is most useful to know for smaller businesses is what happened around the race itself. Under Prazer’s leadership, the 39-acre Grand Prix Plaza was opened to the public with more than 100,000 square feet of ticketed attractions, including karting, racing simulators, an exhibition, and retail and hospitality facilities. It was designed to remain active for much of the year rather than only during race week. Prazer described the Plaza as an investment intended to provide access, serve the local community, and grow the sport’s audience. She describes this as: “moving beyond moments to create communities and experiences people genuinely want to be part of.”
Lesson 3: Customer Experience Belongs To Marketing
Mark Weinstein leads both marketing and Hilton’s luxury brands. He is credited with launching both “Hilton. For the Stay” and “It Matters Where You Stay.” The promise is supported by the hotel chain’s service technology. Its app allows customers to book, select a room, check in, unlock the door with a digital key, and check out. There is a clear link between the marketing promise and the reality in operations.
Marc Speichert at Four Seasons describes his approach as “AI meets EI,” combining technological capability with the emotional intelligence and care of the company’s staff. He has written that Four Seasons uses digital tools to help employees provide more personalised human service, which supports the argument that technology should enable the experience rather than become the experience itself.
For any business selling something a customer physically experiences, the implication is the same.
Marketing should focus on how quickly an enquiry is answered, whether booking and payment pathways are clear, what happens on arrival, whether employees understand the brand promise, how complaints are handled and what communication follows a purchase.
The three CMOs above make that argument for global companies. It is even more important at smaller scale, where one bad interaction is a larger share of a customer’s total experience.
Lesson 4: Loyalty Is More Than Points
Hilton Honors has grown from 25 million members in 2010 to more than 250 million. The programme now runs partnerships with American Express, Mastercard, McLaren Racing, the Grammys, AutoCamp and Explora Journeys, offering members additional ways to earn and redeem points as well as access to experiences beyond a conventional hotel stay. Hilton’s partnership with Explora Journeys allows members to earn and redeem points on luxury ocean travel with additional benefits.
Hilton uses these partnerships to make its membership useful across more of a customer’s life, and the logic scales down to any business that runs a loyalty programme.
Kate Trumbull, ranked 38th, provides another example. As Domino’s Chief Marketing Officer, she oversaw the company’s “Emergency Pizza” initiative, in which customers who placed a qualifying online order received a free medium pizza in their rewards account for later use when dinner plans “went wrong.” This turned a future discount into a product with a recognisable purpose and benefit to the customer.
Membership totals describe scale but say nothing on their own about active engagement. When a company reports hundreds of millions of members, that figure includes many who signed up once and never returned. Loyalty design is judged by whether members actually use what they have joined and continue coming back.
Lesson 5: AI Makes Human Judgement More Important
Frank Cooper III of Visa is one of the rankings’ loudest voices on where AI is taking commerce. He predicts that AI agents will increasingly search, compare and transact on consumers’ behalf, and argues that automated commerce depends on trust and user control.
“Trust,” he says, “is the adoption switch.”
Visa’s own research indicates that consumers are more comfortable letting AI act when they retain visibility, control and the ability to intervene.
Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s first CMO, faced the harder version of the same problem. She was tasked with introducing generative AI to people outside the technology industry. OpenAI’s first television advertisement, aired during the 2025 Super Bowl, placed AI within a visual sequence of human inventions from fire and the wheel through to aviation, computing and ChatGPT. OpenAI said the intention was to make people curious about how AI could be used, rather than explain the underlying technology in technical terms. OpenAI’s own community forum names Rouch as one of the people involved in the advertisement’s creative development.
So, what are the biggest takeaways from the list? Allow customers into the story, give marketing a commercial purpose, treat service as part of the brand, make loyalty genuinely useful, and use technology without surrendering judgement. A Cyprus business actively building at a small fraction of the scale of some of these global brands- that is a more useful take-home than any specific campaign.
Discover the: Forbes Reveals Its 14th Annual List Of The World’s Most Influential CMOs
