Marketing Experts Worth Following in 2027

Marketing professor and founder, MiniMBA

The sharpest available corrective to whatever marketing fad is currently being sold to your board.

Ritson spent 25 years teaching MBA marketing at London Business School, MIT Sloan and Melbourne Business School before going full-time on the MiniMBA courses. He is abrasive on purpose, and that is the value: he is one of the few people with the credentials and the appetite to say publicly that a popular idea is unsupported. His columns now run across Marketing Week and Adweek, which launched a US MiniMBA portal with him.

Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia

The empirical base underneath most of what the effectiveness crowd argues about.

Sharp has directed the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute since 1995. Mental and physical availability, distinctive brand assets, and the case against heavy loyalty-first strategy all trace back through his and the Institute's work. He and Ritson shared a stage at Cannes in June 2026 and agreed on more than the industry expected — mental availability, distinctive assets, sophisticated mass marketing, and running campaigns for years rather than weeks. That consensus is the current centre of gravity in the field.

Group Head of Effectiveness, adam&eveDDB

Half of the partnership that produced the 60/40 rule — still the strongest argument in a budget meeting.

Binet is an econometrician by training who has spent his career measuring what advertising actually does to sales. With Peter Field he wrote The Long and the Short of It, whose brand-building versus activation split is the single most quoted finding in modern marketing effectiveness. Follow him for the ongoing refinement of that work rather than the headline ratio, which gets misapplied constantly.

Independent marketing effectiveness consultant

The IPA Effectiveness Databank, read out loud by the person who has spent longest inside it.

Field spent 15 years as a strategic planner before two decades as an effectiveness consultant, and is an Honorary Fellow of the IPA. His long-running analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank is the evidence behind most claims about the commercial value of creativity, and the reason "creative campaigns work harder" is a measured finding rather than an agency talking point.

Economist and founder of magic numbers; Marketing Week columnist

Econometrics explained so a non-analyst can act on it — the rarest skill on this list.

Kite has a PhD in economics, 25 years of econometrics behind her, and sits on the IPA's effectiveness leadership group. She built, scaled and sold the analytics consultancy magic numbers. What makes her worth following over other modellers is that she translates: her charts are built to be understood by the person who has to defend the budget, not by another economist.

VP Brand Strategy, Jellyfish

The best short-form writer on the brand-versus-performance argument, and the least tribal about it.

Two decades across AMV BBDO, BBH, Leo Burnett and adam&eveDDB before joining Jellyfish, with IPA and Cannes effectiveness awards for McDonald's, Barclays and John Lewis. Roach occupies useful ground: he takes the effectiveness evidence seriously without treating digital and performance channels as the enemy, which makes him the most quotable person on this list when you need to end a brand-versus-performance fight internally.

Co-founder, Evidenza

Co-authored the research that gave B2B marketing its own laws of growth, rather than borrowed FMCG ones.

Lombardo spent years running research and development at LinkedIn's B2B Institute with Peter Weinberg, where their work popularised the 95-5 rule — that only about 5% of business buyers are in market at any moment. Les Binet has called the pair "the Binet and Field of B2B". They now run Evidenza, whose synthetic research angle is explicitly aimed at producing marketing plans a finance team will accept.

Co-founder, Evidenza

The other half of the B2B Institute partnership, and the better writer of the two.

Ten years at LinkedIn, where he co-founded the B2B Institute and served as its global head of development. His research has been carried by Marketing Week, Adweek, WARC and The Drum. Worth following separately from Lombardo because he posts more of the underlying reasoning and less of the conclusion.

Founder, Exit Five

The most useful B2B marketing community of the last five years, and he runs it in public.

Former VP Marketing at Drift and CMO at Privy, now running Exit Five — a paid community of several thousand B2B marketers with a podcast, newsletter and events attached. The community is the real asset; his feed is the front door to it. Follow him for the operating reality of a mid-size B2B marketing team rather than for frameworks.

VP of Marketing, Loxo

Demand gen from someone currently carrying the number, not consulting on it.

