KATE SANTORE
SENIOR, INTEGRATED
MARKETING CONTENT,
THE COCA-COLA COMPANYWhen Kate Santore moved to Atlanta after her
husband took a job at a local hospital, deciding
where she wanted to work—Coca-Cola—was
easy. Actually landing the dream job took a bit
more effort.
“I networked my way inside and outside,”
says Santore, 33. “They weren’t hiring and
I fi nally just started emailing VPs, literally
Googling their email addresses.” Eventually, she
scored a meeting with the company, and was
hired to work on digital brand strategy. Today,
she serves as senior integrated marketing
content manager, working with her team on
projects like Coca-Cola’s popular “Share a
Coke” campaign.
One of the biggest challenges Santore faces
is taking a 130-year-old product and fi nding new
ways to “drive reconsideration and brand love
and consumption, but without any new news to
rely on,” she says. “I’ve got no new feature, no
new camera [to promote], so it’s really all
about our storytelling.” —Katie RichardsARLIE SISSON
VP, EMERGING PRODUCTS, CONDÉ NASTHow do you bring a 100-year-old publishing company into
the modern era? Just ask Arlie Sisson, vp of emerging
products for Condé Nast.
From developing chatbots for Facebook Messenger to
coordinating company-wide hackathons (judged by Condé
Nast artistic director and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour,
of course), 31-year-old Sisson has helped lead the fi rm into
new technologies and platforms.
“My team does dabble in things that aren’t immediately
or outwardly sexy,” she says, “but the guts of what we do get
expressed from multiple brands’ perspectives. Our legacy
as a company is our best asset, because the distribution and
experimentation can’t be beat.”
Most recently, Sisson’s team created a “beauty assistant”
chatbot as a companion to Allure’s annual Best of Beauty
issue, which featured 283 individual items this year.
“Instead of taking too much time fi nding a product
that you’re interested in from the list, this bot helps readers
locate, and purchase, exactly what they want in a very
modern way,” Sisson says. —S.M.24
MATTHEW HENICK
HEAD OF DEVELOPMENT,
BUZZFEED MOTION PICTURESAs head of development for BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, Matthew
Henick leads a team that focuses on producing massive viral hit
series, not just one-off sensations. Take the BuzzFeed series Worth It, a
video road-trip-slash-game-show hosted by members of Henick’s team,
which has received over 300 million views totaling 2 billion minutes of
watch time in just two short seasons.
The ultimate goal, says 34-year-old Henick, is to create shows and content
partnerships that prove why the brands behind the “$72 billion spent on ad-supported
television” should also be paying attention to digital video.
Henick notes that his team, and BuzzFeed as a whole, values the data they collect from viewers as it
informs their future iterations. “We’d be fools to ignore the richest sets of data coming from our audience who
consumes the internet across every platform,” he says. “Platforms are starting to invest more attention to
long-form content, like Worth It, which is exciting from both a monetary and a tech/UX side.” —S.M.
ZACH NEWCOMB
MANAGING DIRECTOR, NORTH AMERICA
MARKETING OFFERING, ACCENTURE
INTERACTIVEIt was a passion for fi lm that eventually led Zach Newcomb to
a top role at the world’s largest digital marketing network. “I love
storytelling and had grand visions of being a documentary fi lmmaker,”
explains Newcomb, 35. “But it quickly dawned on me, eating ramen four
nights a week in New York, that it’s a tough way to make a living.”
After working in production and strategy at HBO, Google, The New York
Times and R/GA, the Columbia Business School graduate landed a top role at Accenture Interactive.
“Creativity is more important than it’s ever been, but that’s no longer just two guys drinking scotch
and coming up with an idea,” he says. “[At Accenture], we have to fundamentally change how a business
helps customers and delivers value.”
Newcomb, who played a key role in Accenture’s recent acquisition of design practice Wire Stone,
thinks the organization will only continue to grow. “Lots of clients say, ‘You built the infrastructure, now
help us bring it to life,’” he says. “That’s the next evolutionary step for us.” — P.C.SISSON: HERVE KWIMO; HENICK: COURTESY OF BUZZFEED; SANTORE: MARC ANDREW STEPHEN