Five million restaurant visits a day can make the word “digital” sound rather abstract. Somewhere, a customer is tapping an offer in an app. Somewhere else, a kitchen screen has just received the order. A courier is finding the door, a family is choosing from a kiosk, and a crew member is greeting someone who would rather speak to a person. Santiago Blanco’s job is to make those moments feel as though they belong to the same brand.
As Chief Marketing and Digital Officer of Arcos Dorados, Blanco sits at a peculiar intersection. McDonald’s is widely recognized, but his map covers twenty countries and territories across Latin America and the Caribbean. Familiarity travels easily. Relevance needs more careful luggage.
Blanco joined Arcos Dorados in 2019 with responsibility for designing and implementing both marketing and digital strategy. The paired title matters. An advertisement can no longer promise one experience while an app, drive-thru, delivery order or dining room supplies another. Media and operations are now roommates. They do not always agree on the music, but they share the electricity bill.
A career built in translation
Long before the Golden Arches, there was Coca-Cola and a career that moved through Mexico, the United States, Japan and South America. Public records place Blanco in a brand-director role at Coca-Cola as early as 2004. The assignments mixed marketing with operations, giving him the kind of education that rarely fits neatly on a classroom transcript: how a global idea survives contact with local language, rituals and retail reality.
He also has the classroom transcript. Blanco earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Tecnológico de Monterrey and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Then the plot folded back on itself. He returned to Tecnológico de Monterrey as a marketing leader, working on the institution’s visual identity and its pitch to future students.
In 2016, while discussing a new agency relationship, he described the university’s commitment to entrepreneurial talent and “a profound human sense.” The phrase belongs to education, but it foreshadows his later language about retail. Scale is interesting. Systems are necessary. The human being at the end of the system remains the point.
Global roles
Marketing
2017-19
2019
Now
By 2017 he was at Alsea, the multi-brand restaurant and coffee-shop operator, as Chief Marketing, Digital and Communications Officer. There, a loyalty platform called Wow Rewards gave him another look at the bargain between data and affection. Points, offers and birthday surprises are machinery. The customer is meant to feel recognized, not processed.
One Alsea episode captures Blanco’s operating style. In 2018, he brought a real Vips business problem to more than 400 first-year Tecnológico de Monterrey students. The brief was to make the restaurant a favorite meeting place for young people without neglecting older customers and families. It was not a case study embalmed in a textbook. The students’ proposals could influence an active business. A marketer had turned a customer puzzle into a classroom, then opened the door.
The customer owns the remote
Blanco’s public thinking has become more pointed as media has fragmented. At a 2025 summit on streaming, he argued that audiences control what they watch, when they watch and how many screens accompany them. His compact verdict was that “the public now has all the control.”
This sounds obvious until a campaign behaves as though the remote still belongs to the advertiser. Streaming has trained viewers to skip, close, scroll and choose. Blanco’s response is not to shout with extra determination. It is to enter the thing people already care about and improve the visit. The brand must become part of the content rather than the interruption wrapped around it.
“The streaming era has become a new mindset.”Santiago Blanco, 2025
The numbers above are a visual argument, not company metrics. The progression is useful because it explains the architecture behind Blanco’s examples. Participation puts the brand inside a chosen experience. Utility gives the customer a reason to keep it there. An app offer on race day, a delivery option after the broadcast, or a useful piece of creator content can do more than repeat the logo. Each continues the experience.
Fast cars, patient strategy
Formula 1 offered a large demonstration. In 2024, McDonald’s became a regional sponsor of the sport through a four-season agreement led by Arcos Dorados. Blanco’s explanation began with the audience, not the hospitality suite. New races, rule changes, social media, gaming and streaming had brought younger viewers, women, children and families into the fold. In Latin America, a deep racing memory already ran from Juan Manuel Fangio to Ayrton Senna and onward to contemporary drivers.
