Donovan Neale-May has spent more than four decades shaping how the world’s top marketing leaders connect, learn, and grow. As founder and executive director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, he built what has become the only peer-powered global network dedicated entirely to senior marketing executives. Today, the organization brings together more than 16,000 members across roughly 120 countries and 10,000 companies, representing close to a trillion dollars in combined annual marketing spend.
Donovan Neale-May | Founder and Executive Director | Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council
Few individuals in the marketing profession can claim to have created an institution of this scale, and fewer still have kept it relevant and growing for twenty five years. His work sits at the intersection of community building, executive education, and original research, a combination that has made the CMO Council a fixture in the professional lives of thousands of marketing leaders around the world.
At EliteX, we are proud to have Donovan Neale-May as Cover Story of the edition: Prominent Leaders in Marketing, 2026.
The CMO Council traces its roots back more than two decades to a Brand Recovery Summit held in Silicon Valley. What began as a gathering of marketing leaders looking to make sense of a changing profession has grown into a robust global community. Neale-May built the organization on a simple but powerful idea, that senior marketers learn best from one another, not from vendors or theorists. The Council today operates seven regional advisory boards with more than 350 senior leaders, maintains academic ties with over 100 top tier business schools, and has produced an archive of nearly 300 practitioner based research reports along with more than 120 expert interviews and points of view. It also runs more than 100 on demand webinars, podcasts, and video programs, giving members constant access to fresh thinking from their peers.
Neale-May spotted where corporate leadership was heading before it fully arrived.
In 2026, the CMO Council marks its 25th anniversary. Neale-May has described this milestone as a chance to reflect on how far the marketing profession has come. When the Council started, only a handful of companies had anyone holding the title of chief marketing officer. Today, close to 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a C-suite marketing leader, and tens of thousands of professionals around the world carry the CMO title or something close to it. Yet Neale-May and his team have never treated this growth as a finish line. They have continued to push the conversation forward, tracking how data driven decision making, artificial intelligence, fragmented marketing supply chains, and the blending of marketing with revenue and customer experience functions have reshaped the role again and again. The Council’s ongoing mission is to grow the relevance and value of the CMO position even as new adjacent titles, from chief growth officer to chief data officer, continue to multiply across the corporate landscape.
Beyond the CMO Council, Neale-May founded and leads the Business Performance Innovation Network, known as the BPI Network. This is a separate global community built for executive change agents, professionals who are responsible for driving transformation, remodeling business operations, and pushing process innovation inside their organizations. Where the CMO Council speaks directly to marketing leadership, the BPI Network casts a wider net across functions, connecting people who are tasked with reinventing how their companies work.
More recently, Neale-May turned his attention to a new frontier in the corporate world, the rise of the growth officer. He formed and now leads the Growth Officer Council, a community built for chief strategy, revenue, commercial, and finance leaders, along with the innovators building new technology for revenue operations. The first major initiative to come out of this new council is called Growth Engineering, Mapping Routes to Revenue, an online content resource designed to help this emerging class of executives navigate their own version of the challenges CMOs faced years earlier. The move reflects a pattern that has defined Neale-May’s career, spotting where corporate leadership is heading before it fully arrives, then building the community and content infrastructure to support it.
Long before he was building executive networks, Neale-May was building brands. He founded and serves as president of GlobalFluency, a San Jose based international demand generation marketing firm. Through GlobalFluency, he pioneered what the company calls an Intelligent Market Engagement model, an approach to thought leadership content marketing that treats insight and credibility as the foundation of demand generation, rather than an afterthought bolted onto a campaign. Before founding GlobalFluency, Neale-May held senior management roles at some of the biggest names in marketing, promotions, and public relations, including a stint at Ogilvy and Mather. His career took him through Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, and London, giving him a genuinely international view of how brands are built and sustained across very different markets and cultures. That early agency grounding, working across large multinational accounts and fast moving new ventures alike, gave him a practical understanding of what marketing leaders actually need, insight he later poured into the design of the CMO Council itself. Over four decades as an international marketing and brand strategist, he has consulted with more than 300 organizations, ranging from established multinationals to brand new venture startups looking to find their footing.
Donovan Neale-May built the only peer-powered global network dedicated entirely to senior marketing executives.
Neale-May’s influence extends well past the world of marketing and business strategy. He is the founder of the SABLE network, short for South African Business Link to Experts, a trusted community of expatriate South Africans working around the world. Through SABLE, these global professionals offer mentoring, coaching, and advisory support to South African companies, entrepreneurs, and institutions that are trying to raise funding, commercialize new ideas, or expand into international markets. The initiative reflects a strong thread of loyalty to his home country that runs alongside his global career, using the expertise of a diaspora community to open doors for South African innovation.
