Larry Light, Marketer Behind Revival of McDonald’s, Dies at 83

Larry Light, a McDonald’s executive who oversaw a worldwide marketing campaign in the early 2000s that was built around the slogan “I’m lovin’ it,” which revived that fast-food chain when it was in the doldrums, died on June 24 in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 83.

His daughter Laura Light said the cause was aspiration pneumonia, adding that Parkinson’s disease was listed as a secondary cause.

When he was hired in 2002 as the global chief marketing officer of McDonald’s, Mr. Light was a consultant who had built his expertise in branding over more than 20 years as an advertising executive.

At McDonald’s, he found a corporate colossus that had lost its way with some consumers, especially young ones. Earnings were falling. The stock price was down. Its advertising was uninspired.

“We recognized that mass marketing of mass messages to masses of people via mass media was a mass mistake,” Mr. Light wrote in 2020 in the online publication Branding Strategy Insider. “McDonald’s had been managed as a mass-market, mass-media, mass-message brand. Our challenge was to lead a big brand, but not as a mass brand.”

Mr. Light said he had wanted a marketing message that did not tell McDonald’s customers what to think.