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Molson Coors’ chief marketing officer, Michelle St. Jacques, famously took the reins at the beer giant a day after Anheuser-Busch ran multiple Super Bowl ads blasting Miller and Coors for using corn syrup as a fermentation base in their beer—something that experts argue is irrelevant to the final product. It was amid the flurry of those first few days as CMO in 2019 that she met DDB Worldwide’s chief creative officer, Ari Weiss.
St. Jacques and Weiss hit it off immediately. Talking to them both now, it’s no surprise to learn that they’ve spent the last two years in near-constant contact. Over the course of our 40-minute conversation about building a fruitful agency-client relationship, they were constantly jumping in to finish one another’s sentences, expand on an idea or add another anecdote about the chaos of 2020.
‘We’ve been torture-tested’
“We really quickly recognized that we had similar visions, or ambitions, or desires on how to build brands that people will actually talk about, and how to build brands with purpose,” St. Jacques said. The intensity of the moment meant that having a creative partner with an almost inherent understanding really allowed them to hit the ground running.
“We were under such a tough moment, kind of being under attack,” she explained. The circumstance “microwaved” her relationship with Weiss and DDB, she said, building trust in record time and allowing them to jump straight into action.
In that way, it’s much closer than a typical agency-client relationship, said Weiss. “It’s just a partnership to make both companies really successful creatively,” he explained. “We’ve been torture-tested 100,000 times from [2019] to today, but we’ve only gotten better and better. We fight better, we celebrate better, we have victories better. It comes from that shared ambition.”
After a swift response to Bud Light’s Super Bowl ads, which included stunts like giving out free beer every time a #corntroversy ad aired, Molson Coors launched a new brand positioning for Coors Light, “Made to Chill.”
A foundation of strong communication
Solidifying the personality for each of its brands and keeping in close contact with Weiss, St. Jacques continued to build out the strategy that she brought to Molson Coors (then MillerCoors) in 2019—bringing ideas to market more quickly, focusing on younger consumers and getting folks excited about beer again in the face of declining market share.
“We joke that there were probably 10,000 text messages between Michelle and me in the first six months to a year,” Weiss said, admitting that he’s not sure whether it’s a joke—he wasn’t able to count them all. “There’s a level of communication; we’re both a little nuts; we’re both, like, a little bit obsessed with making really interesting things.”
That’s not to say that they’re always on the same page. Weiss recounted a recent disagreement about a specific pitch idea that his team brought to St. Jacques. She didn’t like the idea from the beginning, but Weiss revisited it a few weeks later, convinced that it was a still worth a shot. While he hasn’t won her over yet, St. Jacques said that because they respect one other and have the same goals in mind, discussions around disagreements are sometimes even more fruitful than the clear wins.
“I would rather [Weiss and his team] keep bringing back the idea that they want to fight for over and over again than for us to miss something that could be amazing and change the world,” she said. “I will take like the same 45-minute conversation five times, if it gets us to a place where we do something magical.”
After all, St. Jacques said, DDB is often surprising her with the work they come up with—over the past year, they’ve created everything from a holiday sculpture series that’s now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to a Super Bowl-adjacent campaign placed directly into the subconscious and surrealist escapes from awkward situations.
But when asked which pieces of work from the last year were their favorites, Weiss and St. Jacques insisted that the momentum they’ve built over the past two years feels like more of an accomplishment than any one spot.
“When you find relationships … where you feel like, ‘Man, I’m doing work I’m so proud of and I’m so into, and even through all the stress we’re laughing or enjoying ourselves along the way,’ to me, that’s the part that’s the real magic,” St. Jacques said.
Like many businesses during the pandemic, paid media spend was down significantly last year for Molson Coors at $133 million compared to 2019 when the beer giant spent close to $225 million, according to Kantar. The company was expecting business to recover this year, but its luck has yet to turn post-pandemic—all in Q1, the unprecedented Texas winter storm shut down Molson Coors’ brewery in Fort Worth, Texas; a cybersecurity attack caused a global system outage; and new lockdown measures again halted business at bars and restaurants in the U.K. and parts of Canada, leading to a 9.7% decline in net sales compared to the same time period last year.
Still, with those events in the rear view mirror, CEO Gavin Hattersley said in last week’s earnings call that Molson Coors is “making progress on the things that are within our control.”
