Mars is describing a shift that many large advertisers have discussed for years but often struggled to execute in practice. In a new Business Insider interview published on June 15, 2026, Mars Snacking chief brand officer Rankin Carroll said the company is moving away from the old model of broad campaigns built for mass reach and “hope for the best” distribution. The replacement is a more segmented approach in which the same brand idea can be shaped differently for different audiences, channels and moments.
That statement matters because Mars is not a niche direct-to-consumer startup. It is a global portfolio business with household brands, complex channel mixes and the kind of scale that usually forces marketing teams toward simplification. When a company like Mars says precision is no longer optional, the implication for the rest of the market is straightforward: audience-level relevance is becoming part of mainstream brand building, not just a performance marketing technique.
Why this is more than targeting
The easy interpretation is that Mars simply wants better ad targeting. That is true, but it is incomplete. Carroll’s comments point to a deeper operational change. Campaign planning is shifting from one creative package distributed everywhere toward a system in which a core narrative can branch into different versions by context, audience need and platform behavior. In other words, the unit of planning is no longer only the campaign. It is the campaign architecture.
For marketers, this matters because personalization only works when the operating model supports it. Better data alone does not create better communication. Teams need clear audience definitions, creative variants that actually reflect different motivations, governance for brand safety, and measurement that can compare incremental lift across channels. Mars’ reference to Publicis’ Connected ID infrastructure shows that the technology layer is now tightly linked to media and creative decisions.
There is also a more subtle point in the Mars example. Carroll does not reject broad reach. He explicitly says scale still matters. That is an important correction to a common false choice in digital marketing. Brand growth rarely comes from hyper-targeting alone, but broad reach without relevance wastes money. The practical answer is not to abandon scale. It is to make scale more adaptive.
What marketers should copy and what they should not
The most useful lesson is not that every brand should suddenly build dozens of AI-generated variants. The useful lesson is that personalization should start from a growth hypothesis, not a production capability. Mars appears to be using data and AI to decide which groups deserve differentiated messaging and where the waste in traditional planning sits. That is a smarter sequence than generating endless assets first and then searching for a strategic reason to use them.
Another strong signal is Mars’ caution around generative AI. Carroll says the company sees real upside, but also real risk. That position is more credible than the usual “AI will transform everything” narrative because it reflects the actual work involved in brand use cases. Once consumers can co-create with prompts, voice or chat interfaces, moderation becomes part of the experience design. Mars reportedly built multiple layers of protection around one of its AI-led activations. That is the kind of detail business leaders should pay attention to.
For CEOs and marketing directors, the broader implication is organizational. The companies that win here will not separate brand, media, CRM, ecommerce and analytics into isolated workflows. Precision brand marketing requires those functions to work as one system. Audience strategy should influence creative. Creative should influence data collection. Data should improve media allocation. And all of it has to feed back into commercial performance rather than vanity engagement.
The big takeaway is not that mass advertising is dead. It is that mass advertising is being rebuilt around more intelligent distribution. The brand remains the center. But the delivery of that brand is becoming more modular, more participatory and more measurable.
Source:
Business Insider: Your candy ads are about to get a lot more personalized, Mars says
