Rick Ely

The Next CPG CMOs will Come from Social & Community The Chief Marketing Officer role was only created in the 1990s, elevating a role across CPG brands to the executive team, most with brand management backgrounds. Today, with the advent of growth and social media marketing, more often than not these roles are tacked on as incremental roles under the CMO. With the growth of social & community marketing, one of the biggest challenges for CMOs has been connecting upper-funnel brand directly to lower-funnel conversion; you don’t know how many of your social followers are actual customers, or if the brand spend on the NYC pop-up drove conversion. One of my favorite customer moments over the last three years building Try Your Best (TYB) is when  a social media manager was able to prove that their community campaigns delivered an incremental half-point of frequency for sales. For the first time, they could connect the dots! Its become clear to me that the future CMOs will be similar to this woman: earned their stripes in social and community, while learning how to measure growth with the next gen tools. In this clip in an interview with Dieux founder Charlotte Palermino, I dive into this story and the evolving nature of the CMO role. And more specifically, how you'll be able to measure the impact of brand marketing on the bottom line. I get into the components of TYB's brand admin tool enabling measurement of: ✅ Brand Engagement Metrics (what challenges are working, how the community is responding) ✅ Social Sharing (how they are showing up on social) ✅ Direct Sales Impact (LTV, AOV, and sales from your community members vs. non-members) I'm curious how CMOs are rethinking their organizations given the growing importance of social & community marketing...

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"Trust me, human taxidermy is going to get people excited about a car." That's what Ben Whitla had to convince his CEO, board, and investors at Slate Auto. Meanwhile, Jennifer Healan at McDonald's watched Gen Z create absurdist TikToks around their Grimace Shake - and her team's choice was to let them run wild. Both stories from this week's Ad Age Business of Brands conference illustrate the same uncomfortable truth for marketers: whether you're a brand-new startup or #9 on Interbrand's Best Global Brands, winning today requires blurring the line between company and community. 👉 The Old Playbook Is Broken Traditional brand management taught us to control the message at all costs. Stay on strategy. Don't let anyone mess with your positioning. But McDonald's discovered during their research road trip across 25 towns that everyone already has a McDonald's story. Fans were creating meaning and rituals whether McDonald's participated or not. Slate Auto learned this faster. When they removed all branding from their Venice Beach activation, betting on the internet's love of mysteries, Reddit users identified them in 2.5 days. 👉 What "Sharing the Pen" Actually Looks Like This isn't just user-generated content. It's fundamentally reimagining who controls your brand narrative. McDonald's now lets partners redesign approved merchandise. When Travis Scott wanted to modify a T-shirt after approval, they said yes - and learned fans make the brand their own regardless. Slate Auto discovered their voice through real-time iteration, not focus groups. They evolved from "too silly" to "more earnest and honest" based on audience feedback. 👉 The Trust Equation This requires unprecedented trust at every level. Whitla needed his board to trust human taxidermy content would drive reservations (It did! 100,000 reservations at $50 each, before having a single car). Healan needed leadership to trust an experimental Twitch stream with Kai Cenat (a 3 hour paid advertisement with no creative control) which uncovered John Cena's love for the McValue menu and completely pivoted their campaign plans. 👉 The Constraint That Breeds Creativity McDonald's "culture of yes" means saying yes to ideas that make you uncomfortable. Slate's "blank slate" mindset spins lack of auto experience into differentiation. Neither brand could have created their most successful content internally. McDonald's anime campaign brought existing fan-created content into the real world. Slate's viral moment happened because they trusted Reddit to solve their mystery. 👉 The Bottom Line The companies thriving aren't the ones with tightest control - they're the ones brave enough to hand their fans the pen. The question isn't whether your audience will create meaning around your brand. They already are. The question is whether you'll participate in that conversation or try to control it from the sidelines. Need Help? Let's Talk. #AdAgeBusinessOfBrands

