The best creative risks should make you a little nervous. But they should never make you ask why your brand is taking them. 

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with Rankin Carroll, chief brand officer of Mars Snacking, to unpack how brands like M&M’s, Snickers and Skittles stay culturally relevant without treating boldness as an excuse for chaos. 

Rankin takes us behind the scenes of the 2023 Snickers AI experiment that felt “potentially crazy” at the time.

He also gets candid about Mars’ creator learning curve and the responsibility marketers have to the next generation.

What you’ll learn:

• How Mars pressure-tests risky ideas before putting iconic brands on the line
• Why the 2023 Snickers AI experiment required legal, security and agency teams to take the risk together
• How “Why us? Why this brand?” separates bold creative from stunts
• Why brands have to earn the credibility to participate authentically in culture
• Why Rankin believes transformation now has no end state
• How Mars is learning to loosen control in creator-led marketing
• Why marketing leaders need to rethink how the next generation is trained for an AI-shaped industry
• Why CMOs need to own the AI agenda instead of leaving it to scattered pilots

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.

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About our guest: 

Rankin Carroll is Chief Brand Officer of Mars Snacking, where he works across some of the company’s most recognizable brands, including M&M’s, Snickers and Skittles. He has spent more than 20 years at Mars across marketing, advertising, general management and global and regional leadership roles. His career has taken him from Toronto to the UK and at one point, included running an ice cream business along the way.

Today, Rankin focuses on what he describes as the stewardship of distinctive, iconic brands: protect what makes them valuable, make them stronger than when you received them, and still create enough tension to keep them culturally relevant.

Episode Highlights: 

[04:33] The Snickers AI Bet That Looked “Potentially Crazy” — In 2023, Mars put Snickers into an agentic creative experience at a point when the safety and reputational risks looked far less understood than they do today. The project involved roughly ten tech partners, legal and security leadership, and a list of 8,000 blocked words. The takeaway is much bigger than “take more risk.” It’s that ambitious experimentation becomes possible when the organization commits to solving the risk together.

[07:56] Earn the Right to Take Risks — Rankin draws a hard line between calculated cultural risk and performative brand behavior. Skittles could maintain its relationship with the LGBTQ+ community during a more volatile period because the brand had spent years building credibility there. His filter for every big swing is simple: Why us? Why this brand? If there is no strategically convincing answer, the idea does not deserve the risk.

[13:42] Are We Preparing the Next Generation for What Marketing Becomes Next? — Rankin raises one of the more uncomfortable questions from Brandweek 2026: what happens to junior marketers when the profession changes around AI? He expects the practice to look completely different within three years and openly says he does not yet have a satisfying answer for how marketers entering the industry should be trained. For him, that makes talent development a leadership responsibility, not an HR afterthought.

[15:03] “A Thousand Pilots and No Progress” — Rankin believes leaving AI adoption to disconnected enthusiasts across an organization is a recipe for chaos. CMOs need to own the agenda alongside technology leadership, bringing top-down clarity to investment, priorities and what the company should build, buy, rent or borrow. His warning is simple: just because you can use AI somewhere does not mean you should.