Sean Summers is a risk-taker, though you might not know it from his early career. Joining Pepsico in 2002, he spent eight years climbing the ladder to eventually lead marketing for snack brands before joining Twinings in the UK as marketing director. Instead of hopping to the next food brand or CPG giant, Summers made a move that, on paper, might have seemed odd. He joined an e-commerce company in a general management role. Mercado Libre is Latin America’s answer to Amazon and Monzo combined; an online shopping giant with a fintech division on the side.
“The thing that got me excited was the learning curve. I was going to be totally out of my depth on almost everything. And I was naive enough to think that that would happen just for the first year. Yeah…it’s been the same for the last 13 years,” he laughs.
During his tenure, Mercado Libre’s share price has risen almost 2,400% and it now dominates the LatAm market. Summer’s role has also expanded to include not only consumer-facing marketing, but also its burgeoning advertising business (in Q3 alone, it grew 63% year-over-year), as well as its sales and product divisions.
“Marketing has finally graduated here in Mercado Libre. We have proven that we are a business driver. Being a technology company, it’s almost like nobody believed in marketing. It’s all about the product and if you build the right product, people will come. But that’s not the case now. If you build the right product, you get the chance to talk about it.”
Despite being founded in 1999 and an IPO in 2007, the marketing function at Mercado Libre was only formally created in 2018. Previously, each business unit of the company operated independently. Under Summers’ direction, the function has grown to house 500 people and investments have increased by over 100x in that time. “I’ve never been in a business where every single month you close and [the board] asks ‘you know, we could invest a little bit more? Do you have an existing strategy that can deliver a little bit more, or a new strategy that we could be investing in?’ It wasn’t always that way.”
It’s the kind of talk that CMOs reading this story will envy: higher budgets with fewer questions asked on how it’s spent. Summers credits the trust that his marketing has earned, somewhat paradoxically, to the culture of risk-taking that has been fostered.
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“In order to win in this very competitive market, you have to make decisions really fast. You have to take risks. I make only 1% of the decisions in marketing because I have a team of people who are really smart, and they are empowered to make decisions.”
Take its sponsorship of 21-year-old F1 driver Franco Colapinto. Summers says the decision (one of the few he’s had to green-light) would mean ploughing budget into a relatively unknown sportsman at the time with no guarantee that he would make it to the global stage. To any other marketer, this might seem like a huge risk that would inevitably be debated at the highest levels. Yet from hearing about the opportunity to agreeing, it took Summers just 48 hours to sign on the dotted line back in August 2024.
“It’s the calculated risk. Why not X, Y and Z is one conversation. Then let’s just fucking do it. What’s the worst that can happen? People have become too conservative and too worried about whether it doesn’t work out. I made the decision assuming that it wouldn’t work out. But because the rest of the demand generation engine is working really well, we have the luxury of having that. And if you are not taking risk, what’s the message that you’re sending to the team?”
In the months that followed, Colapinto would go on to become the Test and Reserve Driver for BWT Alpine F1 Team. When Summers found out that he was going to be a number two seat, the marketing team developed a TV ad in just two weeks to announce the news to fans.
“I have never been in a place where the ad became the news. We got 12m organic views in the first 24 hours, almost 20m views in the first 48 hours. It was insane. I had never participated in something so viral. ”
It was a bet that paid off. And one Summers could only make due to the “social capital” that he’d accrued from knowing where the other 99% of its marketing budget is spent and exactly how it delivers for the company.
“Every time that we deliver business results, we earn social capital. But we have to have the guts to use that social capital. One of the things I love is that we don’t ask for permission. We ask for forgiveness. I’ve been in organizations where there’s bureaucracy and you have to ask everyone, can we do it? There’s no such thing [here]. There’s 100% accountability on our side for the things we do right and the things that don’t work out. So that gives us 100% freedom to make the decisions. And if my management style is to give my team 100% of ownership and independence to make decisions, I expect the rest of the organization to honor that. And if I screw up, the team screws up, no big deal. Why would you build social capital and not use it?“
That he willingly hands over the vast majority of marketing decision-making is also emblematic of the fact that Summers does not see his role as the orchestrator of the brand’s communications. Yes, he’s chief marketing officer, but he is responsible for a myriad of other business-critical functions as well as the growing retail media network. He neither needs nor wants to sign off on every ad that goes to market. Take this year’s all-important Christmas campaign – he saw it just a few days before the nation.
