Remembering former McDonald’s marketing leader Larry Light and his legacy, which goes well beyond ‘I’m Lovin’ It’

The marketing world lost a transformative figure with the recent passing of Larry Light at 83, best known for his turnaround of McDonald’s with the iconic 'I’m Lovin’ It' campaign. But while obituaries led with the inescapable tagline that rang in our collective unconscious for two decades, there’s a strong argument that Light’s greatest contribution wasn’t a tagline, a jingle, or a brand idea but rather an idea about brands and how they should be built in the 21st century. In 2004, at an Ad Age conference, Light introduced the concept of brand journalism, which stood opposed to the time-worn marketing habit of distilling a brand to a single message to be then beaten into a consumer’s head. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs McDonald’s, he would write later, “rejected the traditional marketing and advertising approaches that focused on a single, repetitive message in favor of a ‘content stream approach,’ involving multi-dimensional messages via multiple channels to multiple audiences.” So, in 2004, Light devised a way of building a brand that’s more relevant than ever in 2024. And he did so before all the disruption that truly fragmented media and audiences. This was before brands did journalism and built newsrooms and made documentaries. Before they launched entertainment platforms. Before they were posting on social. Or listening on social. Actually, he did it before social media existed. To understand how radical this was you have to remember that a major strand in the history of marketing ideas is that of constraint, with the goal of reducing brands to simple thoughts in order to create difference from the competitors. Light called them “positionistas.” Read next to Rosser Reeves and his unique selling proposition or any number of thinkers on positioning, Light’s ideas are like anarchy. With the understanding that marketing is a dialogue with consumers, brand journalism laid the groundwork for a less precious way of thinking about brands and branding. The beauty of it is that it jibes with the way people actually interact with brands and is refreshing to anyone who’s had the surreal feeling of looking at a brand framework or some other artifact that bears little to no relation to how consumers perceive or use a product. I’ve always found it interesting that a thinker as prescient as Light doesn’t get namedropped nearly as much as other smart, provocative thinkers, like Byron Sharp, whose “How Brands Grow” is a bible at marketing organizations like Diageo. Nor does brand journalism get mentioned with nearly the same frequency as unique selling point (USP) or other marketing concepts. Maybe this is because brand journalism is, by definition, somewhat loose or because it doesn’t especially lend itself to frameworks and graphs. Or maybe it’s because Light never published a book called “Brand Journalism.” Nonetheless, you don’t have to squint hard to see Light’s unprecious, polyvalent way of thinking about brands behind all kinds of contemporary marketing. You can see it in Cannes winners like Coke’s crushed logo or the self-immolating Pop Tart. You can see it in brands creating editorial content. And you can see it in brands not taking themselves too seriously, whether subverting themselves on TikTok or in the rise of Vibervertising. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these ideas wouldn’t be possible without Light. But I would posit that anyone paying attention to him along the way might have seen sooner that the world has long been ready for those sorts of ideas. In other words, he was ahead of his time and he offered a recipe for getting ahead of yours. Now, when I see a brand delivering truly unexpected ideas in an insightful way that connects with customers, I imagine all the work it takes to get it sold and made by the team that made it. Sometimes I reflect on all the thinking done to pave the way. That’s when I think of an unassuming rabble-rouser named Larry Light, a bespectacled man pictured in a dark suit who, while working at a giant corporation in his early 60s, saw the future of marketing.

Remembering former McDonald’s marketing leader Larry Light and his legacy, which goes well beyond ‘I’m Lovin’ It’

Featured Stories

Latest News

See More in Opinion