Catherine Leitner as CMO. Dawn Drewry as CIO. Delaware North Strengthens the Leadership Team for Its Next Growth Phase
Delaware North that it has appointed Catherine Leitner as chief marketing officer and Dawn Drewry as chief information officer, with both leaders joining the company’s Executive Leadership Team. The two appointments place fresh senior ownership over marketing and technology, two functions that increasingly determine how large multi-brand operators compete.
According to the company, each leader brings deep experience in building high-performing teams, strengthening business partnerships and advancing strategic priorities across marketing, technology and operations. Announcing both roles together, rather than in isolation, points to a coordinated push to firm up the enterprise’s brand execution and its technology backbone at the same time.
Why the Delaware North leadership refresh matters now
Delaware North operates across a broad hospitality and entertainment footprint, which makes its senior appointments relevant to operators well beyond its own walls. Filling the CMO and CIO seats in a single announcement suggests the company sees marketing consistency and technology resilience as linked priorities rather than separate projects. For an operator managing multiple business units, unified brand direction and a secure, well-governed technology base are the foundations that everything guest-facing runs on.
What the CMO appointment at Delaware North actually involves
Catherine Leitner will report directly to EVP and Chief Operating Officer Jamie Obletz and lead the company’s center-led marketing disciplines, including the Creative and Content Studio, Brand and Digital Marketing. She will continue to partner with subsidiary marketing leaders to support their strategies and align enterprise priorities with each business unit’s goals.
Leitner has served as interim CMO since January, leading the marketing function through a period the company describes as important, with a 2026 priority to redesign its marketing function and go-to-market strategies. She joined Delaware North in 2022 as vice president of marketing for Parks and Resorts, and in 2024 took on a dual role as vice president of marketing for Patina Group and vice president of Brand and the Creative Studio. Before Delaware North, she spent two decades at Marriott International in experiential marketing, brand, communications and global partnerships across brands including The Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis.
Obletz endorsed the appointment directly: “Catherine has established herself as a trusted, collaborative partner across Delaware North, working closely with leaders throughout the business to ensure the company’s marketing and creative teams are aligned with subsidiary goals and positioned to support continued growth.”
What the CIO appointment signals for a gaming and hospitality operator
Dawn Drewry will report to EVP and Chief Financial Officer Chris Feeney and oversee the information technology function, spanning infrastructure, cybersecurity, technology governance and the platforms that support operations, guests and team members. Placing the CIO under the CFO is itself a signal that technology is being treated as an enterprise investment and risk discipline, not simply a support desk.
Drewry brings more than 25 years leading enterprise technology, cybersecurity, digital transformation and business modernisation across complex global organisations. She joins most recently from Monogram Foods, where she was executive vice president and chief information officer, and previously held senior technology roles at Tyson Foods, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell and Advanced Micro Devices. She holds a bachelor’s degree in management information systems from the University of Arizona and a master’s in strategic management and executive leadership from Pennsylvania State University.
Feeney framed the hire around capability and culture: “Dawn brings deep expertise in technology strategy, cybersecurity, enterprise applications and data-driven decision making, along with a passion for developing talent and partnering across the business.”
The caveat worth naming for Delaware North
This is an appointment announcement, not a strategy reveal. The release confirms who is taking these roles and the remits they inherit, but it does not set out specific targets, budgets or timelines for the marketing redesign or the technology agenda. The stated 2026 priority to rework the marketing function is named, yet what “redesigned” looks like in practice, and how the technology function’s investment in cybersecurity and governance plays out, will only become clear through what the company does next, not through this announcement alone.
What Does This Mean for Gaming and Hospitality Operators?
The clearest read is structural: a large operator is centralising brand ownership while simultaneously strengthening the technology and security foundation beneath it, and doing both at executive level. For operators watching how peers organise, that pairing is the signal worth noting, because unified marketing and a hardened, well-governed technology base are increasingly what separate operators that scale cleanly from those that fragment. The appointments themselves are routine C-suite housekeeping; what they suggest about where a major operator is investing its structural attention in 2026 is the more useful takeaway.
Source: Delaware North
