Doug Zarkin is a commercial growth and brand leader, bestselling author and TEDx speaker who has spent his career transforming businesses by making brands more relevant in people’s lives and culture. He has built and scaled businesses including mark. at Avon, Victoria’s Secret PINK, Pearle Vision and Take 5 Oil Change, combining consumer insight, P&L discipline and cultural storytelling to drive measurable growth. A 2026 Adweek Marketing Vanguard, Doug is the author of Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone and is known for a simple leadership philosophy: get close to the customer, get close to the frontline, find the truth, create clarity, then move.
How many years have you been a judge?
This is my first year!
What are your responsibilities in your current role and what do you love most about your job?
In my most recent CMO role, I was responsible for connecting brand, customer acquisition, digital, media, CRM, consumer insights and local-market activation to commercial growth across a large, rapidly expanding multi-unit business. That meant everything from setting the brand strategy and managing significant media investment to building the team, partnering with operations and franchisees, and ensuring we measured marketing by business outcomes, not simply marketing metrics.
What I love most is unlocking what a business could become. I love getting close to customers and the people on the frontline, finding the truth that may be hiding in plain sight, and then bringing people across the organization together around a clear path forward. For me, the most rewarding part of the job is seeing that clarity turn into action and ultimately into measurable growth.
What inspired you to pursue your career path?
I’ve always been fascinated by why people choose one thing over another, especially when the products themselves may not be dramatically different. Early in my career, I realized marketing wasn’t simply about advertising; it was a combination of human behavior, creativity, culture and business, and that intersection hooked me.
What has kept me in it is the opportunity to build and transform things. I’ve been fortunate to work across wildly different categories, from beauty and fashion to healthcare and automotive, and each one has reinforced the same lesson: get close enough to people to understand what really matters to them, then use that insight to create something they genuinely want to choose. That combination of human understanding and measurable business impact is still what energizes me today.
What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you?
Media Planner @ Lintas: NY. It taught me the importance of understanding the why, not just the what.
What do you look for to determine excellence in video?
Does it make me feel something, and by feeling something does it then inspire me to learn or choose / do something?
What initiatives or projects are you working on now that excite you?
A few things are particularly exciting to me right now. I’m advising organizations at important inflection points, helping leadership teams sharpen their positioning, rethink customer acquisition, build stronger brand and growth systems, and translate strategy into something their organizations can actually execute.
I’m also spending significant time exploring the relationship between trust, technology and human decision-making. That builds on my TEDx work around “Thinking Human” and a recent position paper I developed on trust as a measurable operating and commercial asset, not simply a brand metric.
And personally, I’m thinking deeply about my own next chapter: finding the right business where I can bring everything I’ve learned across brand building, transformation and commercial growth to help unlock what that organization could become next.
Tell us about a moment of recognition that had an effect on you – whether personal or official? What does recognition mean to you and why is it important in our industry?
One of my nephews wrote his college entrance essay about me. I’ve been fortunate to receive professional recognition throughout my career, but nothing has ever landed quite like that.
My two nephews are incredibly important to me. They’re like sons to me, and they’ve grown up almost like brothers to my own two kids. I always knew I was “Fun Uncle Doug,” the guy who showed up, made them laugh, took an interest in what they were doing and hopefully made life a little more fun. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that, along the way, they were also watching how I approached life, work, people and decisions.
Learning that I had helped shape how someone I love so deeply thinks about himself and the person he wants to become was incredibly humbling. There isn’t an award, title or professional accolade that could mean more to me than that.
It also changed how I think about recognition. The recognition that matters most isn’t always public. Sometimes it’s discovering that the way you showed up mattered to someone when you didn’t even realize they were watching.
That’s particularly important in our industry because we spend a lot of time recognizing outcomes: the campaign, the growth, the award, the promotion. Those things matter. But leadership leaves a much longer trail. People remember whether you invested in them, challenged them, believed in them, gave them room to grow and helped shape how they see what’s possible.
If I’ve done that for the people I love and the people I’ve had the privilege to lead, I can’t imagine a better form of recognition.
Do you have any specific practices you lean on to spark creativity?
Absolutely. My biggest creativity practice is getting out of the conference room and closer to the truth. I’ve become an Avon representative, a licensed optician and an oil technician because I’ve learned that the best ideas rarely come from staring harder at a PowerPoint. They come from customers, frontline employees and experiencing the business yourself.
I also believe strongly in starting with a notebook, not a playbook. I ask questions, listen for patterns and try not to rush toward the answer. Then I deliberately bring together people who see the problem differently, because creative tension is often where the breakthrough happens.
And finally, I ask three deceptively simple questions: Who are we? Who are we built for? How do we get chosen? When you get brutally clear about those three things, creativity stops being about generating more ideas and becomes about finding the one that makes people say, “Of course. Why didn’t we think of that?”
In your experience, what is a significant change you are seeing happen in the video, television, and/or film industry, and what insight can you share about how to navigate it?
I think one of the most encouraging changes happening in television is actually a return to amazing storytelling.
I grew up on shows like Hill Street Blues and later The West Wing, where the magic wasn’t simply what happened in an episode. It was watching characters become people you cared about. You understood their flaws, their motivations, their relationships. You became invested in what happened to them because great writing had transformed a character into someone who felt real.
Then reality television exploded, and for a long time I think we became fascinated by something different: watching people rather than being transported by stories. It didn’t eliminate great scripted television, but it changed where a lot of the attention and cultural energy went.
What excites me now is seeing audiences rediscover the power of beautifully constructed human stories. Ted Lasso is ostensibly about soccer, but that’s not why people fell in love with it. Shrinking isn’t really about therapy. These shows take complicated, imperfect people and make us care deeply about their journeys. They remind us that great storytelling doesn’t just entertain us. It makes us feel something about someone.
And I think there’s an important lesson in that for anyone navigating video, television or film today, particularly as technology makes producing content easier and the volume of content becomes almost infinite.
Don’t confuse more content with better storytelling.
Technology can make things faster, cheaper and more personalized. But the competitive advantage is still profoundly human: Can you create a character I care about? Can you make me feel something? Can you tell me a story I don’t want to leave?
In a world where almost anyone can create content, storytelling may actually become more valuable, not less.
What excites you about judging for the Telly Awards?
Being in the room where it happens, as they say.
