Global snack producer Mondelēz International is growing, and its creative marketing strategy is driving its success. For its third-quarter results released in November 2023, the company revealed an expectation of organic net revenue growth of 14% to 15% for the year ahead as it continues to serve over 150 countries around the world.
The European arm of the business alone saw net revenue up by 16% for the first three quarters of the year, at $9.32 billion.
As it releases a campaign titled “Birthday” to celebrate the 200th anniversary of British chocolate brand Cadbury, Peter Seymour, Mondelēz’s senior vice president of marketing and strategy for Europe, discussed how he has been pushing to evolve the group’s creative output. This has resulted in recent brand campaigns that have grown in effectiveness, according to research firm Kantar, and won awards across industry tentpole events including Cannes Lions.
“It’s something that we’ve been trying to get right for a whole lot of years,” Seymour told Adweek not long after the release of an animated Christmas ad for Chocolat Suchard in Spain, which drew over 40 million organic views during December.
Internally, creative effectiveness is measured using a proprietary benchmarking tool and process that can be applied to all work across any media, testing the power of a campaign’s storytelling, both rational and emotional. Over the past four years, Seymour claims, the company has recorded an increase in quality of over 20%.
Included within that metric are recent brand campaigns from its stable for Oreo, Milka and triangular-shaped chocolate bars Toblerone, the latter of which has begun a strategy to “premiumize” its image.
Seymour explains that the mixture of big brands—which also includes cream cheese brand Philadelphia—alongside regional and small brands made it difficult for the team of over 400 marketers across Europe to deliver consistently great creativity overall.
Despite that complexity, this has been the ambition throughout 2023 and now for 2024.
“More content on more channels means that smart marketers know, more than ever, that they need to cut through the avalanche of irrelevance by understanding and optimizing all of their creative,” explained Barney Worfolk Smith, Europe, Middle East and Africa managing director of creative effectiveness platform DAIVID. “With only small increments of improvement possible from media effectiveness, those same marketers are now realizing the dial-shifting performance upticks that can be achieved by improving the effectiveness of their creatives.”
A structure fit for effectiveness
Mondelēz’s European marketing team is structured similarly to that of its global brand portfolio, with around 10% working within the centralized team based in Zurich, while most of the department is based across the regional markets to keep them close to consumers, all of whom report ultimately to Seymour. The job of the centralized team is to create the big scalable brand ideas that run across Europe.
The local teams are internally named “The Crown Jewels,” as they activate each of the brands locally, bringing specialist knowledge and insights to each campaign that would not be possible if the entire team were centralized. Seymour also believes that large-scale campaigns cannot be run as if entirely localized, too.
“You have to find the structures, the organizations, the agency support and the processes to be able to flourish at many levels,” he added.
Meanwhile, one of the company’s largest marketing shifts has been to consolidate its agency partnership. Its agency setup now sees WPP and Publicis leading a global creative framework, with the former overseeing work produced for the chocolate, candy, powdered beverages and cheese divisions, and the latter the biscuits and gum divisions. VCCP, however, is the global agency of record for Cadbury, and it produced its latest work, released Jan. 8, as a result.
Publicis also shares the bulk of the company’s global media responsibilities, alongside VaynerMedia and WPP.
“[This] shouldn’t work, because we have this pool of local brands, [so] how do they get looked after by very big network agencies? I have the data behind it: We have stepped up in the performance of our creative work over the past three years. And it’s because we managed to run [our] WPP and our Publicis relationships at multiple levels,” Seymour believes.
To do so, the marketing team monitors the quality of work through a scorecard system of the performance of every local office and big brand. If there is a fall in the score, the leadership teams, including at both agency networks, will step in to help overcome any difficulties around collaboration.
Having worked on the original Cadbury campaign, “Mum’s Birthday,” which led to its shift to focus on generosity, Seymour admits his surprise to find that the brand team has since gone on to better it since.
“What I love about this job is when you think you’ve reached the top, you can always get better,” he stated. “That’s why I love being in a creative job.”
Measuring up to expectation
Creative performance across the stable of brands is tested and measured structurally to assess emotional and rational engagement, as well as the overall impact a piece of work might have across various formats.
“We have a very strong structure of how we train people with beliefs in how you look after brand identity. And that kind of process goes right through to how we test work. How we analyze and evaluate it is the same in every single market. So, we have a really good basis of data that will tell you, whichever market you’re in, whether it’s good work, or just average work,” he explained.
Creative testing has shifted within the team over the past couple of years, he went on to say, with the viewpoint on testing to others having become “a hurdle” to decide whether a campaign runs or not, which doesn’t engender good creativity.
“We test of learning,” said Seymour. “It is a real belief we have put in the organization that it’s about learning what you can.”
The company works with a variety of external agencies to test work, although they all follow Mondelēz’s set global methodology, which outlines what it thinks good looks like. As an example of the growing importance of testing, he cited a planned Easter campaign for Milka, which initially scored 81 out of 100 before being reworked to follow testing remarks, most recently scoring 87.
Those scores are compiled into an internal database of “consistent measures” that are used to judge each piece of work.
Another measurement of success is industry awards. Last year, the team won seven awards at Cannes Lions for its Oreo’s Xbox “Cheat Cookies” activation. That was followed up by a Pac-Man/Oreo collab that was also released at the start of the year.
“Across digital and traditional media, the key metrics for success are the same: attention first, coupled with strong positive emotions,” said Worfolk Smith. “Those emotions make us remember the creative, and that is what makes people go on to buy, either immediately or later. As Dan Weiden once said: ‘Just move me, dude.’”
ESG regulation compliance
Another growing area of concern for marketers across all businesses it how they ensure that their communications around their environmental impact comply with regional environmental, social and governance regulations, while avoiding being labeled as “greenwashing”—an issue across Europe that is now being heavily scrutinized.
According to the “Snacking Made Right” report released by Mondelēz in 2022, it is working toward operating in a more sustainable way, with 2025 goals including sourcing more sustainable ingredients, helping to reduce climate change, improving packaging, advancing DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives and supporting customers, colleagues and communities.
How Mondelēz accurately features the results of reaching these goals within its external communications will be something the marketing team will be charged with ensuring.
“You have to work at it. And you have to, as a leader, be on top of the details,” advises Seymour to other marketers who face the same dilemma.
To achieve this, Mondelēz has a monitoring service for such claims, run through the corporate and government affairs teams, but it’s also very high on Seymour’s own agenda. That has seen the inclusion of a sustainability-focused team within marketing that focuses not only on current regulations, but on reaching the company’s own sustainability ambitions, as well, he claimed.
In September, marketer Vanessa Harrer took on a new position focusing full-time on leading ESG and Mindful Snacking Europe, which sees her stay on top of regulations and changes made.
“It’s important that the future marketer is absolutely on top of health, well-being and also sustainability legislation. So, we’re investing in people and skills and the capability to do it,” said Seymour.
