How Kraft Heinz’s new CMO Todd Kaplan is defending creativity in the age of data

Now, the newly minted Kraft Heinz CMO is working in an increasingly fragmented media space where the C-suite seems to be obsessed with data points and monocultural moments don’t exist as they once did. The question becomes: Will he take the same bet?

In a way, brand innovation has become part of Kaplan’s signature, a mark of his work throughout his nearly 18-year-tenure at PepsiCo, where he oversaw Pepsi’s first visual overhaul in 14 years and the reboot of Pepsi’s Super Bowl Halftime Show platform to feature artists like Jennifer Lopez, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and The Weeknd. Over the course of his time at Pepsi, Kaplan has served as marketing manager for AMP Energy drink, director of sports marketing for Pepsi, vp of marketing for PepsiCo’s water portfolio and vp of marketing for Pepsi before becoming Pepsi CMO in 2022, according to LinkedIn.

Some of the greatest hits from his time at Pepsi include the “More than OK” Super Bowl campaign in 2019, featuring Steve Carell, Cardi B, and Lil Jon, Cannes Lions award-winning “Better with Pepsi” in 2021 and this year, when Pepsi chose to not participate in the Super Bowl broadcast to instead promote Pepsi Wild Cherry on social media and on the ground in Las Vegas. 

“Todd is truly a creative force in the CPG marketing space, constantly pushing boundaries and inspiring those around him,” Laura Jones, CMO at Instacart said in an email to Digiday. On Memorial Day Weekend earlier this year, Pepsi partnered with Instacart for a giveaway of grilling tools as part of its Grills Night Out campaign.

Kaplan seems to be among the few remaining so-called CMO rock stars, a 2010s-era of marketers who seemed to be able to grow the brand with cool creative work that created buzz for the brand and made them into somewhat of a celebrity within the industry. During Kaplan’s time with PepsiCo, the brand won more than 150 Cannes Lions, according to a Cannes Lions spokesperson. With Kaplan at the wheel as CMO, the soda brand launched its #BetterWithPepsi campaign, which found Pepsi logos inside burger chain wrappers to position the drink brand as the fast food soda companion over its competitors. It won six Gold, three Silver and three Bronze Lions.

Much of Kaplan’s legacy could be attributed to his work to bring Pepsi back into the cultural zeitgeist by hiring big-name celebs as they became popular like Cardi B and Zach King, the internet personality known for his illusionist magic tricks.

For the last few years, economic winds have loomed and budgets have shrunk. In response marketers started getting back to basics, focusing on the work as opposed to building their own brands. Meaning, the tea leaves have yet to reveal if the Pepsi playbook works in an increasingly fragmented media marketplace, even for Kaplan, who built his CMO celebrity status around brand exposure and cultural relevance.

Back in June, Kaplan announced his departure from Pepsi to step into the role as CMO at Kraft Heinz, a food company with “sleeping giants ready to even further engage and connect with consumers and the product aspirations,” he said. He’s a casual businessman and sports fanatic who’s said to bond quickly with others over sneaker collections. (Digiday reached out to Kaplan informally via LinkedIn DM, where he agreed to an on-the-record interview for this piece as the new CMO of Kraft Heinz.) He officially started the new role in July.

“Innovation is going to be critical for us here at Kraft Heinz, especially as we look out at the next 10-year horizon,” he said. “As I look at all of Kraft has undergone — a ton of transformation over the last handful of years — marketing has really been a cornerstone of that evolution.” (Kaplan did not point to any specific marketing examples.)

Perhaps Kaplan’s culture-first playbook could come in handy, not just at Kraft Heinz, but across the industry. 

The ‘brand versus performance’ argument

Notably, marketing’s role in business has fluctuated over the past few years. Across the industry, there’s been a brewing debate on how to balance brand versus performance marketing to build a modern brand. For years, marketers over-invested in performance marketing tactics, worried about the short-term bottom line amidst increased competition in the marketplace and looming economic uncertainty.

Kaplan’s strength, according to those who have worked with him, is keeping culturally relevant campaigns as the lifeblood of a brand, challenging the numbers in today’s data-driven strategy-focused marketing landscape to keep creativity at the center of the work. He’s no stranger to innovation at large organizations, which are sometimes less agile and slower to adopt change, and says that innovation will be critical at a legacy company like Kraft Heinz.

“It’s very easy [to lose creativity], especially in today’s environment where budgets are getting cut, the bottom line is what matters, P&L [profit and loss] statements,” said Tyler Moore, current chief strategy officer at The Escape Pod ad agency, who worked with Kaplan when he was a strategist at R/GA, the agency responsible for launching PepsiCo’s LIFEWTR bottled water and Bubly sparkling water products in 2017. “Creativity is fighting to try to have some type of relevance even if it’s the biggest company in the world.”

Kaplan’s at the forefront of the fight for creativity, willing to go to bat with the rest of the C-suite if he has to, said Moore.

The industry is to blame, in part, for the debate over performance versus brand. Marketers don’t always have a seat at the table for that conversation, said Kathryn Worthington, current fractional CMO and former managing director of strategy at R/GA. Worthington and Kaplan crossed paths in building out the Bubly sparkling water product during her time at R/GA. Marketers have historically been siloed, divorced from conversations about strategic growth and product, and relegated to ad campaigns.

