Consumer Packaged Goods

J.M. Smucker has spent the last few years reshaping its portfolio to help it build brands that stake out a leading position in categories spanning pantry, snacking, coffee and pet food, and has similarly reshaped its marketing model through realignment and consolidation.

The strategy appears to be working: The CPG giant boosted its 2025 outlook and has continued to refresh “dusty” brands, modernizing the Hostess brand that it acquired in 2023 ahead of an advertising campaign slated for this year. Plus, campaigns like Jif’s “Save the Celery” effort helped boost brand perception scores among Gen Z and millennial consumers and scored 1 billion earned media impressions in two weeks, per the company’s 2024 investor day report.

Leading the way for the company’s marketing is CMO Gail Hollander, who joined Smucker after several years as client lead for the marketer at Publicis, which streamlines the company’s creative, data and media functions at a bespoke unit called PSOne. Smucker’s next phase comes as the pandemic moves further into the rearview and the advertising industry enters a new era of productivity.

“It’s a fascinating time. There’s a convergence that has happened over the last couple of years between traditional brand building … and the power of pop culture,” Hollander said.

The executive spoke with Marketing Dive about that convergence and other trending topics, including retail media and artificial intelligence (AI), as she looked ahead to 2025.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: Can you tell me more about how you view brand building in an era where pop culture is so important to marketers?

GAIL HOLLANDER: This convergence requires you to make sure that you don’t forget the traditional pillars of brand building, but you have to recognize the fragmentation and be able to use the power of pop culture. 

For us, that means that a brand always has to have a point of view that has longevity, provided that the marketplace doesn’t change underneath your feet. You always need a brand idea with broad shoulders, and you always have to have those guidelines that keep your brands held together. But you have to recognize the behaviors that exist in each channel and platform, and you have to play to those behaviors.

It’s important to make sure that you don’t forget those principles of brand building that have stood the test of time as your foundation, because otherwise you’re just throwing stuff up on the wall to see what sticks.

How does that affect how you approach media mix?

Way, way long ago, one size fits all was fine: did it, done it, dusted. Now you have your foundation, but you have to recognize those channels and platforms, and it gives you the opportunity in execution. We put all that together, and that’s how we’re able to constantly extend our reach with different channels and platforms, but make sure that our brand is showing up as one brand, rather than a fragmented brand all over the place. You can’t take something from TV and [put it out] as an online video. You’re not leveraging the power of the creative, the power of the platform or your investment to its greatest degree. 

How do you approach that fragmentation, especially when something like the TikTok situation unsettles the market?

We operate on a reach-based system, so everything that we’re doing is trying to increase reach among our target audience or sources of volume. We invest where our consumers are spending their time, which gives us a roadmap or guidelines as to where you need to go. Each platform that we add has to add incremental reach, so we have a very diversified channel mix. 

If one platform or channel has to fall out for whatever reason, we don’t lose too much, because of that diversification, and we have the opportunity to make sure that we continue to invest where our consumers are spending their time. The diversification saves you from a sinking ship, truthfully.

How are you taking advantage of the rise of retail media networks (RMNs)?

Retail media has become exponentially more important, and the brand-building tool kit and its ability to go beyond just conversion and also be an awareness and consideration driver is what’s making it a priority in a lot of our media investments.

Historically, you had a bucket of money for retail media and a bucket of money for awareness, and those two things were separate. But because it’s really a cycle of awareness, consideration and conversion, having that separation is not helpful in driving the strength of your investment.

We look at our media investments holistically, and we actually look at what is it that we need to accomplish? How much awareness, consideration and conversion do we need to do? What channels, regardless of if it’s a RMN or not, what channels will best allow us to achieve our objectives? You have to look at [RMNs] as partners, and also look at their media capabilities — not all media capabilities are served up equally. It’s constantly a balance. 

We’ve seen companies work to connect their sales and marketing functions, especially via data. Is that something J.M. Smucker has done?

We have. A number of years ago we took down those fiefdoms when it comes to how successful any one particular activation is being, and so we take a look at all the different data sources to help us with planning. We have a bunch of planning tools where we’re able to input all of what we know to figure out exactly where and how much we should be spending, then we have the data signals that are helping us understand how is it doing. 

The real game changer for us was our use of Keen and their predictive modeling capabilities that has unlocked so much for us in terms of understanding not only how much we should spend, but what the mix should look like in order to maximize the effectiveness of our investment. 

AI remains a hot topic. How have you approached it, and where do you think it’s going this year?

We have been using AI and we’ve leaned in when it comes to identifying our sources of volume and scaling those with lookalikes and figuring out not only who we want to talk to, but how we reach them. We’ve got a lot of AI capabilities that we’re using around that. We’ve got AI capabilities in terms of concepting and being able to research the validity of any concept. When it comes to creative development, it’s really a combination of humanity and gen AI — it’s that combination that ends up getting put on the table, but it is still driven by human beings.

