Mars Pet Nutrition' Marketing Chief on Creativity, Cats (and dogs) and Cannes

Mars is on a mission. While Apple takes home this year’s Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year title, the marketing team behind Mars’s confectionery, pet care and food brands have their sights firmly set on claiming the honour in 2026.

One of the marketing leaders driving that ambition is Natalia Ball, global chief growth officer at Mars Pet Nutrition. A decade into her Mars career, she now oversees the growth of flagship brands including Pedigree, Sheba, Whiskas, Temptations, Cesar and Greenies — having worked across both the pet care and food portfolios. In April last year, Ball stepped up from global chief brand officer and vice president of specialty pet retailing to take on her current position.

Working with the BBDO Group and Omnicom, Ball leads multiple campaigns across the brand portfolio each year. Most recently, she’s overseen the production of a documentary inspired by the award-winning 2021 ‘Hope Grows’ initiative, which focused on coral reef restoration.

Ball shares her perspective — and the ambitions behind Mars’s creative agenda — in the latest edition of Creative Salon’s CMO Spotlight.

Why did you get into marketing? How did you get into marketing? Is it something you always wanted to

Before I got into marketing, I actually studied systems engineering, and so I was not planning to work in marketing. But what I wanted to do, really was work for Procter and Gamble, which was one of the best companies that there was in Venezuela, which is the place I'm from, back at that time. And so I actually joined Procter and Gamble in in a kind of program in it, and they ended up asking me to join marketing. And when I learned about what marketing was about, brand building, the intersection about human insight, business impact and creativity, I fell in love with this, and I never actually worked on systems engineering at all?

What was the programme at Procter & Gamble?

They have a one-week program where they take you through everything in marketing, from the development of a product to then, how to create concepts, and how to market that product or how do you build campaigns. And then, at the end of the programme, they decide who actually gets an offer. I didn't know that that was it when I joined, but after that programme, I realised that it was something that was very interesting, and they made me an offer, so I joined. What I loved about it was that from very early on, you are given a lot of autonomy in building your brands, I got to work on amazing projects of building a new brand from scratch, which I don't think a lot of people have the chance to do, and therefore, to look at the end-to-end process of how to market a brand. And then I was inspired by the marketers in the company. So here I am.

Having been at Mars for over a decade, what prompted you to take the leap into the world of pet food?

It was a personal decision, given that we lived in Switzerland at the time, and we wanted to move to a place that was more vibrant. Mars reached out about a job opportunity as global brand director for the Caesar brand in London. So, I decided to take the leap from a personal need to move to London, and it was honestly the best decision I could have made. People from P&G think that there is no life after P&G, but actually, the minute I joined Mars, I felt at home. It's such a wonderful company that believes so much in developing people, and particularly working in the pet care category. It's probably one of the most beautiful categories to work for. The bond between pets and pet parents is so strong, and I have loved every minute of it.

You have such a large portfolio. What have you changed or evolved around its marketing since taking on the role?

Marketing has traditionally been a strength of Mars. During this year, one of the things that I wanted to do was to boost these strengths even further, so I have put creativity as one of the key capabilities to build for us, or to even boost our marketing, thinking about less ads and more experiences and making that shift and as well ensuring that everybody knows what great creativity looks like. So, giving our marketeers and brand builders a lot of inspiration on how to evaluate creativity, but also inviting them to be bolder in the things that they're trying to achieve and to demand more from our agencies as we move into this world of creating experiences instead of just having ads.

Why have you been focusing on producing more experiences?

Well, the reality is that around 50 per cent of the places consumers are hanging out online, you can't access with ads, either because they have ad blockers or it's social and ads are not available. So if you want to be part of the conversations, you need to create experiences that are going to enter into these spaces and that consumers are going to talk about and interact with, either because you build utility for pet parents, or because of the entertainment power, or because you are giving them something that is mind-opening and worthy of talking about. So that's why crafting these experiences becomes so important, and that's one of the shifts that we're making.  Working with pets is an interactive experience in itself, so I guess that does marry very well with experiences. We are lucky to work in this category, because pet parents are very passionate about their pets, and they can talk about their pets for hours. And so, it's something that actually gives us the license to enter these conversations?

What currently excites you most about the world of marketing?

What is difficult in marketing is that for whoever is not a brand builder in the organisation, it's hard to understand the art and the science of marketing, and so a lot of our senior leaders do not have marketing focus on a short term return and struggle to see that it is important at the same time to bring build brands for the long run and find the right way to talk to the organisation and demonstrate how important it is both to align them behind the metrics of brand building and short term results. It's a challenge, and sometimes it's taken for granted, so one of the first things that gets cut is marketing budgets, and people think nothing is going to happen when we cut marketing budgets, but that's not the case. And so that's one of the frustrations. But at the same time as a CMO, that's part of my job, to bring the organisation along, make them understand the importance of brand building and align everyone behind the same metrics. I take it as a challenge, and that's what I'm working on.

How do you encourage each of the brands to be creative?

We work with Omnicom - BBDO Worldwide, AMV in London, but also BBDO New York. We work with Almap in Brazil, and Colenso, so the BBDO network as well as with DDB in London. First we established a very bold mission for creativity. So last year, a couple of months after I joined in this role, I declared that I wanted us to become Creative Marketers of the Year at Cannes in 2026. By declaring this bold ambition, I was inviting our agencies to step up, but also for our marketers to step up as well. But this was not enough.

