A shift from brand investment in traditional media channels towards social and content has been a growing theme in recent years.

It was a particularly notable topic during this year’s Cannes Lions 2025, when businesses including Mastercard, Kraft Heinz and Unilever touted the benefits of leaning on alternatives to traditional media channels.

At food giant Mars, the focus isn’t on making a conscious shift from one set of media channels to another. Instead it’s on finding the best “vehicle” for the jobs to be done for its particular brands.

As Mars Food and Nutrition CMO Matt Graham explains, the business is using a relatively new model called the Kitchen.

“It’s fundamentally a different way of how we front-load the business challenge,” he says.

The new model puts a lot more focus on deciding what the right mechanism is to address a business or brand challenge, which could take many different forms. If a creative challenge is sought, then the business will also “review” carefully all the possible channels it could use.

On the high empathy tasks – around creative development, insight generation, great storytelling – on those things you need humans.

Matt Graham, Mars

Mars’ media strategy doesn’t start with a particular channel in mind, but rather with the job to be done. The business then decides between different channels on that basis.

“Depending on what we believe is the best vehicle to solve that business problem, we’ll pull one of those levers,” says Graham.

“Social is just a medium to allow us to be where the consumer is, meet them where they are.”

That said, Mars is shifting its advertising spend away from traditional channels and towards social. Graham explains back in 2019, the business was probably spending around 50% of communications investment on social, whereas now it’s more like 74%.

More of Mars’ efforts are going towards what Graham terms “human-to-human connections”, meaning working with creators.

The new media landscape also means being experimental, with Mars’ team having “freedom within a framework” to try new things and find out what works for its brands on different channels. The Kitchen structure is set up to facilitate agility and reactiveness across the organisation.

“We’ve got the Kitchen set up in a way that we can move faster, we can play across the consumer journey, we can get faster responses from other functions like legal to get things to market,” he says.

AI ‘to enable…not replace’

As well as a shifting media landscape, the increasing role of generative AI is another major future dynamic for marketing to face into.

Graham’s approach to AI is very much that it should enhance what the team are doing, not act to replace humans.

As the capabilities of generative AI have evolved, Mars has been doing plenty of test-and-learn work to understand where the technology can play a role, in particular enabling efficiencies.

“We do media mix modelling. We could only do that once a year on most of our brands, because of the time and effort it took to extract the data and translate that into insights. Now we can do it multiple times a year [as a result of AI],” Graham says.

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He believes “low empathy tasks” are where AI can really enhance the work.

“On the high empathy tasks – around creative development, insight generation, great storytelling – on those things you need humans. That’s the stuff that will never, I don’t think, ever be replaced,” says Graham.

Mars is a business that has been around for more than 100 years. The company has lasted that long because of its ability to emotionally connect with consumers on a human level, Graham insists.

“AI is there to enable that, not replace it,” he adds.

Skills for the future

While ensuring brands are on the right platforms and using new tech effectively, another vital piece of the puzzle for Mars is talent.

“The talent profile of the marketer in the future is going to change dramatically,” Graham argues, citing the need to balance digital nativity with strong creativity.

For aspiring CMOs, Graham’s best piece of advice is that “experiences matter”. This means gaining skills across the demand functions – meaning marketing, sales and digital.

“So, when they finally have an ambition to get to my job they’re going to be so well served, versus coming up in a very linear path,” he says.

Having been at Mars for more than 24 years, Graham spent time in sales before moving to marketing leadership. There’s no shortcut to gaining experience, a perspective he emphasises when speaking to young talent.

To drive real credibility inside an organisation like ours, in any organisation, you need to be growth focused.

Matt Graham, Mars

As well as encouraging junior marketers to gain that breadth of experience, Mars has an internal capabilities programme aimed at equipping its marketers with the skills to thrive.

“To drive real credibility inside an organisation like ours, in any organisation, you need to be growth focused,” he says.

Embedding this growth mindset in the organisation involves Mars’ senior marketers sharing their experiences, as well as teaching more junior colleagues the company’s ‘Laws of Growth’ principles. Every single person working in demand at the business must go through that mandatory training, the intention being to embed sustainable brand-building across the organisation. These sorts of initiatives provide Graham with personal satisfaction.

“The best satisfaction in this job is seeing the growth in individuals above anything else,” he says.