EXCLUSIVE: Danone CMO Linda Bethea to Exit as Food Giant Mulls Broader Marketing Changes
Danone North America CMO Linda Bethea is exiting as the company folds U.S. marketing into a streamlined regional leadership model, reshaping its media and OOH playbook.
Danone North America’s long‑time marketing chief Linda Bethea is leaving the company as the French food conglomerate undertakes a significant overhaul of how its U.S. marketing is led, structured and funded. A more streamlined leadership model for the American business will absorb the responsibilities of the U.S. CMO role, effectively retiring the post and redistributing its remit across the regional leadership team.
A Danone North America spokesperson confirmed Bethea’s departure and the structural shift, saying that the company has “reallocated” the CMO’s responsibilities under the new U.S. leadership team. The change follows a broader management restructuring initiative disclosed in August, intended to simplify decision-making and bring the company’s commercial, category and marketing functions closer together in key markets, including the United States.
Bethea exits after roughly six years at Danone North America, during which she oversaw marketing across more than 20 brands spanning dairy, plant-based, coffee and functional health, including Silk, Oikos, Activia, Too Good & Co and SToK. In her role, she led cross‑functional teams charged with “best-in-class” marketing plans across those portfolios, with a focus on integrated media, brand building and innovation support. For out-of-home (OOH) and experiential channels, that remit has increasingly meant orchestrating multi-brand visibility in high-traffic urban, retail and transit environments—critical battlegrounds for categories like plant-based beverages, yogurt and ready-to-drink coffee.
Her departure comes at a time when Danone is reassessing how it deploys marketing resources in a U.S. market shaped by shifting consumer health priorities, GLP‑1‑driven appetite changes and intense competition from both legacy rivals and insurgent challenger brands. Bethea has been a visible voice on those issues: she is slated as a keynote speaker for an industry session on the “lasting impact” of GLP‑1 weight-loss drugs on consumer preferences, underscoring the strategic complexity facing major food marketers.
For OOH stakeholders, the most immediate implication of Danone’s restructuring is likely to be how decisions are made and budgets are allocated, rather than a simple pullback in spend. With CMO duties now spread across a regional leadership team, investment choices around media mix, brand prioritization and shopper ecosystems may shift toward:
– More integrated, region-led planning that ties OOH more tightly to retail, shopper and e-commerce objectives rather than brand-only KPIs.
– Portfolio-level optimization across Danone’s categories, potentially consolidating buys across dairy, plant-based and beverages to gain scale and negotiate more sophisticated data- and measurement-led OOH programs.
– Faster, performance-driven reallocations of spend between channels as sales, retailer data and category signals come in, especially in highly contested spaces like coffee ready-to-drink coolers and on-the-go breakfast.
Internally, the removal of a single CMO figurehead could mean that decisions once championed by a centralized brand office—such as marquee OOH brand-building spectacles or long-term sponsorship assets—may now compete more directly with trade, shopper and innovation launch priorities. That dynamic often pushes OOH toward formats and partners able to show tight attribution to store traffic, basket size or retailer-specific programs, particularly with big-box and grocery chains.
From a talent and leadership standpoint, Bethea’s exit also closes a notable chapter in Danone’s marketing story. Before joining Danone, she held senior roles at Diageo, where she is credited with helping turn around Captain Morgan in North America, and at PepsiCo, where she worked on Lay’s, a $4 billion iced tea portfolio and the expansion of Aquafina into new spaces, including the launches of LifeWtr and bubly sparkling water. That background in building and revitalizing large-scale consumer brands has informed Danone’s recent push to keep legacy yogurt and dairy offerings relevant while aggressively scaling plant-based and functional lines—segments that have been highly visible in OOH and shopper media.
The strategic question for agencies and media owners will be whether Danone’s new leadership model favors:
– Fewer, larger cross-brand OOH platforms that can flex across multiple Danone labels; or
– Highly targeted, retailer-linked OOH investments built around specific brand and category fights city by city or chain by chain.
Given Danone’s emphasis on a “more streamlined U.S. leadership team,” partners should anticipate tougher demands for measurable impact, cleaner integration with retail media networks and the ability to serve multiple brand stakeholders under a single commercial framework.
The company has publicly thanked Bethea “for her service to our company over the last six years” and wished her well in her next chapter, but has not named a direct successor nor indicated plans to re-establish a standalone CMO role in North America. For now, Danone’s U.S. marketing direction will be shaped by its broader regional leadership—setting the stage for a more centralized, performance-oriented approach to how and where the company shows up, from grocery aisles to billboards, street furniture and digital OOH.