Where we’ve actually leaned in most recently is in automating a lot of our social and retail media network assets. You can create templates and then just automate them, and what would have taken three weeks to put together you can do in three minutes. 

Where is it going to go in the future? Who knows, but it’s absolutely something that has to become part of the toolkit. Where is it best used, and how is it contributing to driving your business growth?

We’ve spoken about brand refreshes before. What informs that process in the current climate?

You constantly have to be refreshing your asset mix or your content. We live in a digital world, and the importance of the new is real. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re providing enough “new” to consumers that we keep their interest. 

Life is hard, so the idea of providing positivity and levity and being a positive impact during the day versus a drain of some sort is our responsibility, because we have to earn every second that we get from our consumers.

And when something changes in the marketing landscape or the marketing ecosystem, you have to be honest enough to step back and rethink where you are. Then you have to go through the exercise of, what is your brand DNA, what’s the human truth that’s changed and what’s the cultural truth that’s changed, and that will allow you to build the right strategy in order to find a new way forward.

Even as Advertising Week New York welcomes more discussion tracks centered on performance marketing and commerce media, splashy brand-building ideas can still command the spotlight. PepsiCo Foods on Oct. 10, 2024, will present a case study at the annual confab on “Groundhog Lay’s,” a campaign for Lay’s chips that saw eight spots run dozens of times on a single network as part of a time-loop premise referencing the film “Groundhog Day.” 

The high-concept effort, created with Disney, Maximum Effort, Kimmelot and OMD, is the result of an internal marketing approach at PepsiCo Foods that puts renewed focus on speed (“Groundhog Lay’s” came together in just a little over two weeks based on a casual text exchange). Other recent campaigns from the CPG giant, including Tostitos’ largest-ever around the NFL, share a lean approach, with fast production schedules that prevent marketers from growing overly precious.

“What we learned from ‘Groundhog Lay’s’ was that a simple mechanic is easy to execute in a lot of different ways,” said Chris Bellinger, who became PepsiCo Foods’ first chief creative officer in 2023.

At the same time, PepsiCo is trying to embrace bolder, weirder ideas. Recent ads backing Frito-Lay’s dips portfolio assemble a “Condiment Council” of ketchup, mayonnaise and other toppings as they hold an emergency meeting to address products like Tostitos salsa being applied on unconventional foods. 

Marketing Dive caught up with Bellinger offsite, at PepsiCo’s Design & Innovation Center in New York, to discuss how his role is evolving, oversight of PepsiCo Foods’ internal D3 agency and plans for major events like the Super Bowl. 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: We first connected to discuss “Groundhog Lay’s” in the first half of 2024 and now we’re back here again. Presenting that work at Advertising Week, do you think of it as a calling card for what you’re trying to accomplish with PepsiCo Foods?

CHRIS BELLINGER: I loved the idea that we were not able to overthink it. In our industry, sometimes we work on stuff for six, 12 months, so by the time it gets out in the world, you’ve fallen out of love. It has inspired other activations that we’ve done and unlocked new ways of doing production and partnership. It’s forced people to be a lot more comfortable in the uncomfortable, which has helped us with ideation. We can analyze this to death, we can tweak it and [use] direction by committee as much as we want. But small strategic strike forces that can move really fast, they keep the premise of the idea alive. 

It’s a year this month [October 2024] since you took on the CCO mantle. Why was that an important position for the company to establish now? 

The nature of the world has changed in terms of content and creativity and how our consumers interact with us. Traditionally, you put out one ad a year maybe if you’re lucky. Now, between social media and digital and advertising and content and culture, it’s constant and it’s constantly evolving. The fact that the company was willing to invest in a role like this says a lot about where it views the role of creativity within marketing and the role of creativity with our consumers and our brands. They are inextricably linked to one another. Content can be consumed at any moment in any place on Earth whereas before it was only in a certain place, in a certain time, if I happen to be there. Now, what we say is that the content and creative are borderless. We have to have a more focused and strategic approach.

A big part of that has been D3. When did that agency start and how does it relate to your function? 

D3 was created by our now-CEO of beverages for North America, Ram Krishnan. It was originally a digital execution house focused on short-form videos on YouTube and stuff like that. When I joined, in 2018, D3 was a part of the media team and it had one full-time person. My role then was focused on the in-house team to elevate the creative IQ of the entire company, but also to build out this in-house function that can operate faster, cheaper but still as effectively. Over the last six years, we’ve built it into an around 140-person, full-service creative shop. It is now a core of the foods company that is designed to be there to help execute creativity at speed.

It’s different when a brand team gets to sit in the process instead of seeing it every two weeks. It’s encouraged them to be more creative themselves. Eventually, I got the opportunity to be the CCO, where I get to work with all of the external agencies and push that same mentality. Part of that is playing translator between the brand teams and the agency teams. It’s getting to better ideas faster and hopefully reducing some of that swirl. I want everyone to be jealous of each other. I want one team to look at another team and say, well, how are they able to do that? 