But Kaplan, they imagined, is an anomaly.

Neither Moore nor Worthington were in the Pepsi boardrooms when (or if) tensions about marketing strategy and business goals arose, but they suspect Kaplan has a knack for convincing the rest of the C-suite to follow his lead. That assumption implies he had a seat at the table to get creative ideas through in a way other CMOs can’t.

“His way of communicating something probably tough and risky to his peers and those above him, he just probably has a great demeanor of getting people to buy in and accepting risks and being comfortable,” Moore surmised.

Worthington added, “I’ve seen people argue numbers and what’s a logical path to get there [to sales] and he’s open to the outlier path,” she said. 

Big soda takes on big water

When Kaplan arrived at PepsiCo’s beverage division in the early 2000s, soda sales were bubbling down the drain in what The New York Times called “The Decline of ‘Big Soda.’” Soda, a fan favorite from the 1960s through the 1990s, was struggling to sell to now-health-conscious consumers. And to add insult to injury, Pepsi had been dethroned from its spot as the second-most popular soft drink in the country by its rival Diet Coke.

PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi was investing in building out the company’s healthier options, like bottled water and sports drinks, to help balance things out. It would be Kaplan’s job to make good on Nooyi’s bet, transforming PepsiCo’s water portfolio, and launching new products like LIFEWTR and Bubly sparkling water, alongside R/GA, from 2016 to 2018, per his LinkedIn. Around that time, there was a Kendall Jenner ad in 2017, when Pepsi was criticized for misreading the cultural context around calls for social justice. Ask him about the infamous ad cultural reset moment and you’ll get an audible groan. But challenges at Pepsi came in waves, whether it was turning around the company’s food service business or its water portfolio, like rebuilding Aquafina, he said.

“I was rewarded with my time on water with what I would call a bigger problem of fixing the Pepsi business,” Kaplan said. “It was right after that [Kendall Jenner ad] you referenced.”

The controversial ad was before Kaplan’s time as Pepsi’s marketing lead. But overseeing PepsiCo’s water portfolio wouldn’t come without its trials, according to the R/GA staffers. LIFEWTR’s marketing focused more on the art-themed packaging than the product. Meaning, every time a new art series was launched, there was always an activation, something to keep LIFEWTR in the cultural zeitgeist beyond a 30-second spot, a stunt led to content that the ad campaign was built around, per Moore. 

Then came the #ArtByAWoman campaign, showcasing a series of art on the bottled water that was created by women artists. The agency wanted to play that up, touching on gender equality, a social issue, but there was an air of uncertainty that that angle would align with Pepsi’s brand safety parameters, according to Moore. Kaplan, however, was invested in the storytelling, soothing any suspected tensions and in 2018, the water brand won an Effie for its work as a purpose-driven brand.  

“From day one, that was his rallying cry from up top, to ensure that everything we did had that [creative] lens,” Moore said. “He ensured that we had the investment to launch correctly. He fought for big dollars.” (Moore did not offer specific budget figures.) 

Kaplan’s next challenge

For the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, Kaplan is described as approachable, someone you’d want to grab a beer with — a personality trait that speaks to his Southern California upbringing.

He is not a guarded marketer, says those who have worked with him. Kaplan often came to R/GA’s Chicago office for big strategy presentations. When he wasn’t in person, the R/GA team recalls dinners and off-the-cuff phone calls to spitball ideas. 

He’s curious and considers himself to be someone who can’t resist a good rabbit hole. The last one he went down was to try and understand Web3, he said.

However, perhaps the trait he recognizes most within himself is his entrepreneurial spirit, something that’s been a through-line even before his 17-year tenure at PepsiCo. When he was an undergrad at Northwestern University, he started two businesses, including one student-run ad agency, he said.

Seventeen years is a long time to stay with a company. The average employee tenure is about four years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But by staying, Kaplan saw a slew of opportunities, tackling everything from sports marketing with Pepsi or marketing Mountain Dew to overseeing the water portfolio before landing in the role of CMO.

“On paper, it looks crazy,” he said. “But what’s great is PepsiCo was such a deep company with so many different brands and places to go with it that I would change jobs every two-ish years to try something new.”

Settling into his new role at Kraft Heinz, he’s already got a 10-year-plan to “redefine the food space for tomorrow’s consumer,” he said. Even though he didn’t share details freely, historically, marketing has been the cornerstone of Kraft Heinz, Kaplan added, and will continue under his leadership.

The role of the CMO may look different than it did when Kaplan first started and it’ll look different again in the next few years. But change, he said, is inevitable. The numbers game, looking at ROI and CPMs is just one part of it. Marketers must consider fluctuations in the cultural landscape, from political polarization to global warming, he said.

“There’s always something that is changing how a consumer is going to interact with your brand, where their perception is going to be, how you’re needing to navigate all these different things,” he said. “Being agile and needing to lean into the change, figure out how your brand connects is going to be half the battle.”

Current Pepsi employees and agencies, including AMV BBDO, did not respond to Digiday’s requests for comment. Kraft Heinz declined to make anyone else available for an interview.