How AB InBev’s in-house agency helped them win Cannes Creative Marketer of the Year twice in a row!

Mar 20

I love seeing Australians do well on a global stage, something about Aussie battlers punching above their weight fills me with a sense of patriotic pride.

So when my great mates and former Carlton & United Breweries colleagues, Richard Oppy and Tim Ovadia took on Global VP of Marketing roles at one of the world’s largest FMCG companies Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), I was excited to see what they’d do with some of the world’s most recognised brands.

When I woke up this morning and heard that ABI won Cannes Creative Marketer of the Year for the second time in a row, well you wouldn't believe how proud I am of my old mates and ABI colleagues. A couple ‘Aussies done good’, at the epicentre of global marketing and creativity, beating the world. Perkins, Freeman, Thorpe, Barty, Oppy & Ovadia…or at least that’s how it feels for me.

The story of Creative evolution at ABI is an incredible one, from a cost cutting M&A behemoth run by investment bankers to the world’s most creative marketer, and underpinning it all is their in-house agency draftLine.

When ABI won Cannes Creative Marketer of the Year in 2022, we invited Tim Ovadia, Global VP of Stella Artois to join our In-House Agency Council Member meeting and tell us their story.

The story of how draftLine helped ABI navigate a global pandemic with agility and come out the other side as the most awarded creative marketers in the world.

What follows is a synopsis of a conversation we had with our IHAC members in August 2022, all the more relevant now after ABI has just been announced as winners again in 2023.

During the address, Ovadia described in detail the fascinating strategy behind how ABI’s in-house agency draftLine helped the multinational drink and brewing company take out prestigious awards like 2021’s Cannes Grand Prix and back to back Creative Marketer of the Year, in ‘22 and ‘23 at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“ABI's story starts with building the case for creativity in a language that the CEO speaks,” Ovadia began.

The case for creativity at ABI was very clear, he said: The company had grown around the world inorganically, through mergers and acquisitions.

“(ABI) became famous for ruthlessly and efficiently running beer operations better than anyone else, buying up its competition, streamlining and taking costs out of that competition, and then taking and scaling the brands that it brought into the market,” Ovadia said.

BUILDING THE CASE FOR CREATIVITY

Ovadia spoke of ABI’s debt ratio creeping up following a series of huge mergers and acquisitions, and its stock price was carved in half in the process.

“We had to go from growing inorganically to organically. And to grow organically, growth becomes granular - you have to earn it, you have to earn market share, you have to innovate, you have to build brands,” Ovadia recalled.

So ABI had to make a transformation from becoming excellent at mergers and acquisitions and efficiency to becoming incredible brand builders.

“We have this methodology around identifying gaps and closing gaps,” Ovadia said. “What had become very clear was that we had a gap.”

He said the perception of ABI at the time was: "Incredibly efficient - not very good marketers, not very good brand builders."

The marketing directors sat down with the CEO at the time to explain how ABI needed to become a marketing organisation, not a sales and production organisation, Ovadia explained.

“The directors presented the most creative, brand-building companies in the world: Apple, Burger King, Microsoft... and showed the CEO the winners of the Cannes Lions companies of the year. They showed him a graph of companies that had won Cannes Lions and the correlation between that and their sharemarket price. You can map creativity back to performance. We got buy-in on a very senior level for the need to go on this journey,” Ovadia said.

And from that conversation, the case for creativity was built.

SETTING A GOAL

Ovadia explained that, once you make the case, you need to set your North Star - set the goal.

“Part of ABI's culture is ‘dreaming big’. We talk about: what is our dream? Each of us for our brand has a dream. The company has a dream. And really that language is about setting goals,” Ovadia said.

ABI’s goal was - within 5 years - they were going to transition to be the most creative marketing agency in the world as recognised by Cannes - A goal that was indeed measurable.

This goal was understandably met with some opposition internally: “we shouldn't be chasing awards. Is this the right thing to do? Is this going to be a distraction?”

“And this is from the marketing team, right? As we do, as marketers, we can be quite cynical. We went from that journey, we got our head around it, and then in very much ABI fashion, we set a goal, we knew what we were trying to achieve,” Ovadia remembered.

And once ABI set its goal, and identified the gaps, they asked, “what do we actually need to do across our culture, people, capability, and their processes to enable this to happen?”

THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND CULTURE

“Nothing that happened in Cannes - nothing - was accidental,” Ovadia said.

He recalled how deliberate and methodical ABI was about achieving this goal.

“The chairman of Cannes came up to us and said great companies around the world win this award, but not many set out to achieve it - you're the only one that literally approached it like engineers,” Ovadia explained.

Ovadia said ABI started with people. “We said we're not a creative culture, we need to get the right people into our culture and we need to focus on it.”

So they appointed a Head of Creativity and Culture, and worked with a consultancy to collate and share outstanding creative work from around the world in a very disciplined way. We then knew we had a capability gap,” Ovadia said.

BUILDING A FRAMEWORK FOR CREATIVITY

ABI next built a creative spectrum. They said, let's go and learn from people.

