A field goal is a beautifully unforgiving piece of content. The ball either passes between the uprights or it does not. There is no focus group after the fact, no alternate cut, no soft launch. In February 2023, FanDuel placed that tension inside a Super Bowl commercial and asked Rob Gronkowski, a retired tight end rather than a kicker, to try from 25 yards away. Andrew Sneyd and his marketing team had bought airtime, but they were not thinking like ordinary advertisers. They were building an event inside the event.
The kick missed. The idea landed.
Sneyd had explained the creative premise before game day: FanDuel is an entertainment product that lives inside sport, so merely interrupting the Super Bowl with a polished spot felt strangely detached. The brand needed to behave like part of the game. A live attempt supplied jeopardy, participation and a shared outcome. Millions could watch the same foot meet the same football in the same second. Customers who had placed a qualifying bet would share a promotional pool if the kick sailed through.
That compressed spectacle is a useful way to understand the executive who became NRG Energy's chief marketing officer in 2026. Sneyd has spent his career moving marketing closer to the thing a customer is already doing: opening a beer, booking a trip, watching a game, making a pick. Now the thing is more ordinary and more intimate. It is running a home.
A career that keeps moving closer
The industries on Sneyd's résumé can look unrelated. Kraft Foods. Labatt and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Priceline. FanDuel. NRG. Follow the customer experience, though, and the sequence starts to make sense. Each stop offered a shorter distance between a marketing decision and a human response.
He started at Kraft in 1995 and spent seven years in brand-management positions. Packaged goods offered the classical training: define the consumer, protect the positioning, make choices across product, price, shelf and communication. He then moved into beer marketing, including leadership roles at Labatt and Anheuser-Busch InBev. By 2008 he was discussing how Budweiser and Bud Light could speak to Canadian viewers around the Super Bowl. Later, as global marketing leader for Budweiser, he worked on worldwide growth, sports and the peculiar creative pressure of advertising's closely watched night.
The beer years taught him scale and ritual. A global brand is never simply a logo sent around the world. It must be familiar enough to travel and flexible enough to feel local. Sport helped provide that common language. The Super Bowl, then the World Cup, offered enormous audiences already gathered around suspense, loyalty and conversation.
Priceline changed the instrumentation. Sneyd joined in 2017 as vice president of brand marketing and strategy. The travel platform could see behavior as it happened: a search, a click, a booking, a return visit. He helped spearhead the “Every Trip Is a Big Deal” campaign, using customer insight to connect a recognizable consumer promise with a measurable digital business.
“I like to talk a lot about the art, science and discipline of marketing, and you have to have all three.”Andrew Sneyd on his operating philosophy
That sentence is his pocket-sized management system. Art builds imagery and feeling. Science reads customer behavior. Discipline determines where a team spends its hours and where the company spends its dollars. The interesting word is not any one of the three. It is “and.” Sneyd resists the old contest between brand people and performance people because he has worked on both sides of the false border.
The image, joke or human tension that gives a brand somewhere to live in memory.
The behavior and feedback that show whether customers understood, acted and returned.
The operating choices that put people, time and money behind the work that matters.
When the ad becomes the action
FanDuel, which Sneyd joined around 2020, brought those lessons together. He first led brand work, then became executive vice president of marketing in 2022, with a remit spanning marketing, media, customer engagement and operations. Sports betting was digital, behavioral and fast. It was also cultural, emotional and regulated. A campaign had to be entertaining while remaining precise about what the product was and how it should be used.
The Kick of Destiny distilled the model. The art was a charmingly improbable task. The science lived in free picks, app activity and customer acquisition. The discipline sat in a campaign arc that began before the game and in the production machinery required to edit an uncertain live result for later broadcast. FanDuel was not placing a message beside the product. It was turning the product's logic - make a choice, wait for the outcome - into the message.
The franchise kept evolving. Gronkowski returned. Then Peyton and Eli Manning took over the kicking contest in New Orleans. Sneyd recalled that the brothers did not need to be told to take the premise seriously. Their genuine competitiveness arrived before the direction did. That is a small production anecdote with a larger lesson: useful casting contains its own behavior.
Sneyd also spoke about education and responsibility in the category. His earlier beer experience had taught him what it means to grow a brand in a regulated environment. At FanDuel, he served as a representative on the American Gaming Association's code compliance body for responsible sports-wagering marketing. The work demanded a balance between commercial momentum and rules intended to protect the customer.
The brief pause that clarified the work
After leaving FanDuel, Sneyd opened a short independent chapter. He launched Maplemark Consulting, advising growth-stage and established organizations on brand strategy, creative impact, marketing transformation and operating-model design. He also partnered with the Simpactful network on broader engagements.
His announcement lingered less on the freedom of consulting than on the people he encountered. Thoughtful leaders. Strong teams. Partners who cared about doing the work well and building things that last. The language is revealing because it returns marketing to an operating environment. A brand idea is only as durable as the organization capable of making it true.
Around the same period, he returned to Queen's University, where he earned his Bachelor of Commerce, as a guest speaker in brand management and marketing analytics. He brought cases from Anheuser-Busch, Booking and FanDuel into the classroom. The selection maps neatly onto his own framework: image, behavior and execution discussed together rather than filed into separate courses.
The connected home is the next live moment
NRG may look like a departure from the bright lights of sport. In practice, its consumer business offers another version of the same problem. Electricity, natural gas and smart-home technology meet inside a person's daily routines. The customer does not experience those categories as an org chart. They experience a bill, a thermostat, a security alert, an app, a hot afternoon or a dark room.
Sneyd described the opportunity as the intersection of energy and smart-home technology, with the chance to create more connected, customer-centered experiences. The ambition is not simply to make energy louder. It is to make a collection of services feel coherent.
That challenge rewards his particular career path. Packaged-goods training helps turn complexity into a clear promise. Global beer marketing understands culture and scale. Priceline supplied a feel for real-time behavior. FanDuel showed how marketing can live inside product use. Consulting briefly widened the lens to team design and transformation. At NRG, all five lessons can meet inside one household.
The stadium taught Sneyd how to gather attention. The home asks him to earn a habit.
There will be fewer roaring crowds. Feedback may arrive as a tap, an automated adjustment or a customer who no longer needs to think about the system at all. That is a subtler kind of participation. It may also be the more demanding one. A live kick needs to work for a few unforgettable seconds. A connected-home experience needs to keep working on an ordinary Tuesday.
The thread through Sneyd's public career is a refusal to treat marketing as decoration. A campaign can change the shape of the experience: a trip becomes a big deal, an ad break becomes a field goal, a cluster of home services becomes legible. The medium changes. The operating question remains: what can the customer now see, feel or do?
For NRG, that answer will be built quietly, room by room. The next big game is happening at home.