Krinio Christaras, Head of Consumer Experience MENAP, Mondelēz International.I have lost count of how many times I have heard that marketing is broken. Usually, it comes up in conversations about declining effectiveness, rising costs, or the latest platform that is supposed to change everything. But from where I sit, leading consumer experience across multiple markets, the problem isn’t marketing itself.
The fundamentals still hold: understanding people, creating ideas that resonate and showing up in the right moments.
What’s changed is everything around it.
Most organisations are still built for a world that no longer exists: a world of neat campaign cycles, long planning timelines and clearly separated functions, with data in one place, content in another media somewhere else. It worked when consumers moved slower and channels were predictable.
That’s not the world we’re in anymore. People move fluidly across platforms; content doesn’t really stop; signals are instant; and culture shifts daily, sometimes hourly.
Inside organisations, though, we’re still trying to manage all of this with structures designed for something much simpler – and that’s where things start to feel off. It’s clearly not a capability issue. If anything, we have more than we’ve ever had: more tools, more data and more access.
The constraint is how disconnected it all still is. When you really look at it, a few things start to matter more than anything else.
What I’ve seen make a difference is a shift in how we think about the work: moving away from channels and campaigns and towards systems – not in a conceptual way but in how things actually get done.
How easily can we create, adapt and deploy content without everything becoming heavy or over-engineered?
It’s also about how connected our decisions are across data, media and creative, and whether teams are building together or only seeing the work once it’s already done.
That’s usually where things break: not in the idea itself but in the handovers, the delays and the disconnect behind the scenes.
And, ultimately, those things matter more than the campaign itself.
A few years ago, we started to feel this gap very clearly. We were still operating in campaign cycles while culture was moving in real time, so we pushed into a more agile, moment led approach to content. This was not to replace brand building, but to stay present in what people were engaging with.
At one point, a simple Oreo “two cats” post we turned around in under 24 hours – with no production, just reacting to what people were already sharing – ended up outperforming a lot of what we had spent weeks planning.
That was a wake-up call, not just because of the performance, but because of what it showed us: lower production costs, higher engagement and stronger view through rates.
More importantly, it exposed something deeper: the real shift wasn’t creative, it was operational.
It stopped being about producing perfect assets and became about building the ability to respond, test and adapt continuously. It sounds simple but it isn’t. It forces everything behind the scenes to change.
In the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP) region, this shift has happened faster – not by design but by necessity. Lower production budgets pushed more agile ways of working. High social penetration brought brands closer to creators and communities. A fragmented media landscape forced speed and flexibility. What’s interesting is that many of the ways of working now being discussed globally are already happening here. This is why I don’t think the next phase of marketing will be defined by channels.
They’ll keep evolving; they always do. Channels are just distribution. The real competitive advantage is the ability to connect data, content distribution and decision-making into something continuous rather than episodic – something that learns and adapts.
When we shift from building campaigns to creating experiences that are relevant when they appear – that’s when marketing starts to feel different. It becomes less like interruption and more like relevance: a brand that understands you, shows up at the right time and adds value instead of asking for attention.
That’s when it becomes more human again – not driven purely by data, but by understanding; not just building loyalty but creating real relationships; and not just selling, but serving.
Marketing isn’t broken, but if we keep operating it the way we did even a few years ago, it will keep feeling like it is.
The opportunity isn’t to reinvent marketing; it’s to rebuild it around how people actually live.
By Krinio Christaras, Head of Consumer Experience MENAP, Mondelēz International
