Publicis Sapient - Female Thought Leader of the Year
Company: Publicis Sapient, Boston, MA
Company Description: Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally-enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity.
Nomination Category: Thought Leadership Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Female Thought Leader of the Year - Business Services
Nomination Title: Teresa Barreira, Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Teresa joined Publicis Sapient in 2018 and defined the company and brand strategy to help the organization evolve and transform to become a leader in Digital Business Transformation. Working across the company of 20,000 employees worldwide, she relaunched the brand, identified and activated strategic shifts, refocused the portfolio, clients and work. Since joining as CMO three years ago, she’s invested in technology, built a data-informed marketing organization, hired new talent, created an agile, growth-minded, diverse team, and in 2020 grew marketing influenced pipeline by 278% - the largest contribution in company history. She’s focused on driving diversity, equity and inclusion and built a leadership team that is 87% female and 67% non-white, and models a culture of empowerment, creativity, and fearlessness, encouraging young marketers to test-and-learn without fearing failure.
As a commitment to the next generation, Teresa established a program preparing young talent with critical skills, creating opportunities for marketers to work on initiatives like Global Wellness Week, driving impact and well-being across the company. Teresa also created an internship program to drive DE&I and exposure into potential careers. 90% of the first cohort is comprised of first-generation college-students from racially diverse backgrounds.
Teresa built an entirely new content and thought leadership practice at Publicis Sapient, rapidly accelerating content production and enabling the company to be known for its library of expert digital business transformation thought leadership, incorporating data visualization, videos, podcasts, blogs, interviews and perspectives. Most importantly Teresa led the team to take an integrated, responsive, and agile approach to content production, to market relevant content faster. She did all of this with a lean team far smaller than competitors in the industry.
At the height of the pandemic the team was able to pivot under Teresa’s leadership, creating an interactive streaming platform, called The HOW Channel. The HOW Channel is the first of its kind, with a focus on insightful and immersive thought leadership it’s shifted content creation to an interactive experience. Since launching in August 2020, The HOW Channel now hosts over 93 videos, from 13 series, and in just the 2H of 2020 generated 30% of the total marketing pipeline.
In addition, Teresa also contributes her own perspectives through thought leadership on critical topics such as DE&I, women in leadership, and innovation in marketing.
Teresa is breaking the mold of marketing in technology and services companies. Unlike other players in the industry, Barreira believes that CMOs are no longer custodians of the brand and that the function has become far more experimental. What once resembled an assembly line, with tasks passed from person-to-person, looks more like a lab, filled with opportunities to test and learn, and pilot unique approaches to reach clients and customers. The team works in a POD model which brings a standard set of disciplines such as a copywriter, designer, data analyst, marketing strategist, all together to execute cross-functionally in the POD. The work is well orchestrated and the PODs work collaboratively, the same way an operating room brings together different experts—surgeons, anestheiologists, nurses, to save a patient—the team members in the POD all work together with their expertise to achieve the same shared goal.
Teresa’s unique approach to innovation has led the Pubicis Sapient marketing organization to drive a reinvention of the brand, enabling the company’s own transformation. She believes that marketing today is in a constant state of beta and that the work is always evolving, she encourages her teams to favor speed and progress over perfection. Teresa embraces and instills a strategic mindset within her team and views it as one of the most significant opportunities in influencing the business today.
Reference any attachments of supporting materials
https://thehowchannel.publicissapient.com/