Speaker Series

Claire Burns joined The Hartford in September 2021 as chief marketing officer. In this role, she oversees the enterprise marketing, branding, digital, customer experience, media relations, communication, and community relations functions. She also chairs the company’s Sustainability Governance Committee, where she leads actions to sustain The Hartford’s top quartile ESG performance in the U.S. insurance sector.

Prior to joining The Hartford, Burns served as chief marketing and strategy officer for Prudential International and MetLife’s chief customer officer. Prior to that, she held leadership roles at ALICO (a former subsidiary of AIG), Lincoln Financial, and Aetna.

An advocate for using public-private partnerships to solve social problems, Burns completed a year-long fellowship with the Presidio Institute and the White House Office of Social Innovation in 2015, where she helped harness actuarial data for public good. She has chaired several non-profit boards of directors focused on equalizing access to opportunity including Our Piece of the Pie in Hartford, Conn., Leadership Greater Hartford in Hartford, Conn., and Access Educational Services in Bridgeport, Conn. She currently serves on the board of directors for Healthfirst, a New York health insurer, The Wadsworth Atheneum, and the board of advisors for the Yale Center for Customer Insights.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Wesleyan University and her master’s in business administration from the Yale School of Management.

At Kraft Heinz, Todd Kaplan serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of North America where he is helping lead the marketing function across the company’s $22BN food and beverage portfolio in North America. The portfolio includes over 50 brands that span 40 different categories, including iconic brands like Heinz, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Oscar Mayer, Velveeta, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Lunchables, Ore-Ida, Capri-Sun, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Maxwell House, Grey Poupon, and Cool Whip among many others.

In his role, Todd has been tasked to unleash the potential of Kraft Heinz’s brands through elevated creativity, a deeper connection to culture, and building modern marketing capabilities that can accelerate the business and fuel Kraft Heinz’s next wave of growth. In addition to elevating the creative, strategic, and innovation agendas across the brands, Todd is helping guide the North American Growth Office inclusive of all media, digital, and Kraft Heinz’s award- winning in-house content studio, “The Kitchen,” and help oversee Kraft Heinz’s strategic joint ventures with NotCo and Just Spices.

Prior to joining Kraft Heinz, most recently Todd was Chief Marketing Officer - Pepsi, where he led all marketing for the Pepsi brand and PepsiCo’s sparkling water business in North America. During his tenure, Todd was instrumental in re-energizing the Pepsi brand and is widely credited with bringing the brand back into the cultural zeitgeist – from reinvigorating the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show platform, to developing disruptive new product innovations like Nitro Pepsi and Pepsi x Peeps, to putting out some of the boldest, most talked about, and most globally awarded creative the brand has seen. Most notably, he initiated and led the creation of an entirely new Pepsi logo and visual identity system for the brand – rolling it out across the brand’s 10 billion consumer touchpoints in the United States and around the world.

Todd’s impact has been widely recognized and well regarded within the marketing community and beyond. He was recognized as a top CMO by Forbes on their “Entrepreneurial CMO Top 50” list and by Business Insider as one of the “Top 25 Most Innovative CMOs in the World”. His work has been awarded numerous Cannes Lions, and in 2024, he received ADWEEK’s prestigious “Brand Genius” award. He’s also been recognized by the UJA’s “Industry Visionary Award” and by The Wall Street Journal as an inaugural honoree in MTM’s “Visionaries” platform. Todd has been featured by Rolling Stone as one of 20 “Marketing Rockstars” and selected as one of the country’s “Top 50 Marketers in North America” multiple times by OnCon Icon Awards, while leading the charge at PepsiCo to be named as Marketing Dive’s “Marketer of the Year”.

Todd gives back his time to students through the ANA Educational Foundation and speaking at institutions such as Yale, Duke, and Stanford. He has also served as a juror for industry leading awards ranging from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to The Effies to The One Club for Creativity.

He currently sits on the Board of Advisors for the Yale University Center for Customer Insights, the OAAA Brand Council, and the North America Board of Directors for the Ad Council and the International Advertising Association, and holds a BA in Economics from Northwestern University, and an MBA from Yale University.

Jen Berliner is the Head of Brand & Innovation at Patagonia Provisions, Patagonia's food and beverage division. At Patagonia, she focuses on commercializing and scaling foods that help fight the environmental crisis, with an emphasis on building consumer awareness and adoption of regenerative organic agriculture.

Prior to Patagonia, Jen was the General Manager and CEO of two high-growth natural foods startups, Medlie, which made organic vegetable drinks, and then Moonshot, the first climate-friendly snack brand. She grew Moonshot from its inception to 3,500 retail locations in under two years. Moonshot was the 2021 Expo West NEXTY winner for Best New Salty Snack, a featured brand in Whole Foods Market’s 2022 Top Trends list, and was acquired by Patagonia in March 2023.

Jen previously worked at PepsiCo, holding multiple brand management roles with a focus on strategy and better-for-you product innovation, and GMMB, a policy-focused cause marketing agency. She found her passion for using food to drive behavior change that makes people and the planet healthier while earning her MBA at the Yale School of Management. She also holds a BA from Vanderbilt University. Jen serves on the board of Naturally Bay Area, and resides in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.