• Rankin Carroll emphasizes the enduring value of entertainment in marketing strategies today.
• Mars shifts focus to personalized, engaging content to better connect with consumers.
• Snickers' UEFA Euro 2024 campaign showcases Mars' innovative approach to consumer engagement.

After more than two decades at Mars, overseeing iconic brands like M&M's, Skittles, and Twix, the company's chief brand officer, Rankin Carroll, says one of the biggest mistakes marketers make today is forgetting a simple idea: entertainment still matters.

As marketers race to embrace AI, data, personalization, influencers, and new measurement tools, Carroll told Business Insider in an interview for its "CMO Insider" podcast that the industry sometimes loses sight of what consumers are actually looking for.

"I think what's critical to cut through is it's still a game of compelling stories," Carroll said. "People are still looking for content that captures their attention."

Carroll's comments come as Mars undergoes a major transformation in how it markets its brands, shifting toward more personalized advertising powered by data and technology.

Yet Carroll says all of those tools matter only if they help brands create entertainment that consumers actually want to spend time with.

Consumers don't want brands talking at them

Carroll says one of the biggest changes in marketing is the growing expectation that consumers participate in brand experiences rather than simply receive messages.

"We can get caught up in the data, we can get caught up in all the technology side of this, but at the end of the day, it's compelling stories well told in engaging ways that they can participate in," he said.

For Carroll, that is where entertainment comes in. Instead of interrupting consumers with ads, Mars increasingly wants to give them experiences they choose to engage with.

That philosophy has shaped several recent Mars campaigns.

Carroll pointed to a Snickers activation built around the UEFA Euro 2024 soccer tournament.

The campaign partnered with Meta and WhatsApp to let consumers send personalized messages to friends using an AI-powered José Mourinho character. Users entered prompts about mistakes their friends had made, and the system generated custom responses in Mourinho's voice.

Rather than simply promoting Snickers, Mars built the campaign to tap into behavior that it already understood about soccer fandom.

"We know the behavior around the Euros around football is banter," Carroll said. "You want to banter with your mates."

The result was an entertaining experience that consumers could actively participate in and share. "It just exploded," Carroll said.

Mars says personalization works best when it's entertaining

Carroll believes personalization has become an expectation, particularly among younger consumers.

"What we know is that consumers now, especially younger consumers, expect personalization from brands," he said.

But he does not view personalization as simply delivering more targeted advertisements. Instead, Mars is trying to build experiences that allow consumers to participate in the creation of content itself.

The Snickers campaign was one example. Another was the "Twix Harmonizer," a tool that allowed users to send voice notes to friends that would soften bad news through AI-generated audio.

Again, Carroll says the appeal was not the technology itself but rather giving people something entertaining to do.

"You cut through by creating an experience that they can actually participate in," he said.

Why Mars thinks many marketers are overcomplicating things

Carroll says that digital platforms have made it harder for brands to break through. Social media feeds are crowded, algorithms constantly change, and consumers have more content choices than ever.

Still, he says marketers sometimes focus too heavily on data, technology, and optimization while overlooking the importance of creating something people genuinely enjoy.

"I think that's the word that we've slightly forgotten about. Entertainment," Carroll said.

That thinking also influences how Mars approaches culture.

Whether it's Skittles creating unusual campaigns, Snickers building interactive experiences, or M&M's responding to controversy through humor, Carroll says brands need to find ways to participate in culture without losing their identities.

"We can bring something to you," he says of consumers.

For Carroll, that remains the foundation of effective marketing regardless of how technology evolves.

"At the end of the day," he said, "it's compelling stories well told in engaging ways that they can participate in."

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Modern CMOs are getting the promotion they've long wanted: job titles like CGO that reflect their revenue and growth responsibilities. The catch? They're not getting more power.

That's a sharp tension at the heart of a new study shared exclusively with CMO Insider by the brand consultancy Lippincott. The study analyzed a survey of 541 global CMOs or equivalents.