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Brand is hot again... bold statement! I've been living with a contradiction in my head for years. The EComm argument: attribution works. The business model is more efficient. The channel wins. The Brand argument: long-term equity is the only real protection against competition, transparency, and price pressure. Brands that optimize purely for performance buy growth – they don't build it. Last week I stood in front of 50+ ecommerce leaders at "Meet the Brand" at our yfood Labs offices organized by The eCom Unity. My plan wasn't to pick a side. My plan was to tell a story – about how demanding, how complex, how genuinely long-term real brand building actually is. What I didn't expect: the intensity in the room. The engagement afterwards. And that tells me something. The topic hit a nerve. Not because I was particularly convincing. But because the market is feeling exactly the same thing right now. The data backs it up: ➡️ McKinsey's State of Marketing Europe 2026, based on 500 senior marketing leaders across five major European markets, found that brand building is now the #1 priority – with branding described not as a nice-to-have, but as a stabilizing force in volatile markets. ➡️ 87% of CMOs surveyed by McKinsey cite brand building as their top agenda item – yet only 58% believe their organizations are actually mature enough to execute it well. ➡️ NielsenIQ (November 2025): the share of CMOs who feel C-suite support for long-term brand investment dropped 11 percentage points in a single year – while 84% now cite ROI as their primary budget allocation metric. Marketing Dive ➡️ Analytic Partners found that upper-funnel brand activity is 60% more effective over the long term than lower-funnel performance tactics – yet most companies still allocate well below the recommended 50% minimum to brand. Analytic Partners ➡️ Binet & Field's 60/40 rule has been widely cited for years. And yet: 70% of marketers plan to increase performance spend further – at the direct expense of brand building. This isn't an academic debate. It's the central tension every CMO in the room is sitting with. EComm gives you clarity. Brand gives you substance. If you don't connect the two, you're buying short-term metrics and slowly giving up long-term margin. Huge thanks to Maximilian Rast and The eCom Unity for creating a format that makes exactly these conversations possible. Sources in the comments ↓

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Hernán Tantardini, CMO of PepsiCo Foods North America at today's Association of National Advertisers Master of Marketing event. His take: "food culture isn’t a trend, it’s a growth engine." What PepsiCo is doing is more than marketing — it’s a creative reset. They’re using culture as a strategic lever across the value chain, not just in comms. Examples in thier recent campaigns: “Food Deserves Pepsi”, elevating farmers as heroes of the Lay’s story, and turning “Flamin’ Hot” from a product into a global platform. My main takeway, was this line: “We’re not just a food company — we’re an agricultural company.” That’s a big shift in thinkng, one that reframes growth potental for Pepsi Co around real human rituals, provenance, and passions. It’s a good reminder that creativity has its biggest impact when it’s embedded in how a company actually operates — not just how it advertises. #ANA #MarketingStrategy #BrandBuilding #FoodCulture #Creativity #PepsiCo

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This article reinforces what many CPGs are now confronting. PepsiCo’s move to cut prices, simplify its portfolio, and reinvest in execution isn’t about short-term volume. It’s a recognition that traditional marketing and price led growth are no longer enough in a value constrained, choice overloaded environment. As portfolios shrink, every remaining SKU has to perform. That’s where shopper marketing becomes essential, not optional. Shopper marketing connects pricing, portfolio focus, and productivity at the point of decision. It simplifies choice, reinforces value, and turns operational efficiency into conversion at retail. This is the shift the article points to: Away from broad marketing and constant price increases, toward focus, precision, and execution. Shopper marketing is no longer a choice. It’s how brands protect competitiveness and grow in today’s market. #ShopperMarketing #CPG #RetailExecution #MarketingEvolution #BrandXMarketing

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Instacart just solved a multi-billion dollar challenge for alcohol brands, and it's NOT about delivery anymore. For years, the alcohol retail vertical has been a fragmented mess: Thousands of independent stores, a thicket of compliance laws, and zero ability to track local ad spend-to-purchase. The solution? The landmark Bottlecapps integration. From our perspective at MediaAMP, this move is a masterstroke and a blueprint for the future of specialized retail media. Here's why this matters to CPG: ✅ Unified Market: Instantly tap into the "long tail" of independent retailers at scale. ✅ Compliance as a Service: A "safe harbor" that handles the complex regulatory maze for you. ✅ Hyper-Local ROAS: The first chance to run inventory-aware campaigns and measure closed-loop sales (SKU-level!) from local shops. Instacart is officially evolving from a delivery app to a true Retail Media Powerhouse. The brands that integrate Retail Media Networks (RMNs) into their alcohol strategy now will own the next phase of growth. Want the full breakdown of Instacart's strategic endgame, what brands should do, and why this is a critical moment for CPG? Check This Out : https://lnkd.in/d2chXU96 #RetailMedia #Instacart #CPG #AlcoholAdvertising #AdTech #Ecommerce #MarketingStrategy #DigitalTransformation #MediaAMP

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