Has the level of work exclusively handled by D3 versus external partners fluctuated at all? Is there more that’s being done fully in-house?

The rule of thumb is no one’s forced to use anybody. The internal team has got to earn their keep, just like an external agency would. I came from external and I hated the internal team because I thought they had an unfair advantage. When I joined, the cornerstones laid out were: One, the internal team will never pitch against an external team, and two, everyone has a choice. That’s kept everything at a fair, level playing field. Sure, there’s been more business won by the internal team from a standpoint of opportunities. I think it’s because the internal team just got better. But there’s been work that’s been lost by the internal team to external teams when it wasn’t up to snuff either. 

Where have you focused on building out your capabilities recently? What are you starting to experiment more with as you think about how creativity is changing?

Everybody’s got to be a creator to a degree. That’s a rule on the team, too. I need you to be able to make something. That could be anything from social media to full end-to-end production, or it could be an idea. I do believe ideas can come from anywhere. From an internal standpoint, there is no one discipline that’s in charge. Everybody’s got an equal say and equal vote. With brand teams, it’s having them trust their agency partners. If they’re giving you a recommendation, you’re paying them for that recommendation for a reason. We call it debate, decide, deliver. No one wants to make something sh---y. It’s easy to fall under the trap of making something that’s the least common denominator. It’s hard, it still happens, but that’s what makes creativity so exciting and so challenging.

For the Tostitos NFL campaign [with Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman], when we last spoke about it, you were talking about what your expectations were. What has the initial response been and, like with “Groundhog Lay’s,” how are you learning from that?

I think advertisers and creatives, in general, fall in love with our own ideas. We’ve already made all the neural connections on the rationality as to why, and then you show a normie and they have no idea how you got there. With the Tostitos one, it was: “You can’t watch football without Tostitos.” It was that simple. It let us make six different ads in two days. That’s kind of unheard of now. For us, it was an intentional thing to test the level of range of absurdity that we could go in with, because that’s not what Tostitos has traditionally been.

For us, it’s figuring out what that simple human unlock is that an average person is going to enjoy. Sometimes that’s not the stuff that the industry loves. We joke around about it being blockbusters versus Oscars. Those are two different types of movies and two different types of audiences.

I also wanted to talk about Doritos bringing back “Crash the Super Bowl.” Was there a specific insight that brought you back to that idea? 

When Doritos became an icon to a lot of people, it was when we put consumers at the very center of everything that we did. We felt like now is the time to do that again and let in a brand new generation of creators. The creator economy has completely changed. We have a whole generation that grew up creating content from the first time they got a phone. I can film a 4K or 8K spot on an iPhone now. I’m very excited to see what consumers come back with because some of the spots are things that we would never get through a first round of presentations.

Are there any other strategies you would want to dust off again, where there’s a lot of heritage but maybe it isn’t a muscle that’s been fine-tuned in a while?  

I’m big on not reinventing the wheel. If there’s a great idea out there, there’s no reason why you should have the ego to not lean into it. Let’s see if it can work again, because there’s likely a whole new generation that never got the chance to engage with it. I know we often default to the shiny and new and original. I actually think creating a 2.0 is way harder than creating a 1.0.

I was just at an Advertising Week panel about challenger brands, a lot of which are DTC and tend to be favored by younger consumers. How much do they inform your strategy? 

As a challenger brand, you only get so many swings. Some of our brands, I want them to embrace that because I think we get caught up in big budgets and big opportunities when we should be thinking a little bit more scrappy, a little bit more lean. That’s where creative breakthroughs happen. With so much content out there and so much noise, we owe it to our consumers to give them something entertaining, something they’re going to be willing to share. There is no bigger compliment than someone who texts someone else and says, “Have you seen this?” It’s worth its weight in gold. I can buy a like, I can’t buy a comment or a share. That’s the true measure of engagement for us.

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Welch’s marketing has seen a gear shift in recent years, with the packaged foods marketer once known for TV spots featuring precocious tots embracing experiential activations like a rosé truck and a pop-up speakeasy hidden inside a New York City bodega. 

The millennial-friendly pivot has been driven by a desire to be associated with more than just grapes, with Welch’s undergoing a rebrand and widening its product assortment to include offerings such as canned cocktails and a line of zero-sugar juices that debuted in August 2024. Concord, Massachusetts-based Welch’s, which is over 150 years old, is still owned by an agricultural cooperative of grape growers, but that doesn’t mean its marketing needs to feel fusty. 

Spearheading the marketing charge is CMO Scott Utke, who joined Welch’s nearly four years ago after prior stints at CPG giants like Campbell’s and Kraft. Marketing Dive caught up with Utke at Welch’s Zero Bodega speakeasy in January 2025 to discuss the executive’s bigger brand-building mandate, along with his evolving perspective on agencies and retail media. Following the interview, Welch’s confirmed that it is putting the creative roster for its sparkling juices portfolio under review and enacting a larger shift away from an agency-of-record model after those duties — including the rebrand — were previously handled by Fitzco. 

