Kevin McLaughlin’s latest public pitch begins with a remote control. Or, more precisely, too many of them. When TELUS brought its complete Optik TV offer to Ontario in June 2026, the bundle included streaming services, live channels, sports and on-demand programming. The machinery behind that package is complicated. McLaughlin’s language was not. Customers wanted “more content, fewer remote controls and lower bills,” he said. It is a tidy sentence, but also a compact account of how he has approached a 34-year marketing career: notice the nuisance, remove what can be removed, and explain the gain in words that survive outside a conference room.
That career has moved through categories that rarely share a résumé. He started in 1992 at Labatt Breweries of Canada, working across territory management, research, pricing and marketing. Then came global innovation and brand roles at Diageo, followed by the chief marketer job at Mike’s Hard Lemonade. In 2008 he entered wireless at T-Mobile. Later he would run marketing for Uber in the United States and Canada, lead customer marketing at Nordstrom, return to T-Mobile as Consumer Group CMO, and finally move north to TELUS in 2025.
The sequence looks restless until you notice the repeated assignment. Each business sells a habit wrapped in a choice. Which drink? Which plan? Which ride? Which store? Which bundle? The customer sees a decision. The company sees a product portfolio, a pricing model, a distribution system and several departments with incompatible calendars. Marketing has to turn the second thing into the first.
The complaint is the brief
McLaughlin arrived at T-Mobile before “Un-carrier” became a piece of corporate vocabulary. In 2012, as a vice president of marketing, he discussed the return of a truly unlimited data option. His explanation was plain: it was what customers wanted. Limited-data plans asked people to estimate an unfamiliar unit and live with the anxiety of getting it wrong. Unlimited service turned a technical allowance into a promise ordinary people could understand.
That logic grew into a larger strategy. Industry conference biographies later described McLaughlin as one of the architects behind T-Mobile’s Un-carrier approach. The enduring cleverness of that program was not the prefix. It was the decision to make category frustrations visible, then position their removal as product news. Contracts, pricing conventions and service irritations became creative material because they were already part of the customer’s day.
“Our customers want more content, fewer remote controls and lower bills.”Kevin McLaughlin, on TELUS Optik TV in Ontario
The work also required integration rather than slogans. McLaughlin was part of the leadership group behind the MetroPCS combination, helping take a regional prepaid wireless provider into a larger national brand. The assignment sat at the difficult intersection of scale and identity. A merger can make the spreadsheet larger while making the customer proposition blurrier. Metro needed the reach of the combined company without becoming a footnote to it.
The useful detour
After a decade at T-Mobile, McLaughlin left in 2018 to lead Uber’s marketing across the United States and Canada during the company’s IPO phase. Ride-hailing traded the monthly bill for a two-sided marketplace. Supply and demand changed block by block. The service lived on a phone, but its promise had to survive traffic, weather, price and the behaviour of two different groups of people.
Nordstrom presented another angle. As vice president of customer marketing from late 2019 to 2021, McLaughlin moved into a retailer where the relationship extends across stores, digital commerce, service and loyalty. Telecom often thinks in accounts. Retail forces the marketer to see occasions: the reason someone came, what they considered, what they left with, and whether the experience earned another visit.
An apprenticeship in different units
The early jobs help explain why McLaughlin can move between these frames. At Labatt he did not begin with a C-suite title or a brand manifesto. His documented roles covered territory management, research, pricing and marketing. Each discipline measures the customer differently. Territory work shows what happens in a specific market. Research turns behaviour into patterns. Pricing tests the distance between interest and purchase. Marketing has to gather those views without pretending they are the same.
At Diageo, the scope widened. His roles crossed regional sales and marketing, brand leadership and global innovation between 1998 and 2005. A global beverage company creates a recurring tension: brands need a recognizable center, while markets have their own channels, tastes and rules. Innovation adds another clock. The team is not only explaining what exists; it is trying to decide what should exist next and whether a new idea can travel.
Mike’s Hard Lemonade put him closer to the top of a focused consumer brand. He served as vice president of marketing and chief marketer from 2006 to 2008. The title came with breadth: a smaller portfolio gives a marketer fewer places to hide a fuzzy position. Distribution, packaging, occasion and voice all have to point in the same direction. By the time he entered T-Mobile, McLaughlin had already seen the customer through the eyes of sales, insights, pricing, innovation and brand management.
That is useful context for the Un-carrier years. Customer-first marketing can sound like a matter of empathy alone. In practice, it also requires arithmetic and translation. The complaint has to be common enough to matter. The solution has to work economically. Sales channels need to explain it. Service teams need to support it. A brand promise becomes valuable when those pieces reinforce one another, which is why varied operating experience can matter as much as creative taste.
Then came the return. In 2021, after four years away, McLaughlin rejoined T-Mobile as CMO of the Consumer Group. Returning to a company can be harder than arriving fresh. The old mental map is still there, but the streets have changed. T-Mobile had completed its Sprint merger. The organization was larger. Expectations built during the Un-carrier years had become part of the operating baseline.
Credit is a management tool
McLaughlin’s public posts from this period offer a small window into how he led. They are full of employee names. When T-Mobile colleagues won internal PEAK and Winners Circle recognition, he did more than congratulate the group. He described the work: enabling frontline conversations, organizing launches, listening to recorded customer interactions, keeping teams aligned, noticing risks before they became problems.
In one post he celebrated a group with a combined 142 years at T-Mobile. In another, he relayed lines from peer nominations to show why particular colleagues mattered. The detail is the point. Generic praise creates a warm moment. Specific praise creates an example. It tells everyone reading which behaviours the organization values and gives the work an owner.
This matters especially in telecom, where the advertisement is the visible tip of an operational system. A plan can be easy to explain and hard to bill. A campaign can promise care and still collide with a confusing support handoff. A bundle can look clean on a landing page while creating installation friction at home. Marketing leadership in such a business is partly the art of finding colleagues across product, network, retail and service who can make the sentence true.
Back to Canada
McLaughlin left T-Mobile in 2023. By 2025 he had joined TELUS as Chief Marketing Officer for Consumer Solutions, returning to Canadian business more than three decades after his early Labatt roles. The category was familiar. The market was different. TELUS sells wireless and fibre, but it also asks households to make decisions across entertainment, connected-home services and other products. Every additional possibility creates another chance for confusion.
The Ontario Optik TV expansion is a useful expression of his method because the product is inherently crowded. More than 450 sports and live channels sit beside streaming services and on-demand content. Customers can refresh their lineup every 30 days. The offer connects to PureFibre Internet and can sit alongside mobility and home services. Internally, that is a web of rights, technology, pricing and delivery. Externally, McLaughlin reduced it to choice, flexibility and fewer things on the coffee table.
There is no magic in simplicity. Usually there is a great deal of work hiding behind it. The marketer has to decide which detail earns attention, which one can wait, and which customer frustration deserves enough organizational effort to become a promise. McLaughlin’s category range suggests that this judgment travels. Beer and broadband share little infrastructure. They share a human being deciding whether the offer fits into life.
His own LinkedIn introduction begins with “fearless senior marketing executive and leader.” The bolder evidence is quieter: moving into unfamiliar categories, leaving a company where his work had become part of the brand story, returning to face a changed organization, and then starting again in a new market. The through-line is not a campaign name. It is a willingness to keep translating corporate complexity into the customer’s vocabulary.
That leaves a practical standard for the next TELUS brief. Can a customer understand the change without learning the org chart? Can a frontline employee deliver what the advertisement implies? Can the team name the irritation being removed? If the answers are clear, the copy tends to get shorter. Sometimes it fits into one sentence: more content, fewer remote controls, lower bills.