ECDMA GLOBAL AWARDS ANNOUNCE 2026 WINNERS IN MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
The second annual awards recognize documented results across marketing, e-commerce, product, technology, customer
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NY, Aug. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association has announced the ECDMA Global Awards 2026 results after receiving 538 nominations from professionals, companies, teams, agencies, and technology providers worldwide. The second annual cycle followed a debut year that drew more than 350 entries.
ECDMA Global Awards
The 2026 competition covered marketing campaigns, e-commerce businesses, technology products, and individual professional achievement, with additional categories for content, education, agencies, teams, customer operations, logistics, and communications. The marketing award categories focused on campaigns and strategy, and the e-commerce award categories focused on business growth, customer experience, technology, and operations. Each of those categories used criteria specific to the work being judged.
Because ECDMA charged no fee for individual categories anywhere in the world, professionals did not need employer sponsorship or an awards budget to take part. Anyone familiar with the work could nominate a person or organization they considered deserving. A client could put forward an agency, while a manager, colleague, or business partner could nominate a professional, whether or not the nominee knew about the submission in advance. Organizational categories carried an administrative fee.
Every nomination first passed an administrative check for eligibility, completeness, and supporting evidence. Qualified entries were then assigned to several jurors for independent scoring under the rules and thresholds for their category.
To win, the leading nomination needed at least 80 points out of 100 overall and an average of at least 8 out of 10 on the category’s main criterion. Missing either mark left the category without a winner.
“Strong professionals do not always have PR teams or awards budgets,” said Eugene Mischenko, President of ECDMA. “That should not keep their work out of an international competition. We made individual entry free worldwide, then asked every nominee to show what they did and what changed. When someone sees an ECDMA Global Award on a profile, I want the next question to be about the work behind it.”
Below are some of the winners recognized in the 2026 cycle. The full list of categories, winners, and finalists is available on the ECDMA Global Awards website.
Yana Kuzina was named Best Digital Marketing Professional of the Year for rebuilding Careers to Love PA, a recruitment campaign for nonprofit aging services employers in Pennsylvania. Her team moved spending from low-intent advertising into search, retargeting, video, and CRM measurement. During 2024, website sessions increased 35 percent and conversions rose from 2,054 to 3,340. Media spending fell from $41,600 to $32,000.
Yelena Kovalenko was named Best Growth Marketing Professional of the Year for a customer acquisition system created for a premium beauty business in Dubai. Paid social advertising, quiz-based qualification, message follow-up, and CRM tracking produced 1,685 recorded conversions. The work generated AED 766,410 in attributed revenue, with an average ticket of AED 528.93 and reported acquisition costs of about $3 to $6.
Omnisend received Best Marketing Automation Platform for its email, SMS, and web push tools. The platform is used by 150,000 e-commerce brands for cart recovery, welcome programs, post-purchase communication, lifecycle marketing, and churn prevention. Omnisend reported that merchants generated an average of $79 in revenue for every $1 spent on the platform, up from $68 in the preceding year. Its product teams also completed more than 1,300 customer interviews and analyzed more than 27 billion emails during 2025.
MarketProvider was named Product Data Management Solution of the Year for software that combines product information management, digital asset management, syndication, and market monitoring. Customers reported average first-year ROI of 300 percent, 90 percent fewer product listing errors, four times faster time to market, and a 50 percent reduction in manual content work.
Vladyslav Ielisevych received E-Commerce Professional of the Year after building a U.S.-based wholesale business around direct brand relationships and authorized distribution. Sales reached $146,853 in 2023, $571,963 in 2024, and $1.07 million in 2025. During 2025, the business sold 31,444 units through major marketplaces, with Ielisevych managing sourcing, inventory, and marketplace operations.
Niki Aghaei was named Best E-Commerce Product Manager of the Year for leading product and business transformations across retailers, technology companies, professional services firms, and high-growth businesses. She led deployments involving commerce platforms, marketplaces, forecasting, analytics, workflow automation, and enterprise reporting across several sites and business functions while customer-facing systems remained live. The work improved forecasting accuracy and operational visibility across those businesses. It also enabled retail platform expansions and product launches within multimillion-dollar growth programs.
Margarita Barysheva received Best Customer Success Professional of the Year after building a customer success and support function at a cloud security company. In 2024, net revenue retention reached 114 percent, customer satisfaction was 9.65 out of 10, and churn stayed below 8 percent.