"There is more responsibility but less of that autonomy in terms of getting a strong sense of alignment across the organization," Michael D'Esopo, Lippincott CEO, told me.

Nearly 80% said bureaucracy commonly got in the way of decision-making, while 84% said it was at least "somewhat difficult" to align their management team, senior peers, and other stakeholders around a marketing vision. Fewer than half (44%) said marketing operated with high autonomy.

One unnamed CMO quoted in the report put it this way: "What often happens is that a strong, well-founded idea gets gradually diluted. Someone senior, like a CFO or CCO, adds input that doesn't align with the evidence, and people hesitate to challenge it."

Part of the issue is that many CEOs aren't confident in marketing's ability to demonstrate a financial impact.

"There is a huge trust problem for marketing in the C-suite," former Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar told me in a recent interview.

Plenty of studies over the years have suggested marketing has a credibility problem in the corner office. A report released in April from the communications firm Boathouse, for example, found only 13% of CEOs were confident in marketing's ability to demonstrate a financial impact.

Those long-held tensions are being exacerbated by technological shifts, D'Esopo said.

The abundance of AI-powered dashboards and analytics tools has made marketing performance more visible across organizations, D'Esopo said. That can help CMOs appeal to finance leaders by showcasing short-term wins, but it can also reinforce a focus on immediate results at the expense of long-term brand building.

These new tools have also boosted marketing leaders who are steeped in data. Lippincott said 35% of marketing chiefs come from performance- or growth-marketing backgrounds. Around 20% of the senior-most marketing decision-makers don't even have "marketing" in their job title, reflecting the rise of chief growth, chief revenue, and chief commercial officers, per Lippincott.

That can have both good and bad effects.

The rise of performance-minded leaders may bring more analytical rigor to balance out softer marketing metrics. However, Rajamannar said they can use a brute-force approach, likening it to "running constantly on the treadmill." It can lead to chasing the next click, lead, or conversion rather than building the underlying consumer demand.

Short-termism is also creeping into new areas, such as AI search visibility. CMOs surveyed said their companies are spending more on AI while cutting investment in websites and content — the very assets AI systems use to understand and surface brands.

So if that's the diagnosis, what's the antidote?

Lippincott said in the report that CMOs need to use the language of business growth without losing the fundamentals of long-term brand building, which may require translating marketing's impact differently for each separate stakeholder, whether that's the CEO, CFO, or the board. And organizational alignment should be treated as a growth strategy in its own right.

PepsiCo's Jane Wakely, who has possibly the longest job title in the marketing profession — executive vice president, chief consumer and marketing officer, and chief growth officer for international foods — said CMOs should stay focused on the marketing principles that don't change. New technologies such as AI and diverse data sources just give marketers more ways to achieve their goals, she added.

"If I'm reaching a billion people every day, to grow I've got to reach more than a billion — it's quite simple," Wakely said. "That is not going to change."

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Bose wants a bigger chunk of the music business.

The audio-equipment maker has created Bose Studios, an in-house content studio designed to help it shift from campaign-driven marketing, the company exclusively told CMO Insider.

One key differentiator is the launch of a new record label, Bose Records. Bose CMO Jim Mollica said in an interview that the plan isn't to go toe-to-toe with the "Big Three" label conglomerates, but rather to help break underappreciated or new artists and — crucially — not have to pay for music rights when they feature in Bose commercials. (Mollica said Bose wouldn't look to own the artists' masters, the company wouldn't take a share of their record sales or streams, and that they would be free to sign with other labels.)

Other big projects include commissioning original TV series and films "attached to some legendary Hollywood names," Mollica said. Bose is also planning a YouTube series, podcasts, and live music events — and could perhaps even buy a music media company. Some of those properties will generate their own ad revenue.

