General Mills’ marketing boss on reaching consumers in an era of advertising overload

In another life, Doug Martin could have been a stand-up comic.

The charismatic marketing executive instead holds court in conference rooms and Teams calls, quick with a joke to soften the hard truths about selling food in 2024: “People are exposed to more advertisements today than at any point in human history,” Martin said. And yet, “it is harder than it has ever been in my career to get in front of a mass audience.”

Martin, chief marketing officer at General Mills, faces the challenge with a smile. It’s hard to tell the continued success of a 158-year-old, $20 billion company rests partly on his shoulders.

Over the past five years, General Mills has boosted its marketing spending 43%, adding millions to an already robust advertising engine. After navigating the pandemic and supply-chain crisis, “now we’re back to a period where how you market really counts,” CEO Jeff Harmening said last month.

No pressure.

Martin has built a reputation beyond his 250-member team of being a leader of people first and foremost. If he is successful, his employees will deliver on campaigns to boost General Mills’ billion-dollar brands like Cheerios and Betty Crocker.

Everyone has to put the consumer first. Martin just believes people control how that job gets done.

“We can have fun together,” he said. “Our brands can be fun. We can laugh, and that laughter does build relationships over time.”

Martin didn’t expect to climb the ranks at General Mills, much less live in Minnesota this long. After earning his MBA in 2006, he figured he’d learn the marketing business in Golden Valley and swiftly head back to California.

But he found one reason, then another, to stay.

“The reason I didn’t move back was because the company did a really good job of delivering on that learning goal for me — I always felt like it was worthwhile to stay to learn more,” he said. “So that’s what I think about when I think about my team: How do I create that environment for everybody else?”

So far he’s on the right track, according to his bosses and many employees.

“Doug is, without a doubt, one of the most ‘human’ leaders I’ve ever worked for,” said Melissa Wagner, director of brand experience strategy at General Mills. “By modeling warmth, humanity and humor, he gives us permission to come to work with more empathy, more curiosity and ready to grow.”

In his time managing marketing for Cheerios and Yoplait and eventually leading the company’s entire dairy portfolio and innovation teams, Martin solidified his consumer-first approach.

“There’s a million things that we do in this building that are really, really, really important, but if, at the end of the day, they don’t result in a product or an experience that the consumer prefers, then it doesn’t really matter,” Martin said.

Martin became chief marketing officer earlier this year, changing over from chief brand and disruptive growth officer, a role he originated in 2022. That job included oversight of internal innovation teams and the startup incubator, 301 Inc.

Shifting his role is another sign the company is focused more than ever on its core brands. Only 5% of sales come from new product innovations, Harmening said last month.

As Dana McNabb, the company’s president of North American retail, put it, General Mills is focused on “reigniting the culture of demand generation.”

In other words, being “the best in marketing.”

General Mills hires ad agencies to produce big national campaigns, but the folks in Golden Valley decide what the messaging will be.

Those campaigns have changed dramatically. Over his nearly 20-year career, Martin has seen a mass audience easily reached by a well-timed TV spot splinter into fragmented niches of social media bubbles, cord-cutters and ad-free streaming services.

The answer is not to yell the loudest, but to know the consumer so well they will actually pay attention to the message.

“In a world that’s as noisy as this one, you have to stand for something, you have to stand for something different, and you have to stand for something over time, because these brands are built one contribution at a time,” he said.

That could involve bringing back the Pillsbury Doughboy, partnering with pro football players and brothers Jason and Travis Kelce on a cereal mashup or hiring Pete Davidson to pitch pizza rolls. It also could mean capitalizing on viral social media moments like Fruit Roll-Ups ice cream or an unprompted celebrity call-out.

“One of the Kardashians posted about Betty Crocker cake, and it was like hundreds of millions of impressions. It wasn’t something that we paid for — that’s very, very expensive — but I was blown away,” Martin said. “She posts about cake, and we feel it.”

Martin also thinks about the ads that resonate with him. Those often involve the simplest or most obvious way to pitch a product.

“Anytime I see a campaign in the world that is so simple, I think, ‘My God, why didn’t I think of that?’ That’s when I know,” he said. “That’s when I’m most jealous.”