Brent Smart

Brent Smart is a marketing leader who has won both a Cannes Grand Prix and a Grand Effie, underscoring a career-long conviction that creativity is the ultimate driver of commercial performance.

As Chief Marketing Officer of Telstra, Australia’s largest and most iconic telco, Smart is leading one of the most ambitious brand transformations in the global communications industry. In just two years, he has rebalanced the organisation’s approach to brand, reimagined its agency model through the creation of +61, and presided over more than 80 major creative awards, including multiple Cannes Lions and Effies. His leadership doubled Telstra’s marketing ROI and helped make it the fourth strongest telco brand in the world.

Before Telstra, Brent Smart revitalised Australia’s insurance giant IAG. At his helm, NRMA Insurance rose from the 36th to the 3rd strongest brand in the country, reversing nearly a decade of decline. Mark Ritson famously remarked that the NRMA turnaround “could be taught at Harvard” and positioned Smart as “one of the best CMOs in the world.”

Over two decades, Brent Smart has helped shape some of the most admired creative cultures in the industry, from Colenso BBDO to serving as CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi New York. He has worked with household American brands including Cheerios, Tide, and Walmart. A graduate of The Marketing Academy Fellowship and co-host of the acclaimed Black T-Shirts podcast, Smart remains a relentless advocate for creativity and culture.

Many global marketers look to him because he has rethought the systems that make great work possible: how agencies partner, how internal teams understand creative excellence, how production should be valued, and what it really takes to shift a company’s mindset from metrics-obsessed to meaning-obsessed. His approach has influenced CMOs and agency leaders across continents.