Nikita Tyryshkin earned Brand Strategy Professional of the Year for a six-stage method developed for industrial B2B brands. It was used to establish Worker, a compact special-purpose machinery brand, after the operating company lost a dealership agreement. The new brand was registered in six countries. Company revenue rose from RUB 203.8 million in 2021 to RUB 862.7 million in 2023.
Yelena Kozubskaya was recognized as Best Digital Commerce Professional – Europe for rebuilding the customer-facing business of a national quick-service restaurant group in Kazakhstan. She led the launch of a new mobile app and loyalty program and oversaw CRM, performance marketing, and delivery partnerships. App orders grew almost fivefold between September 2025 and January 2026. Sales rose 45 percent year over year after the rebrand, and delivery orders increased close to 500 percent from 2023 to 2024. Within six months of the relaunch, the new brand ranked second in top-of-mind awareness among quick-service restaurant brands in the country.
Vladyslav Havryliuk earned Best E-Commerce & Digital Entrepreneur of the Year for developing V.J.Coffee in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. He opened the first location in 2019 and expanded the business to five operating sites with online ordering, delivery, and reported annual revenue of about UAH 10 million. The business maintained a net margin of 30 to 35 percent. All five sites remained open through pandemic restrictions, the full-scale war, and repeated power outages.
How the 2026 Jury Worked
Campaign entries were judged on results, creative execution, strategy, audience response, and innovation. E-commerce businesses were assessed on growth, customer experience, technology, operations, and market impact. Individual categories considered the scale of the achievement, the nominee’s own contribution, leadership, recognition within the field, innovation, and long-term value. Each juror recorded every criterion score independently on a 1-to-10 scale, and the platform applied the published weights and retained each evaluation.
A nomination had to explain what happened, when it happened, what the nominee personally contributed, and how the result could be checked. Depending on the category, jurors reviewed revenue and conversion data, dashboards, product records, campaign reports, work samples, case studies, testimonials, public sources, and independent validation. A job title or employer name supplied context. The score was based on the submitted work and evidence.
ECDMA found prospective jurors through its professional community, recommendations from experienced judges, referrals from industry and academic bodies, and public professional records. Becoming an ECDMA judge required outstanding, verifiable achievement relevant to the categories the person might assess. The evidence could include measured business results, a patent, recognized projects, published expertise, professional distinctions, or leadership with a documented effect on the field. The ECDMA Council reviewed identity, career history, portfolio evidence, references, reputation, potential conflicts, and subject fit before issuing an invitation. Those who accepted served without pay under written terms requiring independent scoring, confidentiality, ethical conduct, and prompt disclosure of conflicts. Employment, consulting, financial, competitive, family, or personal connections removed a juror from the relevant assignment.
Below are some of the jurors who scored nominations in the 2026 cycle. The full jury was larger; each nomination was reviewed by several jurors matched to the relevant category and screened for conflicts.
Oksana Tsvigun has more than 19 years of experience in international e-commerce and digital growth. She led e-commerce across Latin America, served as CEO of an online fashion business with more than $50 million in annual revenue, and later founded a growth consultancy.
Viviane Mendes has worked in e-commerce, digital marketing, customer experience, and digital transformation since 1996, when the commercial internet was still emerging. She founded and scaled one of the first print-on-demand commerce platforms, sold it to an international market leader, and later worked on e-commerce monetization for a large retailer.
Lia Grimberg’s career in loyalty and personalization spans more than 20 years across financial services, home improvement, grocery retail, and coalition loyalty programs. She holds an MBA, the Chartered Loyalty Marketing Professional designation, and postgraduate education in artificial intelligence. She also guest lectures for professional and academic programs.
Alina Selyanina directs retail-chain development at Ruskus, a flower retailer that combines physical stores with online ordering and delivery. During her work with the company, the chain expanded from four stores to seven, annual revenue grew from RUB 28.1 million to RUB 461.1 million, and unit volume rose from just over 305,000 stems to 2.99 million. Ruskus reports 500,000 customers and 300,000 delivered bouquets.
Artur Bulatov has 20 years of experience across software development, SaaS, retail, CRM, recommendation systems, subscription products, and omnichannel commerce. He has led product launches and digital transformation programs. He also holds an MBA in Marketing.