The launch of Bose Studios reflects a reality most CMOs face. Ad prices are higher, even though audiences are more fragmented and, in the case of TV, smaller. Consumers are actively avoiding advertising. Social media algorithms and the rise of AI search are disrupting the old ways that brands were discovered. Brands need to entertain to cut through.

"Our category, music, has a bunch of rituals baked into it," Mollica said. "If we have the opportunity, not to sell products, but become part of that ritual, then ultimately Bose is not an audio-equipment business anymore. We're about deepening people's relationship with music."

Much of Bose's prior marketing already focused on forging partnerships with music artists. Last year, for example, it teamed up with Blackpink's LISA to create customized earbuds, which it launched at a pop-up store in Los Angeles. This past February, it collaborated with the Grammy-nominated Twitch streamer PlaqueBoyMax, who created music on the spot during a livestream that aired during the NBA's All-Star weekend.

The record label and film productions signal Bose's expanded ambitions. Other brands, including Red Bull and Starbucks, have launched music labels in the past, though they were eventually retired.

Alexandra Annable, founder of Holl'r Music, an artist management and booking agency, said competition is fiercer than ever for emerging artists. For Bose to succeed, it might want to consider aligning itself with a specific genre, she added, pointing to Wingstop, which created its UK Freestyle Series for emerging drill, rap, and hip-hop artists.

"I think the only way brands can effectively engage with music fans is to create unique, content-led experiences, but these must be really authentic and culturally relevant," Annable said.

Steve Ackerman, a board advisor and consultant to media and entertainment businesses, said Bose Studios needs to ensure the content comes before promoting its products.

"The graveyard of branded content is littered with brands that have gone down this route and not understood what it means to be a content creator," Ackerman said. "They often defaulted to advertising agencies that don't understand how to engage with audiences; they just understand how to create content that gets in the way of the thing that audiences want to engage with."

Mollica, who previously worked at Disney and Viacom, said he understands the assignment. He said Bose Studios is not working with ad agencies and is recruiting and partnering with talent across the film, TV, podcast, and publishing industries.

"This isn't product placement; this isn't a long, 30-minute commercial," Mollica said. "These things are truly about how we are taking this authentic love of music and elevating the content that's out there today for true music fans to experience more."

• TikTok advertising executive Khartoon Weiss is leaving the company.
• Weiss, who spent almost six years at TikTok, oversaw its North America ads business for the past year.
• Weiss is one of several advertising and marketing execs to leave TikTok this year.

TikTok's advertising team is undergoing another big shake-up.

Khartoon Weiss, the lead exec for TikTok's North American ads business, is exiting the company, four people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

Weiss, who pitched TikTok's suite of ad products to marketers onstage at its NewFronts event last month, joined the company almost six years ago from Spotify. She oversaw TikTok's global agency and accounts teams before being promoted to lead the North America division of the global business solutions team in March 2025, following the departure of advertising head Blake Chandlee.

Digiday first reported on Weiss' exit.

Weiss' exit is the latest in a string of advertising and marketing team departures at TikTok.

Zuber Mohammed, TikTok's global head of consumer marketing, left the company in March. Sofia Hernandez, the global head of business marketing and commercial partnerships, and Rema Vasan, who headed up business marketing in North America, left the company last quarter.

Other teams at TikTok have also seen leadership changes this year, including the company's content division, which lost its global head of creators, Kim Farrell, in January.

Some of the executive exits have shifted control of North America teams to leaders from Singapore or China. When Chandlee left last year, oversight of the sales team, known as global business solutions, moved to Singapore-based executive Will Liu, for example.

TikTok's US team restructured in January while forming a new joint venture to transfer certain work, like US user data management, to a separate group that includes Oracle and investment firms MGX and Silver Lake. Its advertising and marketing teams remain under the control of parent company ByteDance.

As part of the structural change, Adam Presser, a trust and safety executive, became CEO of the US joint venture. Presser appeared alongside Weiss at TikTok's March NewFronts presentation to assure advertisers that the company's ads experience would not be disrupted amid internal changes.