Ex-Refine Labs, now running marketing at Loxo. Kuehnle posts the thing most demand-gen commentary leaves out: what happened when the tactic was actually run, including the failures. Particularly good on attribution's limits and on why pipeline sourced by marketing is a harder number than it looks.

ABM advisor and consultant

Account-based marketing without the platform vendor's framing.

Previously at Gong and Navattic, now advising on ABM independently. ABM commentary is unusually captured by the tools that sell it; Owens is one of the few consistent voices treating it as a coordination problem between marketing and sales rather than a software purchase.

Founder and CEO, Ambient Strategy

The most-cited single voice in B2B positioning, and low-volume enough that everything is worth reading.

Dunford has positioned over 200 technology companies, including Google, IBM and Epic Games, across 25 years leading marketing, product and sales teams. Obviously Awesome is the standard reference on product positioning; Sales Pitch extends it into the sales conversation. She posts rarely, which on a platform optimised for volume is itself a recommendation.

Co-founder, MKT1

The best writing anywhere on how to structure and staff a marketing team.

Most marketing advice tells you what to do. Kramer's MKT1 work tells you who should do it, in what order you should hire them, and what the org chart should look like at each stage — the questions a first-time VP of Marketing actually has and can rarely find answered. Templates and frameworks are unusually concrete.

Founder, Lion Words

Messaging as a discipline with a method, rather than a copywriting flourish.

Wiredu works on the gap between positioning and the words that end up on the page — the place most B2B companies leak the most value. Useful counterpart to Dunford: where Dunford settles what you are, Wiredu settles how that gets said consistently across a site, a deck and a campaign.

Co-founder and CEO, SparkToro

Called the zero-click shift early, and has the clickstream data to keep proving it.

Fishkin founded Moz, then SparkToro, and has spent the last several years documenting the structural collapse of click-through from search — the trend that turned out to define this decade for marketing. He argues from data rather than anecdote, and is unusually willing to publish findings that are bad for his own product category.

Chief Evangelist, SparkToro; founder, Zero Click Marketing

Turned the zero-click thesis into an actual content methodology, which Fishkin never quite did.

Natividad co-created the zero-click content framework with Fishkin in 2022 and has since built it into its own podcast and consultancy, with a book due this autumn. Where the diagnosis is "clicks are gone", her work is the prescription: how to structure content that pays for itself on the platform it is published on.

Growth advisor; author, Growth Memo

The only person doing rigorous behavioural research on why AI search changes buyer choice, not just how to get cited.

Indig led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian before going independent. Growth Memo is the most consistently rigorous publication in the AI-search space, largely because he runs studies instead of collecting anecdotes — his work on how users behave in front of an AI answer, and on brand strength as a citation driver, is the closest thing the field has to primary research.

International SEO consultant and founder, Orainti

Has published the clearest end-to-end operating system for AI search optimisation.

Solis has built what most of the AI-search commentary lacks: a complete process. Her AI Search Optimization checklist moves a team from diagnosing visibility, through analysing which sources the engines are drawing on, to implementation and recurring validation. If you need one person to hand to a team that has to do this work rather than talk about it, it is her.

Founder and CEO, iPullRank

Explains how retrieval actually works, which almost nobody else in this space attempts.

King takes a systems-level view of AI search: query fan-out, passage-level retrieval, and what information retrieval literature says about how these engines select sources. It is the most technically demanding material on this list and the most durable, because it describes mechanisms rather than current behaviour.

VP SEO Strategy and Research, Amsive

Runs the tests everyone else cites — including the ones showing AI answers can be manipulated.

Ray does forensic, adversarial testing of AI search: what gets cited, what does not, and how easily the engines can be fed bad information. Her work on AI "gullibility" is some of the only research treating these systems as things to be probed rather than optimised for, which makes it valuable for risk assessment as much as for visibility.

Founder, Zyppy SEO

Evidence-backed testing on brand signals and how they feed AI visibility.

