Suzana Ristevski

Suzana Ristevski is the chief marketing officer for Google Australia, leading the company’s marketing strategy across search, ads, devices and services. Since stepping into the ANZ CMO role in June 2024, Ristevski has operated on a clear principle that marketing shouldn't just strive to be visible, it needs to be valuable. This practical approach is delivering clear commercial returns. 

Over the past year, the ads business surpassed its targets by 125%, while the devices and services division turned Australia into Google's global internal benchmark for marketing effectiveness, directly driving 25% of total sales and generating $2.50 in gross revenue for every marketing dollar spent.

Ristevski’s philosophy of focusing on human behaviour—shaped by behavioural science—over product features was a centrepiece of the Google Pixel 10 rollout. Anchored to a partnership with the Australian Open and fronted by Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri, the ‘Switch Sides, Switch Phones’ campaign featured a ‘Change of Ends’ stadium takeover. The project hit 111% of its sales target and drove substantial net-new traffic, largely from iOS switchers, to the Google Store.

Behind the scenes, Ristevski has re-engineered how her team operates in the age of AI. To clear out the admin work and give her team time to think, she instituted a ‘Stop Doing’ mandate, auditing and cutting low-value legacy tasks. In under 12 months, this shift cut Google Ads Academy production costs by 70%, dropped production timelines from 14 weeks to four, and gave back an average of 10 working days per employee across APAC to reinvest into higher-level strategic work.

This disciplined focus on investment is equally evident in her business-to-business strategy. Faced with budget reductions across devices, Ristevski brought sales, finance, and product leaders into a cross-functional ‘war room’ to cut lower-performing projects and reallocate those funds, securing an incremental $2.6 million in co-investment. In addition, when CRM data identified a gap of 2,500 major local advertisers who wanted to adopt AI but lacked the technical confidence, she launched targeted ‘Seller Bootcamps’ and digital academies through Google Marketing Live AUNZ. The program shifted the conversation from general ad spend to bottom-line business value, pushing the regional pipeline to 139% of its target and driving a 9.9-point lift in customer growth perception in an internal study.

Ristevski’s leadership style focuses on replacing old command and control management with a coaching model that balances clear transparency with the safety to experiment. To blend data with human empathy, her teams paired Large Language Models (LLMs) with real-world living room interviews to uncover what users actually look for in Google Search. To visually explain this connection to industry partners, she commissioned a piece by artist Ben Koracevic using 35,000 nails and a single thread, using the art as a metaphor for how Google AI connects isolated data touchpoints to reveal true human intent.

Ristevski’s long-term impact on the industry was recently recognised with her induction into the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum Hall of Fame as CMO of the Decade. Whether helping to  quantify a $240 billion AI opportunity for Australia's national policy to sharing strategies on stage about the modern path to purchase, her knack for turning complex tech into a clear business narrative sets a benchmark for marketers across the region.