“Our various platforms — juices, spreads and sparkling — all have different creative needs so we are making this strategic shift away from working with a single creative AOR to ensure we’re catering to the diverse needs of each,” Utke said in a follow-up email. “We are excited for the opportunity to find the right partner for our Sparkling business specifically, bringing fresh ideas and creativity to this important part of our portfolio.” 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

MARKETING DIVE: It’s been a little over a year since Welch’s rebranded. What were the strategic goals you had and what’s the progress on realizing those goals?

SCOTT UTKE: It had been a long time since we had changed anything. When we talked to consumers, they had a lot of passion for the brand, but they were rooting for it to do something different. It felt a little staid. We knew we had an opportunity in terms of repositioning but how do you bring that together visually? It hadn’t been done in the past.

The packaging work was the inception. Across all of our packs, we added the real fruit imagery, we changed the logo and we wanted to get our message about the growers on the side of the pack. That took about a year and a half. In addition, we had a new ad campaign, “Let’s Fruit Stuff Up.” The goal was to get people to think differently about Welch’s and move beyond grape. Then, we wanted to fire up the innovation engine. We did that first through new flavors, including the new passion fruit sparkling [juice].

Our biggest launch was gearing up for Welch’s Zero Sugar. This is now the biggest launch that I could find in Welch’s history in terms of investment.

What are the different levers you pull now when you think about a large media investment versus 10 or even 15 years ago?

It’s still about getting awareness and getting trial out. We do it differently than we have in the past because most of our media buy is going to be digital. The other piece of it is: How do we get consumers more engaged in the product? We did TV, but we did it through a partnership with Kelly Clarkson with some sponsored spots and product on air. We also dabbled in podcasts. We worked with Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” where he did some voice-overs and ads around Zero Sugar.

There’s the Zero Bodega experience that we’re sitting in today, which is getting consumers to experience the brand first hand. It’s always been a quirky brand. We’re still leveraging that and trying to bring that to life.

I’ve read reports about CMO budgets declining. When you talk about your biggest campaign launch ever, do you feel like you have more resources or do you have to be thrifty? 

When I came to Welch’s, we were underspending as a brand. I had to make the case to the board about what our fair share of spending should be. We agreed to what that number looked like and what that cadence would be over time. We’ve had a couple years under our belt to be able to build up what our investment is against the brand and then we’ve had to make a decision: If we’re going to have a big launch, we pull the dollars and do one thing really well instead of spreading it out into a lot of little things. 

We have a pipeline of other innovation ideas that we have coming down the pike, but we have a commitment from the growers and the board that we’re going to continue to invest behind this business so that we can get the spending to a healthy level. 

The doing “a lot of little things” approach seems to be more common.

There’s bifurcation from a media perspective. There’s a lot more options and a lot more ways to reach consumers, which I think actually is a good thing. It allows you to get closer to consumers and more targeted. But you’re right, when it comes to dollars, we have to be really choiceful in terms of where we’re going to place that bet and how we’re going to drive growth over time.

How much experiential marketing did the brand do in the past?

We haven’t found any good examples that have been done in the past. [June 2024] was the first time we put our toe in the water. We did a rosé truck for Rosé Day. We started small in Boston and it did a couple things for us: One, it made us realize how much brand love we have in that area. We said, “Man, if we could just do this on a bigger scale, that would be great.” It also got people talking about not only the products we sell, but also what you can do with them. It created all of these new usage occasions.  

With the Zero launch, as we were talking about what makes the most sense, a pop-up like this has a consumer angle to it but it’s also about getting closer to the media, getting closer to influencers. Since New York is a hub, this location made a ton of sense. 

Our agency Superdigital and my marketing team had a lot of fun with the speakeasy. You have the traditional store on the other side that and then, on this side, we wanted a reveal, almost like “The Wizard of Oz” going to color from black and white. This brand is over 150 years old, it’s got a rich history. While we’re moving in new directions, we still want to hearken back to what people know us for.

Is there a target audience for the experiences? Is it a market that was previously underserved? 

If you look at Welch’s overall, we were a little bit of an older brand. We had a bit of an older consumer. We’re looking at those next generations, whether it be millennials or Gen Z in terms of the total brand. When it comes to Zero, what we found is it’s more of a segmentation of people who are looking for no sugar. We appeal to anybody that’s looking for no sugar and wants full-flavor taste. 

You mentioned Superdigital handles experiential stuff and Fitzco does creative. That’s an agency of record appointment? 

It is. We use multiple agencies, but Fitzco did “Let’s Fruit Stuff Up” in terms of the big relaunch. Generally, they’re our agency of record, but we’re flexible. 

The way a legacy marketer like Welch’s approaches agency relationships is pretty different today. AOR can mean a different thing.