Neale-May’s reach across the marketing world is also visible in the sponsorship and partnership relationships the CMO Council has cultivated over the years. Leading technology providers, agencies, and business service firms partner with the Council to reach its highly engaged base of senior decision makers, supporting the organization’s research agenda and its ongoing events, webinars, and publications. This sponsorship ecosystem, carefully built and maintained under Neale-May’s leadership, has helped keep the Council financially independent and able to produce original, practitioner focused research rather than relying solely on membership dues. It is a model that has sustained the organization through a quarter century of economic cycles, technology shifts, and changes in how marketing itself is practiced.
His record of board and academic service is equally substantial. Neale-May spent 18 years serving on the board of directors of Travelzoo, the publicly traded travel deals company listed on NASDAQ under the ticker TZOO, a tenure that speaks to the kind of long term trust placed in his judgment by fellow directors and shareholders alike. He also chairs the Rhodes University Trust in the United States and sits on the university’s Board of Governors in South Africa, maintaining a close connection to his alma mater’s mission and future. His academic contributions have also taken him abroad, having served as an adjunct professor at Seoul National University in South Korea, sharing his decades of marketing expertise with a new generation of students in Asia.
Today, Neale-May’s board leadership continues through his role on the Board of Directors of Clickatell, a global technology company founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2000. Clickatell pioneered business-to-consumer connectivity through SMS and has since evolved into an AI-powered chat commerce platform serving enterprises across banking, retail, travel, telecommunications, healthcare, and other industries. His involvement with Clickatell reflects his continued engagement with technology, digital transformation, and the evolving ways businesses connect with customers.
Under Neale-May’s direction, the CMO Council has also built a substantial content and thought leadership engine that keeps its global membership engaged year round. The organization produces newsletters and monthly briefings, hosts intimate peer networking programs and invention sessions, and runs a career opportunity referral and talent sourcing service for its members. Its Insight Center gathers facts, statistics, and trend analysis that marketing leaders rely on for planning and forecasting, while its expert views section, including a regular blog, points of view columns, interviews, and podcasts, keeps a steady stream of practitioner voices flowing into the community. This combination of research, content, and direct peer access is what has allowed the Council to remain the trusted first stop for marketing leaders looking to benchmark their performance, compare notes with counterparts, and stay ahead of a fast changing profession. Neale-May has consistently emphasized that the value of the organization lies not in any single report or event, but in the cumulative weight of decades of practitioner insight, freely exchanged among people who face the same pressures at the top of their organizations.
Over four decades, Neale-May has consulted with more than 300 organizations worldwide.
Neale-May’s personal story adds another dimension to his professional achievements. He left South Africa in 1974 to play rugby professionally in Italy, a decision that set him on the international path his career would eventually follow. Rugby gave him an early lesson in the value of teamwork, discipline, and competing at a high level, qualities that would later show up in how he built and ran organizations spanning continents. These days, his life still moves between two very different worlds. He keeps a home in Simon’s Town, South Africa, a place that lets him escape the summer heat of his primary United States residence in Las Vegas, Nevada, while his professional headquarters remain in San Jose, California. This blend of a South African upbringing, a European athletic career, and a Silicon Valley business base has shaped a leadership style that is both globally minded and deeply practical.
What sets Neale-May apart is not simply the number of organizations he has founded, but the consistency of the underlying philosophy across all of them. Whether it is the CMO Council, the BPI Network, the Growth Officer Council, or SABLE, each organization is built around the same core belief, that peer to peer knowledge exchange among senior decision makers produces insight that no single company, consultant, or vendor can replicate on its own. He has built platforms, not products, and communities, not campaigns, and that distinction has allowed each of his ventures to remain relevant even as industries, technologies, and titles have shifted around them.
Looking ahead, Neale-May shows no sign of slowing his pace of innovation. As the CMO Council enters its next chapter following its 25th anniversary, and as the newly formed Growth Officer Council begins to find its footing among a fresh generation of revenue focused executives, Neale-May continues to do what he has always done best, identify where business leadership is heading next and build the infrastructure to help executives get there together. His career stands as a reminder that lasting influence in business often comes not from chasing every new trend, but from creating durable communities where the people closest to the problems can help each other solve them. For thousands of marketing and growth leaders around the world, the organizations he has built remain a dependable place to turn for honest, peer tested guidance, a legacy that will likely continue to expand well beyond its first twenty five years.
His career blends a South African upbringing with a truly global business outlook.