Shepard runs data-driven studies rather than opinion pieces, with a particular focus on how brand strength translates into visibility in AI-generated answers — increasingly the mechanism that decides who gets cited. Listed here with his own site rather than a social profile because more than one plausible LinkedIn profile for him is in circulation and we could not confirm which is primary.

Founder and CEO, Foundation Marketing

Treats AI visibility as a distribution problem, which is the read most SEOs are still missing.

Simmonds runs Foundation, a B2B content agency, and has spent years arguing that creating content is the cheap part and distributing it is the job. That framing has aged well: he was early to Reddit as a driver of both organic and AI-sourced discovery, which is now visible in citation data across the engines.

Founder, Kalicube

Entity and brand-understanding work that predates the AI search scramble by years.

Barnard has been working on how search engines understand entities — who you are, what you do, what you are associated with — since long before answer engines made it urgent. His Entity Home concept and the frameworks around it are the practical answer to "how do we make the machines describe us correctly", which is now a board-level question.

VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

Practical, testable AI-search tactics using data you already have.

Long's most useful contribution is mining prompt-shaped queries out of Google Search Console — a way to find AI-search intent without buying another tool. He runs controlled experiments on citation and publishes the results, which puts him in a small group of people producing evidence rather than predictions.

Author, Lenny's Newsletter and Lenny's Podcast

The default reference for product and growth, and the interview archive is the real asset.

Lenny's Newsletter is the largest business publication on Substack, and the podcast has become the standard venue for growth and product leaders to explain what they actually did. It is more product than marketing, but the growth, pricing and positioning episodes are directly applicable, and the back catalogue functions as a reference library.

Head of Growth, Lovable

Writing the AI-native growth playbook from inside one of the fastest-growing companies of the cycle.

Verna held growth leadership roles at Miro, SurveyMonkey, Amplitude and Dropbox before joining Lovable, which reached roughly $200M ARR in under a year with about 100 people. That vantage point is the reason to follow her now rather than for the PLG frameworks she is already known for: she is describing a growth model as it forms, including the parts that contradict the last decade of advice.

Author, Growth Unhinged

The source of the SaaS benchmarks everyone else ends up quoting.

Poyar spent 15 years at OpenView helping software companies scale from $1M to $100M+ ARR, and Growth Unhinged now reaches tens of thousands of operators. He publishes actual benchmark data on pricing, packaging and go-to-market efficiency — which is why his charts turn up, usually uncredited, in other people's board decks.

Head of Growth and Operations, Navattic

Freemium and self-serve mechanics from someone shipping them weekly.

Marcotullio runs growth at Navattic and posts the operational detail that growth commentary usually skips — what the experiment was, what it cost, what actually moved. Particularly good on interactive demos and on the practical question of what to put in front of a buyer before they will talk to sales.

Performance creative consultant; Chief Evangelist, Motion

Codified creative strategy as a discipline, and teaches it in public for free.

Denney has managed over $100M in Meta spend and built a six-figure YouTube following teaching creative strategy. Her methodology is the useful part: she treats ad analysis as content analysis — creator, message, persona, imagery — rather than metrics analysis, and separates primary KPIs from what she calls storytelling KPIs. In a year where creative quality outweighs targeting on paid social, this is the most directly applicable material on the list.

Growth and creative consultant

The "ugly ads" case, argued by someone who has spent $600M+ proving it.

Hott has managed over $600 million in social ad spend across AT&T, Toyota, Kraft and Microsoft before moving to DTC growth. His central argument — that polished studio creative routinely loses to deliberately rough, native-looking ads — has become consensus, and he was making it before it was.

Consumer behaviour analyst and performance creative consultant

Creative strategy grounded in behavioural science rather than pattern-matching last quarter's winners.

Levinger has spent years on consumer psychology and behavioural science applied to performance creative, working with DTC brands including Fabletics and Kettle & Fire. She is the counterweight to teardown-driven creative strategy: her work explains why an ad worked at the level of motivation and identity, which is what makes it repeatable.

CEO, Common Thread Collective

Will take apart your ROAS assumptions in public, with the arithmetic attached.

