What Racing Wienermobiles Can Teach Every Marketer with Todd Kaplan (Kraft Heinz)

**Jim Stengel** (0:00)
If you were a Chief Marketing Officer in Consumer Products, I want you to think about something for a moment. You have creative that works. You have campaigns that capture attention. But somewhere between that moment and the register, the signal gets lost. You cannot see what actually drove the sale. You are making optimization decisions on inference, not truth. Well, that changed in February. Infillion acquired Catalina. Four decades of deterministic purchase intelligence. 130 million US households, 70 retail banners, $600 billion in verified annual consumer spending. And here is what really matters. Over 90% of consumable purchases still happen in store. Infillion and Catalina together can close the dupe from digital advertising to in-lane purchase and incentivize the next one. This is not a measurement tool you consult after the campaign. This is a live signal that runs through your media while the campaign is in flight. You can now optimize from attention to action in real-time against people whose actual purchase behavior you know. A consumer product's brand needs return on ad spending. It needs foot traffic. Infillion now delivers all of it. Not as separate vendors you reconcile later as one connected platform. That is what closing the gap looks like. I spent years at Procter & Gamble trying to answer that question. We had the creative, we had the reach, we had campaigns that genuinely stop people. Then we watched that value quietly disappear somewhere between the moment of engagement and the proof of a business result. That gap between attention and action is where most media budgets go to die. Most digital media platforms have been content to live inside it just a little upstream from accountability. Infillion is the company that decided to close it. They started as the original attention company built on the idea that a consumer choosing to engage with an ad is worth more than one who ignores it. But they did not stop there. They have built the infrastructure to connect the moment of attention to the proof of action across every screen, every format, every vertical. That is not a feature. That is a fundamentally different idea of what an ad platform should be, and it is the one brands have been waiting for. Learn more in the show notes.

**Todd Kaplan** (2:08)
I would look at a lot of marketing, look at classical music and you look at jazz. A lot of it's jazz at the end of the day. By that, I mean classical music, there's the sheet music, what goes where, how you prepare, all of that. Of course, you're going to have your brand strategy, you have to brief the agency, you got to do this right. But then the jazz, you're improvising a little in real time. And so as something happens in culture, you have 48 hours to react. You're not briefing an agency, waiting for a deck, going three rounds, you're picking up the phone, you're getting on, you're texting people, you're just working it out. And the secret sauce is really making sure it's all based on real consumer truths and insights.

**Jim Stengel** (2:43)
Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose.
Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges, along with how they try to build a full, healthy and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders. So here we go.
Six Wienermobiles, one racetrack, thousands of fans, and one of the most memorable marketing ideas of the year. If that sounds a little crazy, you're going to really love today's conversation. My guest this week is Todd Kaplan, chief marketing officer of Kraft Heinz, a company whose brands are probably sitting right now in your pantry. As one of the world's largest food and beverage companies, Kraft Heinz has a portfolio that includes Heinz, of course, Oscar Mayer, Kraft Mac and Cheese, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Lunchables, Velveeta, Jell-O and dozens of other household brands. The company generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, operates in more than 190 countries, and reaches millions of consumers every day through more than 70 brands across over 50 categories. Todd joined Kraft Heinz in August 2024 as chief marketing officer for North America after spending nearly two decades at PepsiCo, where he helped shape brands including Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, and Bubbly. Since arriving at Kraft Heinz, Todd's been leading one of the industry's most ambitious company transformations, building a culture that moves at the speed of creativity. Record it live at Cannes Lions in the Infillion Café. Tune in for a conversation with the CMO who reminds us that the biggest ideas don't always start with the biggest budgets. They sometimes start with six Wiener mobiles on a racetrack. Here's Todd.