The partnership connected track visibility to the McDonald’s app, Drive Thru and McDelivery. Fans could encounter promotions, content and experiences around individual races. This is the difference between placing a mark beside a spectacle and designing a route through it. The race creates attention; the digital and restaurant system gives that attention somewhere to go.
Sport also supplies something fragmented media has made scarce: a shared clock. A race starts at a particular hour. Fans watch together, argue together and reach for their phones together. For a marketer responsible for app orders, restaurant visits and delivery, that synchronicity is not nostalgia. It is an operating cue.
Loosen the grip
At Cannes Lions in 2026, Blanco extended the same logic to creators. Brands once spoke directly to consumers and guarded the message like a family recipe. Now a creator often carries it in a voice an audience has voluntarily chosen. His prescription was frank: working with creators requires a brand to loosen control a little.
A little is doing useful work in that sentence. Blanco is the custodian of standards across a sprawling public company. He is not proposing a cheerful surrender of coherence. He is recognizing that a creator borrowed merely as a distribution pipe will sound exactly like that. The brand brings the premise and boundaries. The creator brings fluency. Trust is the fee each pays the other.
Former colleagues describe Blanco publicly as creative, collaborative and inclined to disrupt habitual thinking. One recommendation credits his experience in Japan, North America and Mexico with bringing fresh thought into a marketing function. Another notes his ability to work across functions while helping people grow. Those descriptions fit the career route: brands, operations, a university, a student challenge, a loyalty platform and now a restaurant network whose digital interface ends in physical service.
Technology can personalize the journey. A person still has to make the welcome feel personal.
Blanco made the point more directly at Cannes. Even with all the available technology, he said, millions of people still enter the restaurants each day and each needs someone to attend to them. Warmth and the knowledge that another person is on the other side remain part of the identity. It is a useful check on fashionable language. Digital transformation is not complete when a screen appears. It is complete when the customer’s day becomes easier without the organization becoming colder.
The ordinary work of being chosen
There is no single Blanco formula hiding behind the app. His career offers a set of tensions instead: global consistency and local texture, control and creator freedom, automation and warmth, mass reach and one customer’s choice. The work is not to eliminate those tensions. It is to keep them productive.
The order of operations matters. Blanco tends to begin with a change in behavior: students looking for a place to gather, racing fans arriving through streaming, viewers holding the skip button, creators speaking to communities in their own cadence. Only then does the channel enter the story. The app is not interesting because it is an app. It is interesting when it carries a race-day benefit at the moment a fan wants one. A restaurant is not a media property by declaration. It becomes one through the memories, service and repeated habits that accumulate inside it.
This approach also makes room for modesty, a quality marketing does not always keep near the front desk. A campaign can invite attention but cannot order affection. A famous logo can open the conversation but cannot finish it. Blanco’s language about listening treats popularity as a continuing obligation. To be remembered, the brand has to notice the consumer in return. In a business measured across countries and millions of visits, that reciprocity is assembled from details: a relevant offer, a clear interface, a local reference that lands, and an employee with enough support to solve the problem in front of them.
That may explain why his public examples are unusually concrete for executive marketing talk. A Vips dining room must welcome teenagers without pushing out grandparents. A Formula 1 deal must travel from the broadcast into the phone and the restaurant. A streaming placement must respect the content. A creator needs enough freedom to sound like a creator. Each is a problem of adjacency: how to stand next to what people value without blocking the view.
Blanco has spent more than two decades learning that lesson in different accents. The global brands gave him scale. Japan and the Americas gave him context. The university gave him a language for aspiration. Restaurant operations supplied the unforgiving test of lunch.
For Arcos Dorados, the stakes appear each time a customer decides among a counter, kiosk, app, drive-thru or delivery platform. For the rest of us, there is a quieter lesson worth borrowing. Attention is not a possession. It is a fresh decision. The useful brand, like the useful host, notices what brought the guest into the room and finds a graceful way to belong there.