Marketing Vanguard

The best creative risks should make you a little nervous. But they should never make you ask why your brand is taking them.

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with Rankin Carroll, Chief Brand Officer of Mars Snacking, to unpack how brands like M&M’s, Snickers and Skittles stay culturally relevant without treating boldness as an excuse for chaos. Rankin takes us behind the scenes of the 2023 Snickers AI experiment that felt “potentially crazy” at the time, and gets candid about Mars’ creator learning curve and the responsibility marketers have to the next generation.

Rankin Carroll is Chief Brand Officer of Mars Snacking, where he works across some of the company’s most recognizable brands, including M&M’s, Snickers and Skittles. He has spent more than 20 years at Mars across marketing, advertising, general management and global and regional leadership roles. His career has taken him from Toronto to the UK and at one point, included running an ice cream business along the way.

Today, Rankin focuses on what he describes as the stewardship of distinctive, iconic brands: protect what makes them valuable, make them stronger than when you received them, and still create enough tension to keep them culturally relevant.

What You'll Learn:
How Mars pressure-tests risky ideas before putting iconic brands on the line
Why the 2023 Snickers AI experiment required legal, security and agency teams to take the risk together
How “Why us? Why this brand?” separates bold creative from stunts
Why brands have to earn the credibility to participate authentically in culture
Why Rankin believes transformation now has no end state
How Mars is learning to loosen control in creator-led marketing
Why marketing leaders need to rethink how the next generation is trained for an AI-shaped industry
Why CMOs need to own the AI agenda instead of leaving it to scattered pilots

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Attribution’s a tricky thing. It can help marketers make better decisions while simultaneously making their strategy worse.

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with Amanda Teder, CMO of Generac, to unpack what happens when marketing gets too focused on what is easiest to measure. Amanda breaks down the full-funnel operating model she has built at Generac, why demand generation is only the opening move in a high-consideration category and why some purchase journeys need nurturing for months or even years.

Amanda Teder is Chief Marketing Officer at Generac, an energy solutions company serving both residential and industrial customers.

Before joining Generac, Amanda spent roughly 20 years at Procter & Gamble, where she worked across brands including Oral-B and Febreze, before moving to Michelin.

Across those very different categories, one theme has stayed consistent: understand what actually drives the business, then build the systems that can turn customer insight into repeatable growth. And, at Generac, that has meant connecting demand generation, nurture, sales enablement and post-purchase support into a more complete customer journey.

What You'll Learn:
Why Generac treats marketing as a connected operating system
Why high-consideration categories cannot stop at demand generation
Why email still matters when a purchase cycle can last months or years
How Amanda applies lessons from P&G across very different categories
Why B2B and B2C marketing share more strategic DNA than most people assume
Why strategy should come before deciding what AI should automate
How attribution can push teams too far down the funnel
Why Amanda’s “builder” mindset shapes the roles and brands she chooses

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the age of AI, marketers still have to answer one big question: “Why should anyone choose you?”

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with Ameetess Dira, CMO of Petzey, for a conversation about the decisions that become even more important as marketing gets easier to automate. Ameetess breaks down why purpose alignment is a non-negotiable in her career, why she deliberately pushes marketing into product, technology, and finance conversations and why some of her strongest brand partnerships looked strange on paper.

Ameetess Dira is Chief Marketing Officer at Petzey, an on-demand pet telehealth app with more than 1,000 pet professionals across the U.S.

Her path into marketing has crossed broadcasting, radio, print, agency leadership, technology, and international market expansion across Asia and the United States.

Her move into pet health was deeply personal. After losing her senior dog, Ameetess deliberately sought out work that could improve access to care for animals and the people who love them. That purpose now shapes how she thinks about everything from partnerships and crisis response to the role marketing should play inside the wider business.

What You'll Learn:

Why purpose alignment is a non-negotiable for Ameetess when choosing where to work
Why underserved problems can create stronger brand opportunities than obvious ones
How unexpected partnerships can work when the underlying values make sense
Why marketing should be embedded in product, technology and finance conversations
Why AI may make storytelling more valuable, not less
Why long-term brand trust can matter more than short-term revenue
How CEO trust gives CMOs more room to take meaningful risks
Why leadership has to change depending on the people and market involved

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’re wondering why your good ol’ marketing playbook no longer works, the answer probably lies in the funnel you’re targeting.

Turns out, the buyer changed the route.

Recorded live at Advertising Week New York, this episode of Marketing Vanguard features Jenny Rooney in conversation with Salesforce CMO Erin Oles to unpack what happens when customer behavior moves faster than the funnel marketers built around it. Erin gets into why traditional attribution assumptions are starting to crack, why marketers need to understand how their brand appears inside LLMs and why AI should be given real problems instead of vague “use cases.”

Erin Oles is Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce.

Her path into marketing began in sales, an experience she credits with teaching her how quickly you can tell whether a message actually resonates with a real person.

Today, her approach to AI is similarly practical. Rather than treating new technology as something marketers need to master in theory, Erin argues for learning by doing, staying anchored to customer problems and handing repetitive work to AI when human judgment can be better spent elsewhere.
At Salesforce, that means rethinking everything from AI search visibility and customer discovery to conversational agents and real-time campaign optimization.

What You'll Learn:

Why Erin thinks the idea of a fixed marketing “playbook” is becoming an oxymoron
Why buyer behavior is making the traditional nurture funnel feel increasingly artificial
Why yesterday’s attribution models may not explain tomorrow’s customer journey
Why AEO is not simply SEO with a new acronym
How owned content can quietly work against your brand inside LLM results
Why AI works best when you start with a problem instead of a tool
Why context becomes more valuable as access to intelligence becomes more universal
How AI-driven discovery could push marketers beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI gives every marketer access to similar tools. So, how’s that going to help your brand stand out?

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with MasterCard’s Executive Vice President of Global Brand Strategy and Innovation, Cheryl Guerin, to talk about how brands can differentiate themselves when technology becomes table stakes. Cheryl gets into how MasterCard uses AI to eliminate routine brand work and free its people for higher-order thinking, why Priceless has survived nearly three decades of cultural change, and why real agility sometimes looks like saying no.

Cheryl Guerin is Executive Vice President, Global Brand Strategy and Innovation at MasterCard.

She has spent nearly 26 years at the company across a wide range of roles, including regional marketing leadership, products and services, P&L responsibility and global credit before returning to the area she describes as her heart: marketing.

Over that time, Cheryl has helped evolve the Priceless platform through major shifts in culture, technology and the business itself, leading initiatives such as the True Name card and Touch Card. Her perspective is grounded in a simple challenge: keep the brand relevant as the world changes without losing the human truth that made it matter in the first place.

What You'll Learn:

How MasterCard uses automation to free brand experts for higher-order creative work
Why Priceless has remained relevant across nearly three decades of cultural change
Why saying no is becoming a critical part of brand agility
How “passions experts” help MasterCard identify cultural opportunities earlier
Why emerging talent can create different economics and stronger relationships than obvious superstar bets
Why purpose-driven work has to connect brand ethos, constituent needs and business impact

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.