Artem Miloserdov has more than nine years of experience building and managing B2B software, cloud services, online-to-offline platforms, and retail technology. He has taken products from launch through monetization and go-to-market while improving operating efficiency. His recent work also includes AI-supported optimization for enterprise and smaller-business customers. He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Yevhenii Ustymenko is named as an inventor on U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2024/0244102, covering web component interaction and data synchronization in distributed systems. His work in software quality and test architecture includes reliability and test automation for high-load digital products.
Dmytro Lavryniuk has founded and operated online retail projects across international marketplaces and independent e-commerce platforms since 2016. He has handled product research, sourcing, and marketplace operations. He also developed proprietary CRM, logistics, and automation workflows for those businesses. He later turned that experience into an e-commerce training program with more than 15 modules and 100 lessons.
Andrei Miloserdov is a senior technical product manager with more than eight years of experience building international e-commerce, marketplace, SaaS, AI-supported, and data-driven products. He has led international product teams and been accountable for strategy, revenue growth, conversion, customer engagement, and platform development. He also holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Konstantin Kislykh has worked in industrial supply chains for more than 30 years and leads a metals trading and logistics company serving more than 10,000 clients. He developed Smart Metal Supply 360, a proprietary digital logistics platform. His professional record includes a place among Russia’s Top CEOs, the Era of Digital Solutions award for Digital Industrial Transformation, and articles in General Director, Metal Supply and Sales, and the Bulletin of Eurasian Science.
Kristina Pikunova has developed communication strategies for election campaigns, civic programs, and public institutions during ten years in public communications. As CEO of SHNM, she has led crisis communication, media relations, reputation management, and public engagement.
Ekaterina Marinenko has completed more than 200 collaborative video projects and co-organized three large creator-industry events in Prague. After she introduced systems for client communication, pricing, automation, and delegation, booking conversion rates reached three to five times the sector average.
Ivan Ivannikov’s marketplace governance practice has secured more than 100 successful court outcomes and recovered over $1 million for sellers in disputes with e-commerce platforms. He also developed an AI-supported legal technology tool that analyzes seller account data and prepares claim calculations.
Veronika Avvakumova has led marketplace expansion for a private-label fitness brand in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States and developed its U.S. social-commerce channel. She has also built B2B export partnerships, received two regional Exporter of the Year awards, and spoken at business and export forums.
ECDMA’s award management system, developed and operated by the Association, built an eligible juror pool for each nomination based on subject fit and excluded disclosed or identified conflicts. It then made assignments automatically and randomized them within that eligible, conflict-free pool. This meant entrants could not know who would review them, and the system avoided repeating the same judge combinations.
The assigned jurors worked independently inside the platform, which preserved each evaluation, applied the published category weights, and calculated the final score.
The recognized work had to fall within the competition’s eligibility period and show both the nominee’s contribution and the result. Evidence varied by category and included business data, product records, work samples, case studies, testimonials, and independent validation. For employers, clients, and industry peers, the award identifies a recent accomplishment that passed independent review and is worth asking about.
ECDMA created the categories and rules and built the award management system used for the 2026 cycle. The Association also selected and vetted the jurors and maintains the annual results archive. The Association’s community now includes more than 5,000 people working across marketing, commerce, product, technology, analytics, communications, customer experience, and operations.
About ECDMA
ECDMA was founded in 2023 as a professional association for people working across the e-commerce and digital marketing ecosystem. Its community now includes more than 5,000 professionals spanning marketing, commerce, product, technology, analytics, communications, customer experience, and operations, and reaches across multiple regions and industry verticals.
Senior membership requires at least seven years of full-time professional experience, two recommendations, documented contributions to the field, and Council approval under a five-pillar framework. Each admission is backed by a recorded Council decision and a unique member ID, which also supports the references, verification requests, and professional credentials issued by the Association.
Beyond the Global Awards, ECDMA runs strategy forums, digital marketing masterclasses, professional education, networking, publishing, professional exchange, and recognition programs. Events regularly attract hundreds of participants. The Association is governed by its Council, which approves admissions and jury appointments and oversees the rules used across its programs. More information is available on the ECDMA website.
Press Inquiries
ECDMA Global Awards, Iryna Opolok
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https://ecdma.org
