Lisa Vortsman, chief marketing and innovation officer at The Magnum Ice Cream Company, North America, sits in a unique position.
As head of a company that is currently undergoing a demerger from Unilever, they have the bedrock elements of a CPG giant with the open opportunity of a more agile company.
“We are emerging and bringing along all the great marketing skills and tools that our teams have picked up at Unilever – which is an amazing place to get your marketing education,” says Vortsman. “Being a standalone company gives us more independence and freedom to tap into new marketing models. It gives us more opportunity to engage with new agencies with new capabilities that fit more of the dynamics of our portfolio.”
“There’s a good balance of bringing the foundation but also being able to define for ourselves the right AI-forward, digitally-driven marketing model that we need to adapt quickly with speed and agility,” she adds.
The new company will consist of its various heritage ice cream brands including: Americana brands Breyers, Klondike, Popsicle and Good Humor, global brands Magnum and Cornetto, as well as new players Talenti and Yasso.
At the helm of marketing for these brands, Vortsman is taking a page out of what she has learned working on other Unilever brands such as Hellmann’s Mayonaise by trying to lean into new occasions and environments. This includes partnering with creators and talent. For instance, Talenti partnered with Emma Navarro during the US Open on the “High Pressure Presser” effort.
“Many Talenti fans love tennis,” says Vortsman. “Being able to partner with Navarro who stays cool on the court and really enjoys the Talenti products makes this a very authentic storytelling collaboration.”
Vortsman has spent the last two decades working across Unilever brands. Brand Innovators caught up with her from her office in New York to discuss the various ways Magnum’s brands are showing up in culture, how AI is revolutionizing marketing and how retail partners are a strategic marketing channel. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you bring the brand vision to life in your creative?
Through the course of creative development, we have always stayed very true to the individual brand essence and the brand tonalities across the board. The way Talenti tells the story of chefmanship and the way it celebrates each layer or each ingredient that goes into the advertising. The way we showcase the caramel swirls, the chunks. It is like a symphony of different ingredients and formulations that come into a beautiful, transparent jar.
Klondike is always disruptive and daring and challenging. Yasso is a recent addition. We have picked up and embraced the tone and cheekiness of a brand. The opportunity for The Magnum Ice Cream Company is that we have an amazing diversity of brands in the portfolio. As a result, we’re able to connect with a very diverse group of consumers.
Can you talk about how you are bringing your brands into new environments?
2025 is a milestone year for us where we elevated brands and put them into spaces they haven’t lived in before. A good example is Talenti’s partnership with Emily Navarro at the U.S. Open. That’s Talenti’s first time having an athletic affiliation.
Jake Shane-specific Popsicles is another example. Popsicle goes back more than 100 years. It’s always been at the heart of imagination. Jake Shane does his famous Popsicle reveals and for the brand to lean in and say, okay, how do we want to own this conversation and inspire a little bit more? We created an exclusive Jake Shane All Cherry Popsicle Box. The authenticity enabled this partnership to feel so natural. When he did the reveal, the brand love was very high and it was with a consumer base that’s relatively new for the brand. That is the perfect example of being culturally relevant and partnering with the right type of influencer.
We did the Life of a Magnum Girl pop-up when the Taylor Swift album was released. The brand has the ability to pick up on what’s happening in culture but actually allow it to influence its own persona, which is very unique to Magnum.
Do you have any creative or campaigns that are launching this Q4?
Q4 is a little bit trickier for an ice cream category, but Breyers plays a key role. Our second highest time for vanilla sales after the July 4th holiday is Thanksgiving. That scoop of vanilla on apple pie is huge. We have a bit of communication around Thanksgiving with the “Better Starts with Breyers” campaign. We also have very exciting news with Yasso scoopable, a new format that we are launching. It’s already in Target and will be rolling out nationally through the course of Q4 and 2026.
Yasso is a brand that can launch in a Q4 season when it is a little bit colder, because of it’s healthier, better-for-you benefits. Whether you want to indulge but not feel guilty about it, that’s very much what a Yasso scoop delivers. January tends to be a peak time of season with New Year’s resolutions and a healthier start to the New Year. Yasso is very relevant for that. We’re very excited about bringing the “Ridiculously Better “campaign in Q4 and into Q1 to introduce this new format.
Can you talk about how your past experience at other brands has helped shape your perspective in your current role?
When I was on the global team at Hellmann’s, we launched a big market development strategy. Mayonnaise is a big staple brand in households. The way Americans use mayonnaise on a sandwich for spreading is very different from the way the French use it in a dressing and is very different than the way the Eastern Europeans use it in soup instead of sour cream. The opportunity was to step back and say, ‘What are the usage occasions of this traditional staple product?’ And how do we inspire other usages either through basic recipe examples or an influencer-forward, social-first, culture-first approach where you use content creators to help inspire new ways of using your products.
At Magnum, we do the same. For example, an influencer used a fruit roll-up and put a scoop of Talenti mango sorbet in there on TikTok. It created this new concoction of all these textures that was crunchy from the candy, but smooth from the sorbet. It translated so quickly within a couple of days to multi-million views and resulted in sales lifts across the board. The opportunity to translate occasion-based snacking through authentic influencers is big for us. It goes much further than Breyers telling you to put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a pie. When we see people making French toast with Breyers vanilla and that just picks up millions and millions of views that’s a different way of using Breyers. There’s a big market development opportunity for us as we continue to reframe the role of our brands and the way people can enjoy them.
What is your approach to AI?
We leverage different AI tools to identify trends that are happening in the marketplace. We use AI tactics to scrape social platforms and retailer.coms to understand what’s working with our products, what’s not such as ratings and reviews. We use predictive listening to understand the next trends in health, like protein. We are also leveraging predictive listening to inform innovation. Connecting with consumers to inform creative thinking and then leveraging AI tools to develop and design. We have a ton of examples that reduce production time by 20-30% and cost by 40%.
Then we are leveraging AI for precision audiences. Identifying the right audience at the right time, in the right moment, in the right mood space. Are they on the couch with their family watching a movie? Are they on the couch on a romantic date? Identifying the moods to be able to target and get the creative out into the marketplace and very quickly learning what’s working and not working.
Usually you have to work in high tech to change so quickly. We’re changing every month. For someone who’s been in the industry for over 20 years, in the course of just the last two years alone, the opportunity for upscaling and getting ahead of things is so exciting and exhilarating. Without a doubt how we market and how we develop creative has completely revolutionized.
Can you talk about how you’re working with retail partners?
Retail partners are a strategic marketing vehicle. It’s more than just getting shelf space. In the past, ice cream has been a very heavily promotion-forward category. But the opportunity to really leverage the omni-channel approach with retailers is massive for us. We’re working with retailers like Kroger and Walmart to bring some of our influencers into the store to have them shop and create content around the product and their shopping experiences. We’ve seen a sales uplift and they’re very happy with it. We’re bringing people to their stores, we’re driving more shopping occasions, as a result, we’re tapping into our own partnerships to promote the retailer themselves.
We’ll do exclusive launches with retailers. For instance, we launched Yasso Spoonables with Target first. Going into 2026, there’ll be opportunities for us to bring more of the big cultural tentpole events to retail shoppers. When we look at the partnership perspective, how do we make shopper experiences better and more fun? The retailer gets very excited about all the benefits.