One-hundred percent. I think in the traditional sense, AOR would be you have an agency that works on all your business and you would work with them for many years. The way we look at it now, it’s fit for purpose. Fitzco was fit for purpose as we were looking for how to relaunch the brand. What we liked about them is they understood the task and they had passion for our brand. Our next innovation, we may go in a different direction.

It might be a little selfish on our part, but we want to find the best work for the brand. We have to use our dollars very efficiently. We’re looking at the touchpoints that make the most sense. Some of those things may be through an agency and retail media networks and national media so that we can get the right reach, but then there are areas where we want to be specific. We want the flexibility to not be held to an old standard of staying with the same agencies over time but making sure to bring in the best and brightest for the job to be done. 

Retail media is evolving fast and CPGs are wondering if the sophistication can keep pace with the level of investment. What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities?

The biggest opportunity is that a lot of the retail media networks have a direct connection with the consumer and the path to purchase is well-defined. Someone like Walmart, for example, they have a lot of reach, they’re very efficient in understanding who their consumer is and they can give us a fair amount of data to understand return on ad spend and how much is being converted to purchase. 

Over time, we’re constantly trying to balance brand building opportunities with converting and creating sales. Figuring that balance out is what tends to be the challenge when it comes to retail media because it feels so conversion based. That and the incrementality.  

Are you active on TikTok at all and what do you make of all this ban back-and-forth?

TikTok is not one of our biggest channels, but it’s an area — especially as we talk about showing up with the right generation — where we need to be, 100%. At the end of the day, the consumer will find a solution that either is a different version of TikTok, meaning another owner, or they’ll find another medium to enjoy the same benefits that TikTok provides today. To me, it’s more of a place in time hiccup. I don’t see it as a long-term concern. 

How do you approach artificial intelligence? 

We always try to carve out 10% of our budget to try things we’ve never done before. There’s already some efficiencies that we’re seeing now with AI and that’s going to continue to grow. The strategic thinking that’s required and the level of understanding of our consumer, it’s going to take some time for AI to learn the intricacies.

The Coca-Cola Company on Feb. 18, 2025, introduced Simply Pop, its first entry into the prebiotic soda category, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The new beverage line comes as the marketer seeks to capitalize on a market for prebiotic sodas that is estimated to grow to $3.5 billion by 2032.

“You would have to be under a rock… to not have seen the growth that is happening in the prebiotic soda space,” said Terika Fasakin, senior director of brand marketing for Simply.

Simply Pop includes six grams of fiber for gut health and Vitamin C and zinc for immunity support. The extension of the Simply beverage line launches in five flavors — strawberry, pineapple, mango, lime, fruit punch and citrus punch — that will become available at retailers in select regions and online nationwide via Amazon Fresh.

The prebiotic soda market is driven by upstart brands including Poppi and Olipop, the latter of which is now valued at $1.85 billion after its latest funding round. Prebiotic sodas have grown in popularity as consumers increasingly reach for better-for-you beverages with functional benefits, especially post-pandemic.

“We see consumers’ needs are evolving,” Fasakin said. “How do we meet our consumers where they’re at with the products that they are asking for?”

‘The juicy new soda’

The launch of Simply Pop was informed by in-depth consumer ethnographies across the U.S., including online focus groups and in-person consumer groups. Coca-Cola found the category only has about 20% market penetration, so the company sought out consumers who are curious about prebiotic products but hesitant to purchase. 

The feedback was a reminder that, when it comes to beverages, taste is king. Coca-Cola set out to deliver a functional beverage that was also fruit forward and decided to launch the new offering under its Simply brand. Launched in 2001, Simply now has more than 20 offerings, including extensions into alcoholic and mixer categories, and already has significant equity with younger consumers.  

“Gen Z grew up with Simply. So while millennials or other demographics didn’t always have Simply in the household, this brand has so much love and equity,” Fasakin said. “We lean into that Simply equity and heritage [on packaging] because it delivers such high quality, great-taste expectations.”

Brand equity around fruit-forward flavor is expected to drive the marketing for Simply Pop, which will be positioned as “the juicy new soda.” The marketing strategy will be digital and experiential first, with out-of-home, influencers, paid media, social media and plenty of “liquids to lips” sampling. In addition, Simply Pop in early Q2 2025 will partner with women-focused media platform Dear Media for a podcast tour centered around the “juiciest” pop culture. 

“Our consumer target is Gen Z and millennials,” Fasakin said, adding that the team has pushed itself to “show up differently.”

The launch of Simply Pop also comes as prebiotic brands enter their own soda wars: Poppi recently faced backlash for a viral stunt around its Super Bowl campaign, while Olipop has taken aim at PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew. For a new launch from Coca-Cola — no stranger to sparring with its rivals — the key is being disciplined about remaining true to the Simply brand.

