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.
He also gets candid about Mars’ creator learning curve and the responsibility marketers have to the next generation.
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 industr...