This post has been refreshed for clarity and context. The original report came from a CNBC interview with Andrew Clarke, then chief marketing and customer officer at Mars.
When Andrew Clarke told CNBC that it had probably never been a more challenging and disruptive time to be a marketer, he was describing a problem every marketer still feels: attention is fragmented, channels keep multiplying, and customers move between media, search, social, marketplaces, retail apps, and stores without caring how a brand’s internal teams are organized.
That tension has only intensified. The tools have changed, but the job is the same: reach the right people, make the brand memorable, prove what is working, and keep growth moving without getting distracted by every new platform.
What Mars saw before many marketers felt it
In the CNBC interview, Clarke said the challenge for Mars was reaching mass audiences while adapting its marketing mix across creative, media, public relations, design, data, and evidence-based decision-making. That point matters because Mars is not a niche brand with one tidy customer journey. Its portfolio included confectionery brands such as M&M’S, Snickers, and Skittles, along with pet care brands such as Pedigree and Whiskas.
CNBC reported at the time that Mars was privately owned, made almost $35B in sales, and was the world’s largest confectionery company by global market share, citing Euromonitor. Mars also worked with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science to understand buying behaviour and guide media investment.
Since then, Mars has become larger. In an August 2026 company statement, Mars described itself as a $65B+ family-owned business based on combined Mars and Kellanova 2025 net sales. That added scale makes the original marketing challenge even clearer: more brands, more categories, more routes to the customer, and more pressure to make decisions that hold up across the business.
In plain English: Mars was trying to protect broad brand reach while making sharper, more measurable decisions. That is still the core marketing challenge.
Disruption did not replace fundamentals
The mistake is assuming disruption means marketers must chase every new platform. Clarke’s argument was more disciplined: creativity still matters, but it has to be paired with research, data, testing, and growth strategy.
That is an important distinction. A new channel does not automatically create a better customer connection. A dashboard does not automatically prove impact. AI does not automatically fix weak positioning, thin creative, or unclear offers.
The fundamentals still do the heavy lifting. You need a brand people remember, a message they understand, and a reason to choose you. Technology can improve how quickly you learn, test, and personalize, but it cannot rescue a strategy that never made sense in the first place.
What has changed since the original interview
When the original CNBC piece ran in 2018, digital transformation was already reshaping how large consumer brands thought about commerce, media, and customer experience. Mars had recently announced two major digital leadership hires: Sandeep Dadlani as chief digital officer and George Corbin as chief digital demand officer. The company positioned those hires around data analytics, automation, e-commerce, and digital customer experience.
By 2026, that transformation has moved from digital adoption to AI-enabled execution. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey reported that CMOs were allocating an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, while only 30% said their organizations had mature or fully developed AI readiness. The same survey said many marketing leaders still lacked the budget and resources needed to deliver their strategy.
IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study pointed to the same pressure from another angle: U.S. ad spend was forecast to grow, digital channels were expected to lead that growth, and AI was becoming central to planning, activation, creative, and measurement. That means marketers are not just choosing media channels anymore. They are choosing which systems will influence who sees the message, how it is optimized, and how success is measured.
The real lesson for smaller businesses
Most Tech Help Canada readers are not running Mars-sized media budgets. That makes Clarke’s point more useful, not less. If a global company needs discipline to avoid wasting money across too many channels, smaller businesses need it even more.
The practical lesson is simple: do not confuse more activity with better marketing. Posting on every platform, buying every tool, and launching campaigns without a clear message usually creates noise. Strong marketing starts with the customer, the offer, and the conversion path.
If you are improving your own marketing, start by mapping the role of each channel. Search captures existing demand. Social can create discovery and trust. Email turns attention into repeat contact. Content builds authority over time. Paid media can accelerate what already converts. The mix matters, but only when each piece has a job.
Data can tell you what people clicked. It can show which ad won, which landing page converted, and which audience segment responded. It cannot decide what your brand should mean to a customer.
That is where creative still earns its place. Mars built many of its best-known brands through memory, emotion, distinctive assets, and broad reach. Smaller businesses can apply the same principle at a different scale. Your visuals, voice, offer, proof, and customer experience should make you easier to notice and easier to remember.
The more automated media buying becomes, the more your creative has to work. Platforms can help you find people, but they cannot make those people care. For that, you need a message that meets a real need and sounds like it came from a human being, not a template.
Data should sharpen judgment, not replace it
Clarke’s reference to evidence-based marketing still deserves attention because it avoids two common traps. One trap is treating marketing as pure instinct. The other is treating marketing as pure math.
Good marketers use data to improve judgment. They test campaigns, study behaviour, compare channels, and look for patterns. Then they make decisions that connect numbers to customer reality. A campaign can produce cheap clicks and still attract the wrong buyers. A piece of content can bring less traffic and still produce better leads. A creative idea can look inefficient in the first week and become valuable when it builds memory over time.
For businesses adapting to AI-driven advertising platforms, this matters even more. As Tech Help Canada has noted in its coverage of Meta and Google’s shift toward automated campaign control, marketers need to understand what the platforms are optimizing for and where human strategy still matters.
What marketers should do now
The right response to disruption is not panic. It is focus. Before adding another channel, campaign, or AI tool, marketers should tighten the basics that make every tactic work harder.
Clarify the customer. Know who you are trying to reach, what they already believe, and what problem they are trying to solve.
Strengthen the offer. Make the value obvious. If the offer is unclear, better targeting will not save it.
Use creative to build memory. Distinctive messaging, visuals, and proof make your brand easier to recall when the buyer is ready.
Measure what matters. Track leads, sales, retention, and qualified actions — not vanity metrics alone.
Test with discipline. Change one meaningful variable at a time, learn from the result, and scale what earns its place.
This is also where the broader evolution of digital marketing becomes clear. The tools keep changing, but the best marketers keep coming back to the same questions: Who are we trying to reach? What do they need to believe? Why should they choose us? How will we prove the work is moving the business?
Disruption rewards disciplined marketers
Clarke’s quote has aged well because it captured both sides of modern marketing. Yes, the work is harder. Consumers have more choices, platforms have more control, and the path to purchase is less predictable. But the opportunity is bigger too.
Marketers can learn faster, test faster, and reach customers in more relevant moments than earlier generations could. The advantage goes to teams that combine creative courage with evidence, not teams that blindly chase whatever looks new.
For Mars, that meant connecting brand building, digital commerce, data, and growth strategy across a global business. For smaller companies, the same idea applies at a more practical level: build a clear message, publish useful content, make your offer easy to understand, and measure the actions that lead to revenue.
Disruption is not going away. The question is whether your marketing system gets sharper because of it.
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