They interviewed Cannes judges, “because that's where we wanted to get to, and said, talk to us about what you look at with the work”.

ABI’s creative spectrum mapped work from 1-10 - from work that did damage to a brand, to work that was iconic and shaped culture.

They established "brain trusts"; groups of people, external, internal, that weren't involved in the campaign, that reviewed campaigns, assessed them against the creative spectrum, gave them a score, and then helped the teams make the work better.

“Every single market, every single campaign went to a brains trust and the campaigns got assessed against the creative spectrum score. We wanted to immerse people in the idea that creativity mattered, we wanted to help them with the spectrum by giving them objectivity of what great creativity looked like, we wanted external voices in the room, not just our own, but we also wanted the focus on this is the way the judges at Cannes were going to assess the work,” Ovadia said.

ABI created its own internal awards, called the Creative X Awards.

“We mirrored them in the categories that Cannes had,” Ovadia said. “We created this internal awards system, because we knew that we weren't going to get to be creative marketer of the year overnight - it's a five-year journey. And what now wins gold at our internal awards now wins gold at Cannes. It wasn't always that way, but it is now.”

But the “process” piece of the puzzle did not come as deliberately as the others.

THE IN-HOUSE AGENCY ENABLED AGILITY

It happened as a result of the pandemic, out of COVID, Ovadia said.

He said there were two types of companies at the time: those that decided to bunker down and put things on hold and get through, and then there were other types of companies that said how do we use this as a transformational moment?

Ovadia remembered the time well, adding: “And in classic ABI style, before we had a chance to grieve or get our head around the fact that we were locked in our homes for 18 months, the company started saying right, tomorrow we transform, let's use it as a competitive advantage.

He said:

“And what we did with marketing was fascinating. The CMO at the time said, ‘Right, everything is frozen around the world. There is no money. I don't want anyone spending money.’”

His view was very much consumer-led. He said,

“Right now people around the world don't need brands advertising to them. That's not what they need. They need help. Our drinkers need help. The communities that we operate in need help. We need to use marketing for good. Because right now if I see a company advertising, I feel it's tone deaf.’ And he was very passionate about that. “So he said there's no more spending. Stop. What we're going to do instead, is we're going to put in place an ‘ideas for good’ process.
Every single week, every one of our markets, we were given a brief and it started out very broad, and then as we got through 3 or 4 weeks of the process we sharpened it up, but the brief was: come to us with ideas for how we can have a positive impact in the community through our brands at this point in time.”

Ovadia said the CMO put out 4-hour meetings in the diary, asking for submissions: “

You would put a 1-page submission in, we would shortlist it, you would get on a call, I think there were between 30-50 submissions every week, we would listen to them all, after we got off the call, we would vote on what we thought the best ideas were and then we would give them immediate funding to go and make those ideas happen. That process happened for seven months. Every single week, the whole marketing organisation got together to review work.”

Ovadia explained:

“What's really interesting is our internal agencies, this is where they had that time to shine. The external agencies simply could not cope in this type of environment. They did eventually get there after a couple of months, because they realised if they didn't get there, they weren't going to get any work. But it was our internal agencies who were able to respond to these briefs a week after they were being given. And that really solidified the role and the need and the value that our internal agencies had.”

And he said a number of the campaigns that came out of that process ended up being Cannes Gold Lion-winning ideas.

“Literally one of the first ideas we had came from one of the internal agency’s team who said: ‘You know what, in our brewing process, one of the by-products we make is ethanol. What if we bottled that ethanol and made it into hand sanitisers?’
“Six weeks later, we were able to create hand sanitisers and put them out to communities in need. And do it to scale around the world - it became an award-winning idea,” Ovadia said.

The second idea came out of ABI’s internal agency in Colombia.

Ovadia said:

“They identified more mom and pop businesses that are the mainstay of the Colombian economy, when people became isolated in their homes, these peoples' livelihoods went away. These small shops - they weren't Amazon, they weren't tech-enabled, they didn't have the ability for people to order stuff from home.
“What our internal agency realised was ABI, we have relationships with all these small, independent businesses and we have a technology platform that they order through and we essentially created an Amazon-style platform for all the small mum and pop shops in Colombia to register and be part of and we connected them up with consumers in apartments and then allowed those consumers to be able to order goods from the small retailer on the street and get them delivered.
That happened within two months. And we got recognised by the President of Colombia for the impact that we had in the community in a time of crisis,”

Ovadia added.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Build the case for Creativity from the top down (C Suite)
Set a clear, measurable goal to raise the bar creatively.
Identify your gaps in: people, culture, capability and process.
Be methodical in your approach and processes addressing those gaps.
Don’t be afraid to bring in external experts like -lution to help you close those gaps, and optimise your in-house capabilities.
Leverage the speed and agility of your in-house team in difficult situations as an opportunity to transform your business.

IHAC exists to help businesses maximise their in-house agencies by attracting the best talent, building capability, and sharing best practices. We create a positive environment for sharing collaboration and learning, and everything is underpinned by a need to drive business performance. IHAC Members can watch the full address by Tim Ovadia here.