Vote for Greater Boston’s top CMO

VentureBeat has teamed up with the Ad Club of Boston in a competition to recognize the best CMOs in New England.

Please vote here for who you think is the best CMO in the region. We’re looking specifically for those who have done the best job growing their company over the past year.

We’ll select the top 20 from your nominations, and recognize them at the upcoming GrowthBeat Summit in Boston on June 1-2, where we’re also inviting the best CMOs around the country to speak and network. We invite you to apply to join us to celebrate.

Here are some more details:

Your nominees will ideally be CMOs, but we recognize that not every leading marketer carries that title. Other titles will be considered — VPs of Marketing, Chief Digital Officers, and so on — but the candidate should carry the growth mandate for their companies and also rank as their companies’ top marketer.

We’re soliciting names of marketers from all industries. Once the votes are in, we’ll look closely at your nominations, and then take vertical differences into consideration in our final consideration of the top 20. For example, a marketer of an apparel company may not have grown as fast as a mobile ad network. But that’s okay, because we’ll also consider how the company is doing versus its industry peers. Private and public companies will be considered. (But growth based on VC funding fumes alone will not suffice to make a CMO a winner.)

We’ll create a separate top marketer ranking for agencies and professional services.

Here are the main criteria we’d like you to consider. Which marketers have achieved impressive growth by:

1. Articulating a well-honed and creative “story” for their company’s product
2. Leveraging technology to have the right conversations with the right customers in the right channels

It’s our belief that these two elements, creativity and technology, need to be fused together properly to create significant growth. Indeed, they are the focus of the GrowthBeat Summit event on June 1-2 in Boston for CMO-level executives.

Please make your nominations by May 18. We’ll then announce the leading nominations, which we hope will spur still more votes to help us select the right finalists. Our panel of experts — made up of myself, our VP of Research John Koetsier, President of the Ad Club Kathy Kiely, among others — will choose the winners based on careful consideration of your votes and accompanying supporting evidence. You’re welcome to nominate up to three names.

VB and Ad Club are doing this for two reasons.

First, we think it will provide much needed recognition for New England marketers who are doing a kick-ass job. And we want to make this truly a community-driven exercise, which is why we’re partnering with other Boston groups, including the Ad Club, which has about 30,000 members in the brand advertising community. We’ve invited representatives from these organizations to assist us in spreading the word.

The second reason is selfish: VB is building what is quickly becoming the largest repository of data from marketers about the technology and the strategies they’re using to get ahead. Events like GrowthBeat Summit allow us to get more intimate with the community. The good side to this is that we’re an independent news company, and objectivity drives us. We’re truly looking for the best and the brightest marketers in Boston.

Thank you for participating, and hope to see you at the event in June!

Make sure you vote!