Samantha Avivi built a career across every side of the brief

At five years old, Samantha Avivi got an unusually complete view of the advertising business. Her father, Stan Harris, a copywriter and agency owner, placed her in a Woman's Day advertisement. On the set, she watched the director hold a creative vision, the actors settle into their parts, the copywriter and art director see an idea become physical, and the client pace while an account executive kept close. The scene stayed with her. So did her father's stories about creative awards, especially Cannes Lions. Long before Avivi had a marketing title, she had seen the peculiar mix of invention, persuasion, collaboration and nerves that makes an advertisement happen.

That early view became a career viewed from nearly every other angle. She grew up in Florida, studied advertising at the University of Florida, and moved to New York to climb through agency life. She worked at DMB&B, Young & Rubicam and BBDO, leading efforts for brands including M&M's, Always and Pampers. She would later sit on the client side, work with a giant retailer, advise executives, run marketing in the automotive aftermarket and oversee consumer brands inside Bayer. More than 30 years and work in over 40 countries have given her something broader than a category specialty: a working knowledge of how a good idea survives an organization.

A mock interview opens a different door

The hinge in Avivi's story was not a carefully engineered promotion. It was a mock interview at Procter & Gamble. She took a chance on the conversation and moved from making advertising into the wider discipline of brand management. At P&G she spent seven years across Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences, Tampax, Pampers, Luvs and Kandoo. She also worked on the Walmart team running P&G's baby-care business, a vantage point that put retailer reality next to brand ambition.

Her agency years had taught her how creative work gets made. P&G taught her to connect that work to a business system. The combination produced visible career markers. The University of Florida credits her with creating the M&M's Global Color Vote and helping create Pampers' Baby-Stage-of-Development diapers. It also records recognition from the Effies, Clios, Cannes, Ad Age and Brandweek. These were not isolated flashes. They were evidence of a marketer learning to move between consumer insight, product, retail and culture without losing the central idea.

“It's not all a straight line up - there are ups and downs. Success is defined just as much in the times where you struggle and you pick yourself up and you continue going.”Samantha Avivi, Learnings from Leaders podcast

The quote gives her résumé its proper shape. Avivi does not present curiosity as a decorative leadership trait. She treats it as permission to move sideways when a different seat can teach her something. Kimberly-Clark followed, where she became global marketing director for a $4.2 billion bath-tissue business covering Scott, Cottonelle, Neve and Andrex. In 2012, the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications inducted her into its Hall of Fame. She later worked in purpose-led growth consulting with the Jim Stengel Company, adding the advisor's view to her agency, client and customer experience.

The automotive aisle becomes a leadership lab

Automotive marketing might look like a hard turn from consumer packaged goods. For Avivi, it became another way to test the same fundamentals in a more complex buying system. As Tenneco's chief marketing officer, she led global brand strategy and creative development for 31 aftermarket brands, 42 product lines and 26 countries. The portfolio served both business buyers and consumers. In 2023 she moved to Advance Auto Parts as CMO, responsible for building the future of marketing across do-it-yourself customers, professional customers and owned brands.

The categories changed, but the job retained its essential tension. A global system needs standards strong enough to create coherence. A local team needs latitude to meet a real customer in a real market. Brand strategy has to be memorable, measurable and usable by people who did not write it. Avivi's public reputation as a coach and connector makes sense in that context. The executive's task is partly to choose. It is also to help a distributed group understand the choice well enough to act without waiting for another meeting.

At Bayer, trust becomes the organizing idea

Avivi joined Bayer in April 2024 as North American CMO for its Consumer Health division. Her responsibilities stretched past advertising into innovation, in-house media, data and analytics, consumer insights, agency relationships, creative production and marketing training. The portfolio included familiar names such as Claritin, MiraLAX, Bayer Aspirin, Aleve, Alka-Seltzer, Midol and One A Day. In other words, she was responsible not just for what brands said, but for much of the machinery that decided what they should say and how the work would improve.

Her theme at Bayer has been trusted brands. In her public description of the company's framework, consumer understanding, cohesive planning, consistent delivery and better use of data belong in the same system. She has also argued that artificial intelligence can improve decisions and interactions while insisting that the future of marketing remains built by people and for people. The stance is practical. Technology can accelerate the work. It cannot relieve a brand of the need to make a clear promise and keep it.

On June 8, 2026, Bayer named Avivi global CMO of Consumer Health. The appointment put her in charge of global brand building, marketing and consumer strategy and gave her a place on the division's global leadership team. In her own announcement, she framed the move around listening, learning and partnering. She named the colleagues whose trust had opened the opportunity and the teams around the world with whom she would share it. The language matters because it matches the method: authority is useful when it creates clarity for other people.

Cannes closes one circle and opens another

When Avivi finally attended Cannes Lions in 2023, the trip carried the weight of those childhood stories. She wrote about the memory of her father's pride in the awards he brought home and the many creative colleagues who shaped her own work. She returned in later years with a growing sense that participation carried a responsibility to mentor, contribute and give something back to the community that had inspired her.

In June 2026, soon after her global appointment, she delivered a Cannes keynote titled “Trading in the Currency of Trust in Consumer Healthcare.” Her reflection afterward was strikingly people-centered. For all the talk of AI, creativity and growth, she wrote, she would remember the colleagues, partners and mentors behind the work. The moment on the stage belonged in part to the team that made her prepared to stand there.

That is the quiet symmetry in Avivi's story. A five-year-old watches adults turn a sketch into a living scene. A young agency professional learns the craft. A mock interview changes the route. An operator collects new points of view across categories and countries. A global CMO steps onto the stage her father once described, then turns the spotlight back toward the people around her. The ambition survived, but it matured from wanting to witness creative recognition into wanting to build the conditions where a team could earn it.

“The future of marketing will be shaped by technology, data and creativity. But it will always be built by people and for people.”Samantha Avivi, reflecting after Cannes Lions 2026

Range is only valuable when it returns as judgment

There is an easy but incomplete lesson in Avivi's career: be open to detours. The harder lesson is to make the detours compound. Agency work alone does not produce empathy for agencies. Retail experience does not automatically create commercial fluency. Global scope does not guarantee respect for local knowledge. Each move becomes useful only when its perspective changes the decisions made in the next job.

Avivi has made talent development part of that compounding process. She chaired Tenneco's Women's Business Resource Group, served as an executive champion for Women in Auto Care, and helped revive the South Florida chapter of the P&G Alumni Network after years of inactivity. She has described herself as energized by developing talent and helping teams see the possibility in ambitious brand building. Colleagues' public recommendations repeatedly emphasize humility, passion, dependability and an ability to coach beyond her immediate scope.

Outside work, the biographical details are grounded rather than ornamental. She married her high-school sweetheart, has three children, runs and listens to podcasts. Running is an apt companion to her view of a career: progress accumulates, the route changes underfoot, and difficult miles still count. The point is not to pretend every stretch is pleasant. It is to continue with enough attention to learn from the terrain.

Bayer's global brief will test every part of the operating system Avivi has assembled. She must connect brands across markets without sanding away their relevance. She must make data and AI useful to creative people without confusing speed for judgment. She must ask teams to earn trust in an environment where consumers can inspect, compare and answer back. None of those problems belongs to marketing alone. That may be why a leader who has worked on nearly every side of the brief is now responsible for the whole one.