The useful thing about a duck is that nobody confuses it with the product. It can walk into a football commercial, interrupt a coach, cross into somebody else's fictional town and still carry one compact sound: Aflac. For Garth Knutson, the company's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, that separation is less a joke than a working advantage. Insurance is invisible until a contract matters. The Duck gives the category a face, a voice and a piece of memory that can travel.
Knutson inherited an advertising asset with a quarter-century of repetition behind it. The tempting CMO move would be to announce a new chapter by changing everything. His public playbook runs in the other direction. Keep the center. Tinker around it. Find talent and properties that extend the idea. Put money behind the places where the audience and the company's point of view meet.
This sounds modest until you look at the decisions. Aflac moved activation attention from the men's college basketball tournament toward the women's tournament before the current wave of audience growth made the choice obvious. It paired the Duck with Dawn Staley, Nick Saban and Deion Sanders. It sent the character into Dr Pepper's Fansville. In February 2026, Aflac signed on as the front-of-kit partner for the Atlanta NWSL team scheduled to debut in 2028.
A connector before a chief
Long before the C-suite title, Knutson chose a more revealing label for his job: connector. In 2011, he was a management supervisor in Wunderman's Seattle office, working across a worldwide network on the Microsoft business. He described the work as matching client goals with specialists and insights, then turning those combinations into conversations with customers. When asked how he brought ideas to life, his first answer was short: “Not by myself, that's for sure.”
The answer has aged well. Marketing chiefs get photographed alone, but their output is orchestral. The job is to align researchers, creatives, media buyers, agencies, finance teams, executives, athletes and rights holders without sanding away the reason each one is in the room. Knutson had years to learn that coordination from the agency side.
His Seattle career began at WONGDOODY after Washington State University, where he studied communications with an advertising focus. He moved through Wunderman, returned to WONGDOODY as an account director, and in 2012 made Direct Marketing News' 40 Under 40 list. Publicis Seattle hired him in 2015 to work on T-Mobile. He later became a group account director, leading work for a brand that had turned provocation into an operating language.
There was a brief stop in marketing at Amazon Music in 2021. Then came Aflac, first as vice president of brand, then interim head of marketing and CMO. The transition contained a quiet advantage: he already knew the company from the other side of the table. Knutson had begun working with Aflac as an agency partner at Publicis in 2016. He did not arrive needing to discover why the Duck mattered. He arrived knowing how much work it takes to make a familiar character feel inevitable.
The asset that compounds
At a 2025 brand summit, Knutson put numbers on the Duck's early effect. Awareness stood at 7 percent when the character launched in 2000. Three years later it reached 91 percent, while sales doubled. The numbers explain why his consistency argument is more than nostalgia. A repeated distinctive asset is stored media. Every new appearance can reactivate years of prior attention.
The risk is that familiarity hardens into furniture. People know the character but stop seeing it. Knutson's response is disciplined recombination. Keep the sound, silhouette and role. Change the room. One season that means Saban and Sanders in a mock commissioner's office. Another means a basketball campaign with Staley. Another means allowing a competing advertiser's world to host your mascot.
The Dr Pepper collaboration began as a thought during a drive around Seattle. Knutson later texted a low-resolution PDF to Brian Mead, a former colleague working with Dr Pepper's internal creative agency. He added no explanatory message. Mead quickly asked how they could make it happen. The economy of that exchange is the point. A good partnership premise should survive a rough deck and an empty text bubble.
Conviction has a line item
Consistency provides the base. Allocation reveals the judgment. In 2022, Aflac was among the NCAA sponsors concentrating activation around the men's tournament. The company shifted more of that spend toward the women's tournament before names like Caitlin Clark became an automatic media plan. Knutson later described the decision as a chance taken before the audience effect was clear.
The move joined attention, partnership and purpose. Staley offered credibility and a direct view of where college basketball still needed work. The company also worked with the Women's Basketball Coaches Association on assistant-coach awards across multiple levels of the sport. Rather than treating women's basketball as a one-month media slot, Aflac built a network of actions around it.
This is where a marketer's stated values become legible. The press release is cheap. The scarce resource is the dollar that could have stayed in the safer tournament. Knutson's career on agency accounts likely sharpened that distinction. Agencies can recommend a brave choice. The client has to sign the allocation.
The same thread now reaches professional soccer. Aflac's seven-year agreement with NWSL Atlanta 2028 starts well before the club's first match. The brand will appear on the front of the kit and across programming that leads into the team's debut. Arriving two years early gives Aflac something more useful than borrowed visibility. It gives the company a place in the club's formation.
Give up the right control
A 2019 project makes Knutson's collaborative instinct concrete. Publicis Seattle had developed a logo for the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games. The team was dissatisfied, set its concept aside and invited nine athlete-artists into a workshop. Their drawings shared ideas of heat, unity and motion. The resulting mark came from that room rather than from a conventional agency reveal.
Knutson said surrendering control produced something the agency could not have created alone. It is an easy lesson to admire and a difficult one to operationalize. Creative businesses build rituals around expertise. The expert is expected to arrive with the answer. Collaboration works only when the invitation changes the work, not when participants are asked to validate a nearly finished choice.
There is playfulness in the background, too. In 2011, Knutson and colleague Blake Abel started What the Klout?, a blog about the then-fashionable score for online influence. It taught the measurement system, poked at its absurdities and grew into presentations across more than 40 markets in their agency network. Knutson recommended Claude Hopkins' century-old Scientific Advertising around the same time. The pairing feels right: respect the enduring principle, tease the fashionable metric.
His life has supplied other odd connections. At five, he traveled as a roadie on his hometown symphony's China tour. As a college senior, he returned to the same community orchestra as a performer on a tour through Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The detail is charming because it mirrors the career. First he helped the production move. Later he took a seat inside it.
The operator's version of creativity
Knutson talks about creative work in operator language: consistency, chemistry, formats, process and budgets. He has noted that media costs rise while marketing budgets do not, forcing teams to make more versions for more channels with the same pool of money. There is no romance in that constraint. There is craft.
Colleagues describe an easygoing surface paired with steady energy, curiosity and a willingness to roll up his sleeves. That portrait matches his public choices. He is not trying to become more famous than the asset he manages. He is trying to build the conditions in which the asset keeps earning attention.
The Duck remains the visible star. Staley, Saban and Sanders supply cultural gravity. Athlete-artists improve the work when invited to own it. A former colleague receives a rough PDF and carries the thought into another brand. The CMO connects those pieces, protects the through line and decides where the money goes.
That is the long game in one sentence: repeat enough to be remembered, change enough to be noticed, and make the budget tell the truth about what you believe.