TRENDSETTERS
Patrick McLean: Turning “Highway Hospitality” Into a New Engine for Growth
As the first Chief Marketing Officer of Love’s, Patrick McLean is helping one of America’s largest family-owned businesses move from decades of growth through expansion to its next stage of growth through marketing—without losing what made the company successful in the first place. When most people think of Love’s Travel Stops, they probably think of […]
Global Marketing Fails Operationally Before It Fails Publicly
Kevin Freedman on AI, brand drift—and the growing risk of “international marketing debt.” Great global marketing tends to be celebrated for the things we can see: the idea, the creative, the media, the results. Kevin Freedman thinks we should pay considerably more attention to what happens underneath. “Creative often gets the credit for campaigns and […]
Cause Marketing Grows Up: From Campaign to Collaboration
For Momentum’s Mollye Rhea on why the strongest cause partnerships are becoming more integrated, more enduring—and more valuable to everyone involved. Cause marketing has come a long way from asking consumers to add a dollar at checkout or promising that a percentage of every purchase will go to a good cause. Those approaches haven’t disappeared—and […]
Are Movements Becoming the New Media?
When content is abundant, participation may be the harder—and more valuable—thing for brands to create. What if the next important evolution in media isn’t another channel? It may be something people choose to join. That’s the provocative possibility that emerged from a recent Internationalist conversation with Scott Goodson, Founder and Chairman of StrawberryFrog and creator […]
The Future of Marketing Depends on Better Questions, Not Just Faster Answers
AI & Humanity | Before becoming a technology entrepreneur by founding quantilope, Dr. Peter Aschmoneit spent more than a decade making the same kinds of decisions that today’s CMOs face. His experience as a brand marketer at Unilever, Danone and Fuchs—and his doctorate in marketing—led him to a simple conclusion: the future of AI depends […]
Jared Belsky: Trust, Collaboration—and Why Marketing’s Best Days May Still Be Ahead
When Jared Belsky decided to return media rebates to Acadia’s clients, he knew people would notice. The decision challenged one of the marketing industry’s least-discussed practices. Instead of keeping rebates earned through media buying as agency profit, Acadia redistributed them to nearly 50 clients based on their share of spending. “It wasn’t my money in […]
TRENDSETTERS | Michael Fanuele on the Crisis of Inspiration
Organizations today have more information than ever before. Research is richer. Data is more accessible. Measurement is more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence can summarize, predict, analyze, and optimize at a scale that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Yet despite all this intelligence, many leaders find themselves confronting a surprisingly human challenge. How […]
The Grumpy Innovator: Why Good Ideas Don’t Always Win
Costas Papaikonomou on disruption, decision-making, and the overlooked power of the obvious. Innovation has become a kind of corporate reflex. When growth slows or markets shift, the instinct is often the same: disrupt, reinvent, transform. But according to Costas Papaikonomou, an innovation expert, entrepreneur, co-founder of Una Terra, and author of The Disruption Fallacy and […]
Retail Media, Connected Commerce & the New CPG Playbook
A conversation with Mary Katherine “MK” Woltz of Danone on how media is being redefined—from a channel to a growth system. Media Isn’t Supporting Commerce Anymore It’s becoming inseparable from it. For years, retail media was treated as an extension of shopper marketing—a powerful but contained layer focused on conversion. That distinction is disappearing. As […]
From Performance to Protection: How ROCKWOOL Is Reframing Marketing in a Changing World
In a market defined by pressure on costs, on supply chains, and on expectations, brand performance remains essential. But increasingly, marketing is being asked to do more than communicate performance; it must clarify what it enables and why it matters now. At ROCKWOOL, that shift is taking shape in a deliberate and meaningful way. With […]