The ranking of advertising and marketing keynote speakers

1. Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk is chairman of VaynerX and chief executive of VaynerMedia, the agency he built after growing his family's wine business and running a daily video show about it. He has written several books including Crush It!, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook and Day Trading Attention, and he invests in consumer and technology companies.

His sessions cover where attention is actually available on each platform and what it costs to make enough creative to meet it, drawn from campaigns his agency is running at the time. The delivery is fast, loud and profane in places, which organizers should price in. The material suits agency, brand and industry audiences that want a view from inside live media buying, and he is a reliable draw for a room that has to be filled.

Best fit: industry conferences, agency all-hands meetings, and brand marketing summits

2. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

The range Erica Dhawan covers shows up most in room size. The same body of work goes to a 20-person executive session and to an association main stage with thousands in it, and what changes between the two is the shape of the session and not the subject. Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts, and RealLeaders put her first among female keynote speakers. The content gets worked through with the event owner in advance, so the room hears its own situations named.

Best fit: executive sessions, company conferences, and association main stages

3. Wendy Clark

Wendy Clark was global chief executive of dentsu International and before that chief executive of DDB Worldwide North America, and earlier she ran sparkling brands and strategic marketing at The Coca-Cola Company. She has held senior marketing roles at AT&T as well, and she has sat on industry and public company boards.

Her sessions cover what it takes to run marketing at global scale from both sides of the table, the client side and the agency holding company side. She has held the top job on each side and is direct about where the two misread each other, including on fees, on talent and on what a review process actually costs. The material suits marketing leadership and agency executive audiences working through structure, talent or partnership questions, and she is comfortable in a panel or an interview as well as a keynote.

Best fit: marketing leadership summits, agency executive meetings, and industry association events

4. Marty Neumeier

Marty Neumeier wrote The Brand Gap, Zag, The Designful Company and Metaskills, a set of short books that are standard reading in brand and design teams. He worked as a designer and brand consultant for decades, including a period as director of transformation at Liquid Agency, and he has lectured at design schools internationally.

His sessions cover brand as a strategic choice about difference, and the design practice that follows from taking that seriously. He works from clear diagrams and a small number of definitions he has refined over many years, and the session is unusually quiet for the category. The material suits brand, design and product marketing teams, and it is often booked when a company is about to reposition and wants a shared vocabulary first.

Best fit: brand strategy offsites, design team gatherings, and repositioning kickoffs

5. Ann Handley

Ann Handley is chief content officer at MarketingProfs and wrote Everybody Writes and Content Rules, and she publishes a long-running newsletter on marketing writing. She was a founding editor of ClickZ in the early commercial web and has spent her career on the editorial side of marketing, close to the writing itself.

Her sessions deal with the writing itself, which is the part of marketing most teams produce the most of and examine the least, and she works through real before-and-after examples. The register is warm, the session usually includes an exercise, and she gives the room something to edit before it leaves. The material suits content, communications and demand generation teams, and it transfers well to any group that writes to customers.

Best fit: content marketing conferences, communications team offsites, and marketing training days

6. Jay Baer

Jay Baer founded the consultancy Convince and Convert and has written several books including Youtility, Hug Your Haters, Talk Triggers and The Time to Win. He has advised more than 40 of the Fortune 500 over a long consulting career, and he is a certified tequila sommelier, which turns up in the staging of his sessions.

His sessions cover customer experience as a source of word of mouth, including the research behind what makes customers talk about a company unprompted and what speed alone is worth. He builds each talk around research he has commissioned himself, so the numbers in the talk are his own and are usually new to the audience. The material suits customer-facing and marketing operations teams, and sales and service audiences booked alongside marketing.

Best fit: customer experience conferences, marketing operations meetings, and sales and service summits

7. Brian Solis

Brian Solis wrote X, Lifescale and Mindshift and spent years as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group and then at Prophet, where he published research on digital transformation. He now holds a global innovation role at a large enterprise software company and continues to write and speak on digital behavior.

His sessions cover how customer behavior shifts when the interface does, and what a company has to change internally to keep up with it. He works from research he has run himself across several waves of the same question, which means the talk shows how the answer has moved across those waves. The material suits digital transformation and customer experience functions, and executive groups that have funded a program and want an outside read on it.

Best fit: digital transformation summits, customer experience conferences, and executive briefings

8. Bozoma Saint John

Bozoma Saint John was chief marketing officer of Netflix, chief brand officer at Uber and head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music, and before that she ran entertainment marketing at PepsiCo. She wrote The Urgent Life and has appeared on industry power lists repeatedly through that run of roles.

Her sessions cover building a brand that holds a place in culture, drawn from campaigns she led at companies in very different states of health. She talks openly about what those jobs cost her personally, including a period of loss she writes about in the book, and the sessions carry that weight alongside the marketing content. The material suits brand marketing and consumer teams, and events that want a keynote with a personal register.

Best fit: brand marketing summits, consumer team gatherings, and industry main stages

9. Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland is vice chairman of Ogilvy in the United Kingdom, where he began as a copywriter and later founded the agency's behavioral science practice. He wrote Alchemy, writes a long-running column in The Spectator, and he was president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

His sessions apply behavioral science to commercial problems, with the argument that the rational answer and the effective one are frequently different things. The talk moves between examples at speed, the humor does a good deal of the work, and the examples run from airline seating to doorbell design, a long way from the usual case studies. The material suits industry conferences and strategy groups, and it works best with audiences who have already sat through the data-led version of the same subject.

Best fit: advertising industry conferences, strategy team offsites, and marketing effectiveness events

10. Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway teaches marketing at New York University's Stern School, and his books include The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Adrift and The Algebra of Wealth. He founded the brand intelligence firm L2, which he sold to Gartner, he co-hosts the podcasts Pivot and Prof G, and he has served on the boards of several public companies.

His sessions cover the economics of the large platform companies and what their position does to everyone marketing around them, delivered with charts and blunt conclusions. He makes predictions on the record, revisits the ones that missed, and the slides are built to be screenshotted and passed around afterward. The material suits executive summits and industry main stages, and rooms that have decided they want a provocateur on the agenda.

Best fit: executive summits, industry main stages, and investor and board events