“This brand has built its reputation on being authentic and consistent. We’re committed to continuing to foster genuine consumer relationships,” Fasakin said. “We don’t believe there’s a shortcut to building that credibility.”

Tide’s association with the NFL runs nearly as deep as the stains its products claim to eliminate. Some of the 78-year-old CPG brand’s most iconic marketing has been crafted for events like the Super Bowl, including the memorable “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign from 2018. The laundry detergent marketed by Procter & Gamble (P&G) is changing up its strategy for the 2024-2025 football season in ways that recognize the rising importance of social media, local marketing and athlete ambassadors who can be leveraged as content creators. 

The latest football blitz, titled “#TideTackles,” follows former NFL stars Mark Ingram, Jamaal Charles and Anthony “Spice” Adams as they travel to tailgates around the country and interact with fans, chowing down on regional gameday fare that makes a mess along the way. The effort, which debuted in October 2024, is largely unscripted — a first for Tide’s NFL marketing — and billed as the company’s most content-rich push around the league to date. 

Tide is producing over 100 unique assets to support #TideTackles, which has already toured cities like New Orleans and P&G’s hometown of Cincinnati, with sights now set on the coasts. Media spans TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and online video for Tide’s owned socials, as well as influencer partner channels and a buy around Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football.” The Woven Collaborative, a unit comprised of various external agencies and Tide’s internal creative team, is behind #TideTackles.  

“We had broad ideas, but it was relatively unscripted once we got there. We didn’t know what consumers were going to do,” said Alex Perez, senior brand director for North America laundry at P&G. “Usually, when we make a commercial, we know what stain we’re going to get. This one, we were like: ‘I don’t know what’s coming. We need a hundred of them.’” 

A changing playbook

The concept behind #TideTackles is rooted in data that found half of tailgate attendees show up for the food, with different areas of the country specializing in what are often messy dishes. Perez also acknowledged that fan passion stems more from following specific teams than the NFL as a national organization. Tide has been an official league sponsor since 2012 but wants to better prioritize what makes individual fandoms unique with #TideTackles.

The first installment of #TideTackles sees former NFL player, TV personality and internet meme fixture Spice Adams visit Buffalo, New York, wiping a chicken wing across his face to apply Buffalo sauce as if it were warpaint before mingling with a crowd of Bills diehards. Adams, who chose his own wardrobe for the occasion, is amplifying the visit on his personal social media, providing a bit of influencer marketing on top of Tide’s story driven content.    

“It’s targeting certain fanbases or ZIP codes but we’re finding, broadly, the messaging is appealing,” Perez said. “If you’re posting through the Cincinnati Bengals or the New York Giants, you get some regionality just by the people who are following those accounts and who are interested in that content. We found that’s a good way to make sure that the message is reaching people where they want to be reached.”

Producing #TideTackles comes with more moving parts than shooting on a conventional set. Tailgates are rife with waivers to sign for those who appear on camera while Tide is hauling around a mobile trailer equipped with washing machines to show how products like Tide Power Pods can eliminate stains on the go.

Tide is also paying closer attention to spontaneous moments that fit with the larger #TideTackles narrative. A Philadelphia Eagles fan who got a red drink spilled on her after a player dove into the stands wouldn’t have caught the brand’s eye in the “old world,” according to Perez, but was a point of inspiration for #TideTackles. 

“We’ve definitely amplified the amount of listening we’re doing with consumers, the amount of research we’re able to do with consumers,” said Perez. 

Focusing on smaller, emergent moments and social content may resonate with pockets of the football faithful, but Perez doesn’t see a trade-off with past marketing strategies that carried a unified national focus and honed in on a single star or iconic tagline. #TideTackles also features some wider-scale media buys, such as the streaming spots running around “Thursday Night Football.”

“You have to be able to be relevant in the places where consumers see you and also raise the bar across all of the national pieces,” said Perez. “As the media has evolved, we have to do both, and our consumers are demanding that we’re there for them in all the places where they’re consuming content or looking for information.”

While direct-to-consumer (DTC) is no longer seen as the marketing panacea it once was — especially during the peak pandemic period — the sales channel can still be useful to CPG marketers as part of an omnichannel strategy. That is the case for Mondelēz and its flagship cookie, Oreo. 

“We approach DTC as a tool for creating closer connections to our consumers and learning from them. It enables us to test new products, marketing strategies, engagement tactics and pricing models,” said Kamila DeMaria, director and general manager of DTC at Mondelēz, via email.

To enhance its capabilities, Oreo in 2024 chose digital commerce agency Goodness as its DTC agency partner. The partnership evolved out of Goodness’ previous work to migrate Oreo from Adobe’s Magento e-commerce platform to Shopify to improve efficiency and user experiences.

“Shopify, and the tools that it unlocks, lets a brand like Oreo behave more like a digitally native brand and compete on that level,” said Ethan Martin, strategy director at Goodness. “That’s what the Oreo team specifically was after, and what Mondelēz is hoping to unlock across the whole portfolio.”