“I hate what marketeers have done over the last 20 years. We have turned marketing into a communications area. And I couldn’t be more against it. I made that choice on purpose. Over the last six years, I have found people who are better than I am at judging creativity. If I want to create an environment where they are making decisions, I have to trust them.”
His biggest message for the industry is that a CMO cannot spend their days approving copy. “Our function is so much more critical from a business point of view that we shouldn’t allow it.”
Summers lives by the philosophy of “what worked for us last year is not going to work for us next year.” In the early days, he could create a marketing plan – a formula – optimize it, rinse and repeat the next year. He became a master of that formula. He now has to start from scratch every 12 months.
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“No matter how successful we are, we have to reinvent the entire demand generation engine every 12 or 18 months. That’s the only way. We are in fast-paced industries. Our competitors are brilliant, and they will catch up. So unless we make conscious efforts to keep innovating in a fast way, they’re going to catch us.”
No surprise, then, that AI is top of mind in terms of how it can do more, faster. As an e-commerce company, its investments in the foundations of this tech have been ongoing for nearly a decade. However, since 2023, it has had a particular focus on generative AI, with its 20,000 software developers and customer service teams being tasked with integrating it into their processes. This year, the marketing function was tasked with getting to grips with how the tech can fuel productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in the coming years. Today, every element of the promotional calendar, branding activities and performance marketing has been planned with a view to how Gen AI tools will help its teams deliver more.
“Eight years ago, we had zero media presence. Today, 52 weeks of the year we are across all media: open TV, cable TV, digital, YouTube, out-of-home, you name it. So you can imagine, the amount of creative that we are generating is huge. How do we make it more efficient in a way that doesn’t detract from quality?“
It demands that every member of the marketing unit be proficient in AI, and for Summers, that has meant a hiring freeze ostensibly intended to force them to adopt new tools. He explains: “We decided that it was a good time to create a constraint. So we’re not going to grow the headcount, even though we aspire to keep growing like crazy. We are forcing ourselves to increase the adoption of all Gen AI tools.
“At the beginning it was a little bit scary, but everyone embraced it.”
On performance marketing, for example, it has its own content creation, attribution and optimization tools. Right now, 80% of campaign work that flows through the system is automated with human “supervision” managing 20%. “We want to push that 20%. How do you turn it to zero? By creating agents that do that supervision.”
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Or take its recent entry into the TikTok world. Referrals from TikTok are going through the roof but having the brand show up there in a shoppable way meant it needed to produce millions of custom videos for individual products. Gen AI was the only answer.
“Today, we are the biggest provider of videos to TikTok worldwide. But instead of telling something funny, we’re trying to give you reasons why to buy this product, and in two clicks, you can.”
Now it’s handed those same Gen AI tools over to product manufacturers and sellers – giving them scripts, images and a final video in a matter of minutes.
Then there’s its Christmas ad – created using AI. Or a campaign it created for Samsung? Also, AI made.
Summers dispels any notion that this massive shift towards automation is anything for its marketing team to worry about. He insists it’s not about replacing the people, but rather making the work they spend time on more interesting, to make room for innovative, entrepreneurial thinking and empower them to push boundaries.
“When I started my career, marketing was the place to be in business. But I talk with young people now and I’m not sure that they see it like that [anymore]. And I think it’s our fault. We haven’t made it exciting. We’re not innovating. We’re not taking risks. We are not getting outside of our comfort zone,” he says.
“The marketing function, no matter in which industry you work, is changing so fast that you need to let go.”
Sean Summers has been nominated for The Drum and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year Award 2025. You can find out more about the accolade and this year’s nominees here.
Previous winners of the award include Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal, who won for 2023, and Marcel Marcondes, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev, who won for 2024.