To realise this ambition, we put a full programme in place, including capability building, so that we could give our marketers the tools they need to excel in creativity. They did, for example, a partnership with the Cannes Lions Advisory to host a master class for on creativity that was incredibly inspiring. We have done seminars on writing great briefs evaluating creativity, so capability-building becomes very important. Then, as I talked before, inspiration. We do Walk the Work sessions where we share best-in-class work with brand builders, so that they know what’ great’ looks like. We also held our first Global Creative Council, where we invited our agencies all over the world to come up with creative ideas. Their answers around the business challenges across our many brands, and we ask them to think differently, to really think boldly. I'm so happy to say that they actually came to the table and surprised us with wonderful work,

One campaign now out there is the continuation of the ‘Hope Grows’ work for Sheba. Can you talk about how impactful this initiative has been, and why follow up with a documentary?

Sheba has been committed to coral reef restoration since 2021, when we started the Sheba ‘Hope Grows’ programme, part of one of the largest coral restoration programmes, promoted by Mars Sustainable Solutions. We thought this was a story worth telling when you understand what's behind coral restoration to the local community. The NGOs and the scientists who work every day to restore coral in a fight against time, to make this happen. We thought this was a story that was worth telling.

Part of what Sheba does is that we craft extraordinary experiences for cats and cat parents and this story was one of those experiences we thought we could include in our repertoire. So, we supported the development of this documentary, and we managed to connect it to a full ecosystem of content, including the documentary itself on Amazon Prime. But then we partnered with Aulii Cravalho, who is the voice of Moana, and who's one of the producers of this documentary, to create content on Sheba that we feature on our own Instagram, Tiktok pages, etc. These we amplify with a strong PR campaign that gave us a lot of earned reach. So far, we are very happy with this programme, not only because it has given us tremendous earned coverage, we have tracked 5 billion impressions, and we have been able to appear in places that we would normally not appear in like Marie Claire or Teen Vogue. There's no way Vogue would ever, you know, feature Sheba on any of their articles. But through this programme we have managed to do that, while at the same time shining a light on this very critical work and driving awareness that we are supporting this programme so other people can also support it too.

What do you hope it communicates about the Sheba brand?

I think it communicates that it is a brand willing to use its wide platform of reach to support that matters in the world. What is beautiful is that we have been committed to this for some time. So it's not a one time thing. We started in 2021, we have been committed to this journey, and we will continue to do so but we want to shine a light on something important, where we can use our platform to create impact.

When we think about these things, we're thinking about a full ecosystem of content and experiences that creates impact. And when we did the documentary premier in London, we created an immersive experience that brought people into the coral environment. When people came in, whether they were reporters or whether they were some of the partners or customers, they really felt immersed in it. It's something they're going to want to talk about and they're going to want to tell others about. This is what is the core of experiences.

And of course, the creator economy is growing in terms of its influence for brands. What has been your experience of working with them.

I have loved working with creators more and more lately. When they are properly aligned to the brand purpose and the brand vision, it works terrifically well. We worked our brand Pedigree which has been proposing adoption for many years with our ‘Feed The Good’ platform. We launched a campaign in Brazil called ‘Caramello’. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of work I have been involved in, because it invites people to think about the mutt type of dog in Brazil, the most common ones are caramelos, which are the ones you find the most on the streets, and invite people to consider them as breeds and the pride of Brazil, and to adopt. But the way we did this was by partnering with a huge content creator in Brazil, who has more than 50 million followers, and she has a caramelo herself, and wanted to register her dog in a dog show. She was rejected because her dog was not considered a breed, so she posted on social media that she was outraged that her dog was beautiful and asked how come she couldn't have this dog participate in a dog show? Then Pedigree came in to say, ‘Don't worry, we got you.’

Part of the campaign was the work required to turn caramelos into an actual breed, including a Kennel Club, DNA testing. The fact that we partnered with her is what made this so successful. Because from the very beginning, she had this beautiful platform. She was very aligned with what we were trying to do, and therefore she came across super, authentically great idea.

What in your experience, makes a great agency partner?

I believe that every client has the agency they deserve, and then your agencies are only as good as you are as a client. A big part of having a good agency partner is for you to be a good client. And for me, what that means is, as a client, you need to be very clear about what your ambition is and raise the ambition for your agencies. And the more you do that, the more they will come to the table and match that ambition. But then, for them to be wonderful partners, I like it when they really understand your business, your business challenges, and care about creativity in the context of solving business challenges and driving business results. For example, with Omnicom, we've had a partnership that has lasted 30 years, so they know our brands better than even ourselves. They know our business very, very well. So it's a good partnership of how they can help us solve the challenges that we have today.

I also expect agency partners to push us to actually tell us when what we're doing is not good enough, to bring new ideas, not wait for that brief, but actually leave and brief the brand and come back with ideas that push us, that make us be bolder and challenge us. I haven't said ‘no’ to an agency this year, so I want us to push even more so that I can say ‘no’ to something.

Has there been a campaign or work that has made you jealous in the last year?

I would say that what I've been most jealous about is Duolingo killing their mascot. I loved that they dared to do that. It was super bold. The type of conversations that it led to were amazing. And another thing that I like is that they could have done this in one market, but they did this everywhere at the same time. And if you follow its account in Spain, in France, in the UK, it was so different, the way they executed with local nuance, but at the same time it was building that momentum globally. So that was something that I loved, and I'm sure it would have had tremendous results for them and a lot of brands actually wanted to jump in on the action. We jumped in on the action as well with Sheba, and got a lot of engagement as well. You can't kill your mascot off, though. You guys can't do that, not alone. But then they revived it. Yes, of course, they did all that marketing investment, but they're not killing it.