Jenna Bromberg inherits one of America’s most recognizable fast-food brands, but recognition is no longer translating into growth
Brands
The next competitive advantage won’t come from making packaging greener. It will come from making sustainability invisible to the consumer experience.
AI assistants, private conversations, podcasts, communities, creators and word-of-mouth are creating a marketing environment where influence is expanding precisely where measurement struggles to follow.
Now that machines can reproduce the language, imagery and imperfections brands once used to signal “real,” marketers need to confront a harder question: what does authenticity actually mean when anyone can manufacture its appearance?
McDonald’s wants to turn its restaurants, screens, app and customer relationships into a billion-dollar advertising business. The bigger story for marketers is that retail media is rapidly becoming something much larger than retail.
Today, the CMO role is increasingly responsible for understanding what the world wants from the company in the first place, turning marketing leadership into something much closer to business leadership itself.
Something strange is happening to modern branding: companies have never had more tools for expressing themselves, yet increasingly they seem to be expressing themselves in exactly the same ways. The problem goes deeper than AI-generated creative, because an entire marketing ecosystem built around optimization, templates, best practices and measurable performance is quietly pushing brands toward the same safe center.
Carl’s Jr. could have advertised its new burger with another close-up of melting cheese and a price splashed across the screen. Instead, Angus Maximus became the centerpiece of a Roman spectacle, demonstrating why the size of the creative idea doesn’t have to match the size of the marketing proposition.
Marketing was built around campaigns because media was scarce, production was expensive and audiences could reliably be assembled around moments. None of those conditions still hold, yet brands continue organizing their budgets, agencies and creative processes around a model increasingly incompatible with how attention actually works.
In an era where almost every brand can operate its own channel, programming and community, the smarter question is no longer how to buy more attention, but how to create something people might voluntarily come back for.