Todd Kaplan is Pepsi’s Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing all marketing for the Pepsi brand and PepsiCo’s sparkling water business in North America. He is responsible for all creative communications, brand strategy, product innovation, and commercial execution across a range of brands in PepsiCo’s sparkling portfolio including Pepsi, Bubly Sparkling Water, and more.
Recognized as a top CMO by Forbes on their “Entrepreneurial CMO Top 50” list and by Business Insider as one of the “Top 25 Most Innovative CMOs in the World”, Todd has brought a disruptive, unapologetic, and culture-forward perspective to Pepsi that has been foundational to re-energizing the brand. Since Fall of 2018, he has infused a challenger mindset into Pepsi and has brought the brand back into the cultural zeitgeist – from reinvigorating the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show platform with historic performances from JLo & Shakira, Dr Dre, Snoop, Eminem, The Weeknd and many more, to developing disruptive new product innovations like Nitro Pepsi, to putting out some of the boldest and most talked about and globally awarded brand creative the Pepsi brand has ever seen. Todd has also been instrumental in establishing Pepsi as an industry leader around the development of new content models, pushing the brand into new spaces including the creation of multiple television shows, long form films, creator partnerships, and NFT projects. He even boldly created and sold in a new Pepsi logo and visual identity system for the brand that successfully brought a widely celebrated modern, distinctive, and familiar feel to the brand for its first visual identity refresh in over 14 years.
Kaplan’s impact has been broadly felt across both the business, the brand, and the department. Under Todd’s leadership, Pepsi has experienced its first positive sales growth in well over 15+ years, and has sustained that positive sales growth for 18 consecutive quarters and counting. Simultaneously, Pepsi has seen increases across all core brand equity measures (including an +11pt improvement in brand consideration) while achieving all-time highs in earned media, social conversation, and creative effectiveness. Todd is a champion of DE&I within the company, building diverse and high performing teams that tout a learning culture and highly inclusive team-driven approach.
Prior to this assignment, Kaplan has spent much of his career at PepsiCo, where he has consistently brought his creativity, strategic thinking, and passion to each of his roles. Most recently, he led the transformation of PepsiCo’s multi-billion-dollar U.S. Water Portfolio by creating and launching two new brands – Bubly (sparkling water) and LIFEWTR (premium water). These two brands quickly became the biggest new product launches in PepsiCo history, delivering close to $500MM in sales in their first two years alone, catapulting PepsiCo to become the #1 driver of growth in the entire U.S. water category. Over the years, Kaplan has consistently made an impact within a variety of different roles he has taken on at PepsiCo, whether it was leading marketing for Mountain Dew, overseeing Pepsi’s vast roster of Sports Marketing partnerships, or leading Consumer Insights and creating disruptive new Beverage Innovation products for PepsiCo’s foodservice division. Prior to joining PepsiCo he worked for Millsport LLC, a sports marketing consultancy, where he oversaw the VISA International business.
Kaplan’s efforts have been widely recognized and well regarded within the marketing community and beyond, as his work has been awarded numerous Cannes Lions, and he has been honored with the UJA’s “Industry Visionary Award” and by The Wall Street Journal as an inaugural honoree in MTM’s “Visionaries” platform. He has been featured by Rolling Stone as one of 20 “Marketing Rockstars” and selected as one of the country’s “Top 50 Marketers in North America” multiple times by OnCon Icon Awards, while leading the charge at PepsiCo to be named as Marketing Dive’s “Marketer of the Year”. He regularly gives his time back to organizations within the marketing community, where he has served as a juror for industry leading awards ranging from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to The Effies, and has been a key executive supporter of the AdWeek DEI Council’s “Executive Mentor Program”. Todd is an established thought leader within the industry, recognized as one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voices” as one of the “30 Most Influential Marketers” on the platform and one of the “Top 30 CMOs to Follow” on social media. He has keynoted and spoken at a range of events including the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, South by Southwest, NY Advertising Week, and the Milken Institute Global Conference. He sits on the Board of Advisors for the Yale University Center for Customer Insights and the North America Board of Directors for the International Advertising Association, and holds a BA in Economics from Northwestern University, and an MBA from Yale University.