Announcing The 2018 40Under40 Winners

This article was originally published in 2018 and was last updated on June 10th, 2025.

• Tension: We celebrate standout talent yet quietly fear the machinery that selects it—wondering whose brilliance goes unseen.

• Noise: Awards media reduces complex careers to listicles, reinforcing hype cycles instead of sustained merit.

• Direct Message: Recognition only matters when it sparks collective ambition—lists are maps, not pedestals.

Read more about our approach → The Direct Message Methodology

Every December inboxes swell with “40 Under 40” announcements—a ritual equal parts inspiration, vanity metric, and industry pulse-check. This year’s marketing cohort was harder than ever to curate: we sifted through hundreds of CVs, references, and growth charts before selecting the forty professionals you’ll meet below.

But this isn’t just another rollcall. Lists shape how organizations hire, how peers benchmark success, and how young talent calibrates its own possibilities. If we only skim headlines, we risk mistaking the spotlight for the stage itself. So let’s pause, examine how these accolades work, and ask a deeper question: What should public recognition actually do for a profession?

What It Is / How It Works

“40 Under 40” sounds deceptively simple—pick forty marketers under forty, publish, applaud. Yet behind the curtain lies a multi-layered vetting engine:

1. Nomination gravity. Candidates are nominated by bosses, boards, and sometimes competitors. The first test is whether one’s achievements ripple far enough to trigger a nomination.

2. Evidence over claims. We verified each entrant’s revenue impact, team leadership, or product innovation. For founders like Tasso Argyros of ActionIQ and Travis Montaque of Emogi, that meant growth metrics; for in-house changemakers like Susan Diana at Marriott or Shiloh Stark at The Nature Conservancy, it meant measurable customer or donor lift.

3. Diversity of influence. The final slate spans B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, social impact, and mar-tech. It ranges from Jessica Best orchestrating data-driven storytelling at Barkley to Ryan Kelly scaling performance marketing at Nanigans.

Here they are—forty professionals whose combined output touches almost every corner of modern marketing:

• Tasso Argyros (Founder & CEO, ActionIQ)

• Mike Batiste (President, Five Eighty)

• Brandon Beatty (Co-Founder, KleerMail)

• Jason Beckerman (CEO, Unified)

• Eric Berry (Co-Founder & CEO, TripleLift)

• Jessica Best (Director of Data-Driven Marketing, Barkley)

• Joe Coleman (Co-Founder & CEO, Contently)

• Matt Conlin (Co-Founder & President, Fluent)

• Susan Diana (Director, Product Management, Marriott International)

• David Fossas (Sr. Director, Brand, WP Engine)

• Lauren Gentile (VP & Executive Creative Director, Epsilon)

• Ellen Gurevich (VP, Integrated Marketing, IMA)

• Edward Harris (CMO, Valley Forge Tourism)

• Katie Hotze (Senior Principal, Mercer)

• Joe Hyland (CMO, ON24)

• Valerie Jennings (CEO & Founder, JSMM+VBM)

• Ashley Karr (Sr. Director, B2B Marketing, CarGurus)

• Karen Kehm (Sr. Director of Marketing, BEN)

• Ryan Kelly (VP of Marketing, Nanigans)

• Anthony Kennada (CMO, Gainsight)

• Edward Kennedy (Sr. Director, Commerce, Episerver)

• TJ Leonard (CEO, Storyblocks)

• Kathryn Loheide (Head of Global Digital Marketing, Cheetah Digital)

• Jordan Maddex (VP of Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Jet Linx Aviation)

• Travis Montaque (CEO & Founder, Emogi)

• April Mullen (Director of Consumer-First Marketing Adoption, Selligent)

• Michael Provenzano (CEO & Co-Founder, Vistar Media)

• Michael Ruby (Creative Director, Flexport)

• Ryan Schulke (Co-Founder & CEO, Fluent)

• Shivika Sinha (CEO & Founder, The Veneka Group)

• Shiloh Stark (Director, Digital Fundraising, The Nature Conservancy)

• Brian Stempeck (Chief Client Officer, The Trade Desk)