Uniting DTC and equity

Goodness’ work was two-fold: building a new e-commerce system that could be scaled across Mondelēz’s portfolio that would be efficient enough to outweigh the high cost of going direct to consumer, and opening up new opportunities for the brand’s OreoID customization platform.

“[With OreoID] we really had our chance to optimize, make something that was more modern, fun, sleek and cool and that feels like a dashboard, and really try to greatly reduce customer service calls and greatly increase conversion rate for every step,” said Donald Fierros, chief operating officer at Goodness.

The work also allowed Oreo to sell retail packs and limited-edition flavors through its e-commerce shop for the first time, opened up the ability to better integrate brand campaigns and unlocked the possibility for a deeper partnership with Goodness.

“There was opportunity with Goodness’ skill sets and the match between DTC and equity sides of Oreo where their goals are different,” Fierros said.

Experimenting with data

Since coming on as an agency partner in Q2 of 2024, Goodness has worked to connect internal systems that it hopes will eventually allow for Oreo to deploy fully personalized communications that enhance engagement and conversion for DTC. Nearly half a year into its relationship with Oreo, Goodness has iterated on OreoID and is working to connect ad, media and CRM data to the e-commerce site. And despite its legacy bona fides, Oreo sees itself as an innovator around data in the space.

“The advantage that Oreo has is that they have this massive pillar of retail sales that’s the core of their business,” Martin said. “It gives them real room to experiment and leverage their DTC platform in a way that maybe a digital brand can’t.”

Building and experimenting with a more connected data infrastructure through DTC will be key to Oreo’s needs on the equity side of its business around how it captures zero- and first-party data at every consumer touch point. Those imperatives are likely to persist, no matter what Google’s plans for third-party cookies portend.

“Building direct relationships with consumers through compelling value exchanges is at the very core of Oreo’s marketing transformation agenda,” said Hamish Stacy, senior manager and U.S. Oreo consumer data lead, via email. “It sets the foundation for developing a sustainable competitive advantage when applied to empathy at scale across our paid and owned ecosystem.”

That data will also be key in training the company’s generative AI infrastructure, Stacy explained. Mondelēz International in September 2024 announced the launch of a new platform supported by Accenture and Publicis Groupe that seeks to better harness the emerging tech.

Understanding conversion

For marketers, collecting data is one thing. Making sure the data is valuable, understanding what has been collected and generating insights is a more complicated proposition. Goodness is helping the Mondelēz data team ensure that data flows in one direction, in the same funnel and into the same storage.

“That way, we don’t have to rely on these big third-party tools to understand the data. We can understand the data on our own, and so can the teams at Mondelēz,” said Fierros. 

CRM has increasingly become a focus for Oreo, as it has throughout the marketing industry. Goodness is helping Oreo think about what first-party data it can gain by asking customers about their favorite products, limited editions and campaigns. The agency is also supporting Oreo’s efforts to determine which zero-party data it can glean from its online platforms (e.g. which content themes best drive web traffic). If done correctly, all of this data can help inform media strategy.

“Our conversion metrics won’t necessarily be sales. They will depend on the challenge, like list growth or data enrichment,” Fierros said. “We’ve got a few North Star metrics that we’re driving to, but we do have to consistently look at attribution methods to make sure that each one of those North Star metrics is being tracked in a consistent way.”

For Oreo, building and operating a stronger data infrastructure will help it support its ambitious goals around acquisition, activation and analysis that Goodness can help it achieve, Oreo’s Stacy explained.

“To reach our ambition we heavily rely on the expertise of agency ecosystem partners and their ability to work collaboratively with each other and constantly challenge, break, and rebuild ways of working,” the executive said.

Retail media is one of the key marketing channels that saw accelerated growth due to changing consumer behaviors and specific challenges related to the pandemic. Curbside pickup, home delivery and in-store fulfillment options were boosted during the period and those habits appear permanent, increasing the importance of retail media networks.

That’s especially true for CPG marketers like Georgia-Pacific, with a portfolio that includes paper product brands like Angel Soft, Quilted Northern, Sparkle and Brawny.

“I’m not sure if you heard, but there was a toilet paper shortage in 2020,” joked Paras Shah, senior director of digital media at the CPG giant, during a panel discussion at Marketing Dive and Grocery Dive’s virtual event, “How to Navigate and Capitalize on Retail Media Networks,” that was held on Sept. 25, 2024.

Shah leads programmatic media, social media, search marketing and retail media across Georgia-Pacific’s brands, and since 2020, he has led the transformation of the company’s omnichannel marketing strategy, with a special focus on retail media.

The following Q&A draws from a larger conversation that occurred during a virtual event and has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can register here to watch a replay of the full event.

MARKETING DIVE: How can retail media help marketers better connect with consumers where they are?

