B2 Awards Top Jury

MELISSA WASHKO

Chief Brand Officer
GE Aerospace

BIO

Melissa Washko leads global brand for GE Aerospace, including creative, advertising, events and trade shows, licensing, and governance. Following the historic separation of GE Vernova and GE HealthCare, she and her team have advanced the standalone GE Aerospace brand into its next era, evolving one of the world’s most iconic industrial brands with clarity and discipline. 

Operating in one of the most complex and highly regulated industries in the world, her organization stewards a multi-entity global brand system supporting air framers, airlines and defense customers operating thousands of aircraft worldwide. Through rigorous governance and enterprise-wide alignment, her team ensures the brand performs consistently across business units, joint ventures, and global partners. 

Together, they have sharpened GE Aerospace’s enterprise positioning, launched its first standalone advertising campaign, and strengthened brand stewardship across a global ecosystem of customers, regulators, suppliers, investors, and future aerospace talent. 

Melissa’s leadership philosophy links brand directly to enterprise value, whether the audience is B2B or B2C. She believes great brands start with the customer—using insight, creativity, and data to shape experiences and stories that build trust, reduce friction in complex decisions, and create durable preference that delivers measurable commercial and brand impact. 

With more than two decades of experience in enterprise brand strategy and transformation, she has held senior leadership roles at GE Aerospace, Amazon, Krusteaz, and Frito-Lay. She has built and scaled high-performing global teams and is committed to developing the next generation of brand and creative leaders. 

As a jury member for the 2026 ANA B2 Awards, Melissa brings experience evaluating work that must be creatively compelling, strategically rigorous, and commercially effective in complex B2B environments. 

Q&A with Melissa Washko

Please provide one word that defines great B2B brand leadership today. 

Human 

Please share one trend you are watching closely. 

I’m watching how data, AI, and human creativity are coming together to reshape complex B2B buying journeys into experiences that feel far more personal, intuitive, and human from end to end. The most exciting work uses these tools not just to target more efficiently, but to build trust, anticipate needs, and simplify decisions for real people making high‑stakes choices.  

In one sentence – What will it take to make an entry worthy of a B2 Award? 

To be B2 Award–worthy, an entry needs to clearly link a real business problem to a sharp customer insight, bring it to life with distinctive, integrated creativity, and show that it drove meaningful impact for both the business and the brand. 

What advice would you offer to teams preparing submissions for the B2 Awards? 

Tell your story simply and honestly: spell out the business challenge, show that you really understand your buyers, explain the idea in plain language, walk us through how it showed up across the journey, and be specific about the results that mattered most. Don’t over‑package it—just make it easy for us as jurors to see the straight line from problem to insight, to idea, to execution, to impact. 

Why do awards programs like the B2 Awards matter to the health and progress of the marketing industry? 

I believe programs like the B2 Awards raise the bar for what B2B marketing can achieve by celebrating work that balances creativity with commercial rigor, they help all of us learn faster by surfacing what really works, and they give teams the recognition and confidence to keep pushing past “good enough” toward truly transformative work. 

What distinguishes exceptional B2B marketing from work that is simply “good”? 

Exceptional B2B marketing starts with the recognition that buyers are humans, not just accounts or buying centers, and it changes how they feel, think, and act. The best work builds trust and empathy, creates a sense of almost “irrational” loyalty in your favor when options look similar, and does all of that in a way that is distinctively ownable by your brand and demonstrably valuable to the business. 

How have your expectations of great marketing evolved over the past few years— and how does that shape how you evaluate work today? 

The bar on craft and creativity keeps going up, but so does the need for discipline and focus. A few years ago, I might have been impressed by a big idea on its own; today, I’m looking for work that is deeply rooted in customer insight, thoughtfully orchestrated across the journey, and tied clearly to commercial and brand outcomes. As a judge, that means I’m less swayed by surface-level polish and more interested in whether the team made smart choices: did they prioritize the right audiences, use data and technology responsibly, and build something that could scale and sustain—not just spike? 

When reviewing submissions, what signals tell you that a program is driving real, sustainable business growth? 

I look for a coherent story over time, not just a set of impressive numbers. Signals of sustainable growth include: a clear link to the business strategy, evidence that marketing is shaping pipeline quality and win rates, and indications that the work is strengthening brand preference, trust, and potentially pricing power. I pay close attention to whether the program is repeatable and scalable—for example, did the team build capabilities, partnerships, or assets that will make the next campaign smarter? When I see marketing, sales, and product aligned around shared metrics and a shared narrative, that’s a strong sign the impact is real and durable. 

How do you balance creative ambition with commercial accountability when assessing great B2B work? 

I don’t see them as opposites; the best B2B work does both. As a judge, I’m drawn to ideas that are brave and distinctive, but I’m equally focused on whether that ambition is anchored in the business. I ask myself: would this work still make sense if you stripped away the award show context and sat in front of a CFO or a sales leader—would they see the value? I give the highest marks to entries that show they took smart risks: they pushed the brand and the category forward, but they did it with a clear understanding of the commercial stakes and a plan to measure and learn. 

How do you evaluate the role of data, AI, and marketing technology in creating meaningful B2B brand impact? 

In my mind, data, AI, and martech are means, not ends. I’m impressed when teams use them to make experiences more human, relevant, and timely, not just more automated. In judging, I’ll look for how data and AI informed the insight, targeting, and creative decisions, and how they were used to learn and optimize as the program unfolded. I’m also watching for responsible use—respect for privacy, transparency, and avoiding over‑personalization that feels unsettling. The strongest entries will show how technology helped them deepen relationships and trust at scale, rather than just drive short-term clicks or leads. 

Get to know the 2026 B2 Top Jurors.