Todd Kaplan of Kraft Heinz, Asmita Dubey of L'Oréal and Paloma Azulay of McDonald's sat down with ADWEEK's Alison Weissbrot to talk brand building, covering AI adoption, creators, long-term equity and where their budgets are heading. Two threads stood out. Kaplan and Dubey both argued that the next phase of growth runs through earned attention and a newer discipline, generative engine optimization, the work of making sure a brand shows up when a consumer asks an AI for an answer. Azulay kept the focus on brand fundamentals and value, though she too noted that LLMs reward brands that teach the machine clearly what they stand for. The shared thread: getting your message delivered is no longer the same as getting it received.
Paid Reach Was Never the Point
Kaplan came up in the era of buying your way to the consumer, but he thinks that model leaks. "Just because your message was delivered doesn't mean it was received," he said, noting that he picks up his phone during commercials and skips pre-roll on YouTube. So Kraft Heinz is leaning harder into what he calls the entrepreneur side of media: organic and earned reach that has to be good enough to travel on its own.
The point gets concrete with AI. If a consumer asks an assistant for "high-protein meal options under $10 for my family" and none of your brands surface, you aren't in the conversation. A lot of brand content, he noted, isn't being read by the large language models yet, which makes organic visibility a structural question rather than a campaign tactic.
Generative Engine Optimization: How to Become the Answer
Dubey laid out a practical approach to the new front door. Close to a billion people now use ChatGPT and similar tools, and as LLMs become where people start their discovery, the question shifts from "how do I reach you" to "how do I become the answer." Her response is a content transformation across three layers.
First, authority-building content: scientific journals and credible, expert material that signals the brand is a trusted source. Second, brand-building content that machines can actually read, which means transcripts and text on the social and video content that used to be locked inside video. Third, clean product data in the marketplace, written descriptively enough for an engine to understand and recommend. Get those three right, she said, and the brand starts showing up in the answer, which then loops back to click-to-buy and deeper discovery.
Both leaders treated this as a full-funnel reality rather than a single channel. Upper-funnel awareness still lives on YouTube and connected TV, the middle funnel runs through the creator economy, and the lower funnel is e-commerce, which is already more than 30% of L'Oréal's business. GEO sits on top of all of it as the new layer of discoverability.
Live Sports and "Digitainment," the Other Exception
The one place paid, tuned-in attention still holds up, Kaplan said, is live sports. The Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Olympics and even the Knicks are among the few remaining appointment-viewing moments, where reach and real engagement arrive together. The opportunity is connecting to those audiences organically rather than just buying the spot, a space he summed up as "digitainment," the overlap of digital, engagement and entertainment.
Creators, and Protecting Legacy While Handing Over the Keys
For L'Oréal, earned attention runs through people. The company works with roughly half a million creators worldwide and puts its share of influence at close to 29%, and the discipline is handing the brand to those voices without losing what it stands for. Dubey's example was reviving an established name with a new face, seeding a creator like Miley Cyrus first, then opening it up to micro and nano creators who each post their own version, generating tens of millions of impressions.
The guardrails matter most at the nano level. The brand seeds the product, explains the truth behind it (a magnifying texture with vitamin C that brightens, for instance), and then lets creators express that truth their own way. "Beauty is made by self-expression," she said. Kaplan added a structural point: a creator today is the talent, the production company, the media outlet and the IP all in one, so you can't treat it like renting talent. You hand over the keys while keeping clear guardrails on what the brand means.
Brand Building Is Still a Long Game
Underneath the technology, all three made the case for patient, long-term brand building. Azulay compared it to falling in love with a person: it takes time and repetition before a brand becomes a habit, and performance marketing only creates the illusion of instant results. Kaplan offered his "tattoo test," the idea that people tattoo brands on their bodies only when those brands stand for something deeper than the product, and that clarity has to be paired with consistency across every touchpoint.
The discipline shows up in measurement. More than 30% of L'Oréal's net sales goes to advertising and promotion, and the company runs a proprietary system, BETIQ (Beauty Engagement Touchpoints IQ), to track short-term ROI and long-term equity together. The CFO case, Kaplan noted, is not fluffy: strong brands earn pricing power, frequency and loyalty.
Three Ideas to Take Away
- Optimize for the engine, not just the eyeball. Build authority content, make video readable with transcripts and text, and clean up your product data so LLMs can recommend you.
- Earn the attention you used to buy. Organic and earned reach, plus live-sports "digitainment," are where engagement now lives, with paid media there to scale what already travels.
- Hand creators the keys, keep the guardrails. Seed the product and the brand truth, then let creators express it in their own voice, especially at the micro and nano level.