Holiday runs Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce growth agency. He is analytically aggressive in a way that is rare among agency principals — publishing the finance behind ecommerce growth, arguing about contribution margin instead of ROAS, and being specific about what agencies are and are not worth. Most valuable if you own a P&L rather than a channel.

VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot; editor, chiefmartec

The only person credibly tracking the shape of the entire martech market, annually, for 15 years.

Brinker publishes the martech landscape — the map everyone screenshots. The 2026 edition is the interesting one: the market effectively stopped growing, up 0.79% to 15,505 products, while churning hard underneath with 1,488 products added and 1,367 removed. His current argument is that 2026 shifts the question from AI for marketers to AI for customers, which changes what your stack is for.

Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations, Indeed

Marketing ops explained by someone who has run it at AWS scale and can still write plainly.

Alfonso led marketing operations at AWS for nearly four years and now directs marketing strategy and operations at Indeed. Marketing ops is chronically under-served by public writing — most of it is vendor content — and The Martech Handbook plus his weekly posts are the most reliable substitute for a mentor in the discipline.

Founder and CEO, SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute

The most marketing-native AI voice — every item is framed as a decision a marketer has to make.

Roetzer sold his agency in 2021 and now runs the Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. What separates him from general AI commentary is translation: he does not report that a model shipped, he reports what it changes about your team, your workflow and your budget. Also runs MAICON and the Artificial Intelligence Show podcast.

Associate Professor, The Wharton School; co-director, Wharton Generative AI Labs

Not a marketer, and that is the point — the best available empirical work on AI and knowledge work.

Mollick studies the effects of AI on work, entrepreneurship and education at Wharton, and One Useful Thing has become the most widely shared practitioner AI writing of the last two years. He runs and reports actual experiments on what AI does to output quality and team performance, which is more useful for planning than any amount of marketing-specific AI commentary. Listed with his newsletter rather than a social profile because that is where the substance is.

Chief Marketing Officer, HubSpot

A sitting CMO of a public company thinking out loud about AI — a rare combination.

Bodnar sets HubSpot's global marketing strategy and co-hosts Marketing Against the Grain with Kieran Flanagan. Most CMO content at this level is sanitised; his is not, largely because the podcast format lets him work through problems rather than present conclusions. He and Flanagan co-wrote Loop, a marketing framework for the AI era.

SVP Agentic GTM and Systems, HubSpot

Building an AI-native go-to-market org in public, rather than writing think-pieces about one.

Flanagan was SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, then CMO at Zapier, and is now back at HubSpot running Agentic GTM and Systems. The remit is the reason to follow him: he owns the build of the agentic go-to-market motion, so what he posts is implementation detail rather than prediction.

Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

The best writing about writing in marketing, and a masterclass in newsletter craft by demonstration.

Handley co-founded ClickZ, has built two multimillion-dollar companies, and writes Total Annarchy fortnightly. The newsletter is worth subscribing to twice over: once for the advice, once to study how it is constructed. In a period where most marketing content is being generated rather than written, she is the strongest argument for the difference.

Senior Content Marketing Manager, Moz

Content strategy that starts from topical authority rather than a keyword list.

Mmeje works at the intersection of SEO and content strategy, and is one of the clearest voices on building topical authority — covering a subject completely enough that search engines and answer engines treat you as the source. That approach has aged particularly well as citation, rather than ranking, became the goal.

B2B landing page and conversion consultant

Owns the narrowest useful niche on this list: the page your paid traffic actually lands on.

Bober works almost exclusively on B2B landing pages and conversion. It is a deliberately small remit, and the reason to follow her is that this is where a large share of paid budget quietly dies — the ad worked, the page did not, and nobody on the team owns the page. She posts teardowns with the reasoning made explicit.

Founder, The Reeder

Built content functions at Gong and Clari, and is candid about what that actually took.

Reed ran content at Gong during the period its content became the thing every B2B company tried to copy, then at Clari, and now advises independently. Useful for the operating detail behind a content brand: how much was produced, by whom, at what cost, and which parts of the reputation were downstream of a small number of decisions.