• Siddharth Taparia (SVP & Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP)

• Amanda Tavackoli (SVP, Marketing & Comms, TBK Bank)

• Jessica Vogol (Sr. Director, Growth Marketing, Movable Ink)

• Liz Walton (VP, Marketing, Yext)

• Jenna Weinerman (Marketing Director, Updater)

• Michelle Wood (Director of Marketing, Atlantic|Pacific)

• Patrick Workman (VP, Global Platform Partnerships, Experian)

• Eden Zeek (VP, Digital Experience, Fidelity Investments)

A list is informative—but only if we interrogate why it matters.

The Deeper Tension Behind This Topic

Public recognition promises to democratize attention—to spotlight possibility for every young practitioner staring at a blank LinkedIn profile. Yet selection committees inevitably wrestle with an uncomfortable question: Does an award celebrate genuine impact or reflect who already had access to visibility?

Professionally, the honorees relish validation; psychologically, many report “impostor flashes” once the applause fades—Am I actually that good or did I just navigate the system well? Meanwhile, peers outside the list navigate their own cognitive dissonance, oscillating between inspiration and envy.

This tension—between inclusive aspiration and exclusive limitation—mirrors a broader social dynamic: meritocratic ideals colliding with structural reality. The list is both a ladder and a mirror, revealing how opportunity, privilege, and hustle intertwine.

What Gets in the Way

Three currents of noise distort how we interpret awards:

1. Conventional Wisdom: We still equate fast growth with brilliance, even when macro tailwinds inflate numbers. Without context, revenue milestones risk turning into vanity metrics.

2. Status Anxiety: Social feeds turn accolades into comparison arsenals. A scroll through congratulatory posts can leave mid-career marketers questioning their trajectory more than celebrating others’.

3. Media Over-Simplification: Headlines compress multi-year journeys into neat origin stories. TJ Leonard’sdecade of incremental product pivots at Storyblocks, for instance, becomes a single bullet in his bio, masking the messy pivots that forged resilience.

These distortions nudge us toward surface admiration instead of substantive learning. They also burden winners with maintaining a flawless narrative—an impossible expectation that discourages risk-taking after the confetti settles.

Integrating This Insight

How do we convert recognition culture from scoreboard to compass?

1. Shift the unit of analysis from who to how. When you read about Anthony Kennada’s community-led growth at Gainsight or Lauren Gentile’s creative-tech fusion at Epsilon, extract the underlying frameworks: customer-obsession and cross-functional fluency. Make those the takeaway, not merely the titles.

2. Ask the second-order question. Instead of “Why wasn’t I on the list?” ask “What conditions allowed them to thrive, and can I replicate any?”. Valerie Jennings leveraged niche agency positioning; Eden Zeek championed UX inside a legacy finance giant. Different contexts, shared principle: strategic focus beats simple hustle.

3. Design post-recognition stretch goals. If you are a winner, treat the accolade as a social contract to push boundaries further. Research shows public commitments boost follow-through; channel that accountability into mentoring, cross-industry experiments, or bold product bets.

4. Celebrate progress narratives, not just highlight reels. Teams should dissect Katie Hotze’s enablement programs or Shivika Sinha’s purpose-driven branding to understand the iterative setbacks behind them. Normalizing the slog builds healthier ambition across the org chart.

5. Build horizontal networks. Recognition can silo achievers atop invisible pedestals. Reverse that by hosting peer roundtables—think Brandon Beatty swapping direct-mail insights with Jessica Vogol’s email-personalization playbooks. Collective intelligence outperforms isolated brilliance.

Ultimately, an award list should function like a well-drawn map: it tells us where unexplored ridges lie and reveals the contours of peak performance. But climbing remains an individual endeavor. We lace our boots differently, carry unique supplies, and confront weather that no judging panel can predict.

The 2018 “40 Under 40” class has earned a moment beneath the marquee lights. Our task—as colleagues, competitors, and co-architects of marketing’s future—is to use that illumination to find our own footing on the trail, not to cast larger shadows on the valley below.