PARAS SHAH: Marketers can target consumers based on purchase history, browsing habits and personally identified preferences, and ensure that ads are relevant and align with their current needs. That wasn’t necessarily the case pre-COVID, when retail media was not as well developed. But that really accelerated how many people signed up for retail or mobile apps. It accelerated how much first-party data was available for the retail media networks to be able to turn around and use. 

Ads are also now being placed more directly within the shopping experience, like with retail search ads or in-store via in-store videos and digital signage. They’re all being developed to reach consumers closer to the point of purchase, but they’re being done in a way that’s minimally disruptive, while also increasing the likelihood of engagement.

Retail media networks are also starting to build off-site shoppable ads in digital media using programmatic offsite, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, connected TV, where marketers can connect with shoppers to complete purchases directly through the ad. That helps meet the consumer at the moment of intent, and it makes it very frictionless and improves that convenience factor.

Real-time insights into ad performance that some of these retail media networks are offering really help marketers adapt in a very agile way, based on the consumer’s response to the ads. And then they use this data to then optimize their campaigns for better results.

By focusing on relevance, convenience and the ease of integration into that marketing ecosystem, retail media really allows marketers to connect with consumers at very crucial moments along the path to purchase. 

How can marketers use that retail data to better target their campaigns?

Retail media uses the same channels, capabilities and platforms as your national digital media. Retail media can offer data that enables better targeting, but that’s only when you really tap into and leverage the power of that better targeting.

Contextual relevance is key. We leverage curated sites and publishers, and we have them serve ads when consumers are engaging in relevant activities. We’ve also looked at targeting based on demographics and life stages. That’s a key benefit of retail media networks: data on household size or family composition can really help marketers select specific messaging or creative.

Data is at the heart of everything that Georgia-Pacific does. We try to make sure that we leverage data to activate against so that we can make sure that we’re reaching the consumer across the different points in the purchase journey.

Where are the insights and strategies for retail media coming from agency partners or in-house?

At Georgia-Pacific — and I consider this one of our competitive advantages — we’ve built an entire in-house capability. Our programmatic media, search marketing and paid social are bought in-house. We’re able to leverage our in-house team of practitioners and specialists to work with our brand teams and cross-functional partners — sales, supply chain, finance — to plan what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it.

They’re the ones who go activate and come back and share with their counterparts, what we’re learning, what insights they’re gaining from the activations, what’s working, what’s not working, how efficient and effective things are. Then they’re making changes on the fly to optimize and make sure that we’re creating more value with investments in the space.

How do you approach measurement in a retail media space that doesn’t have a lot of standardization yet?

That continues to be a pain point for Georgia-Pacific. We want to invest in retail media to drive incrementality for a business, and there is no standardized way of measuring incrementality. Everything we found is kind of apples to oranges, so we use our own media mix modeling to be the determinant of how effective something is — that’s the single source of truth. 

First, we try to standardize our investments across our internal measurement capabilities. We try to find a balance of efficiency and effectiveness metrics that meet both the brand and the sales teams’ priorities. 

Second, we’ve created a retail media measurement framework. We look at KPIs that are more aligned to the marketing objective based on the stage of the funnel or target audience. 

Third, having guidelines for in-campaign optimization and post-campaign evaluation, where capabilities exist, is also important. But that’s our tertiary priority, because that’s only going to tell you so much.

We like to think of everything as an investment. So we want to make sure that the KPIs are set so we can drive investor confidence in our retail media spend. 

Do you think retail media networks are contributing to media fragmentation?

Retail media networks are becoming their own walled gardens, but it’s a bit nuanced. Much like Google, Facebook and Amazon, retail media networks have access to a significant amount of first-party data, particularly around purchase behavior, loyalty data and in-store activity. But as the retail media networks grow, they tend to limit the data sharing. They keep more valuable audience insights and performance metrics restricted to their own platforms. 

The challenge for marketers lies in navigating these ecosystems in walled gardens and negotiating for visibility into the measurement and performance across the multiple retail media platforms and within the walled gardens. 

Retail media networks often try to lock you into a full-funnel campaign. But I always like to remind every retail media network, that is your full funnel, not my full funnel.

What should marketers that are looking to invest in retail media for the first time be thinking about?

Marketers should make sure that their investments align with their objective. If they’re just getting into retail media for the first time, make sure that whatever they’re investing in is actually driving their objective. Too often I’ve seen where marketers are doing what retail media networks tell them to do without actually delivering on their business objectives. There is sometimes a misalignment of incentives.

Back when we started on this journey, we flipped the funnel. We started with the bottom of the funnel, and we wanted to see where we could maximize those consumers who are ready to convert. Then we worked our way down the funnel to drive more awareness and consideration, so that we can hold those consumers’ hands and hearts through the non-traditional, non-linear path to purchase all the way through conversion again. 

By flipping the funnel, we were actually able to make sure that the retail media was used to drive sales and market share gains across the appropriate fulfillment options most efficiently and effectively. That’s what I recommend to any marketer who’s trying to invest in it for the first time.