AB InBev Has Won Creative Marketer of the Year Three Times. Marcel Marcondes Says It Is an Operating Achievement, Not a Creative One.
Three Cannes wins, one operating system. The world’s biggest brewer has spent a decade turning award-winning creativity into a repeatable system.
The world’s biggest brewer has spent a decade turning award-winning creativity into a repeatable system. At Cannes, CMO Marcel Marcondes shared the five lessons behind it, and the one question it still cannot answer.
Cannes Lions awards its Creative Marketer of the Year each June. Until this week, no company had won it three times. Marcel Marcondes, CMO of AB InBev, opened his session at the Lumière Theatre on Monday morning with a football metaphor to explain what crossing that threshold means, Brazil in 1970, the moment a country stops collecting trophies and starts embodying an identity. “As of now, everybody has creative effectiveness in their blood.”
Whether that claim holds is something the company will demonstrate over the next few years. What Marcondes spent the session doing was outlining the operational machinery that got them there: five lessons from a decade-long attempt to institutionalise creative effectiveness across 500 brands in more than 50 markets.
Before the awards: build the infrastructure
When AB InBev set out to become what Marcondes described as “the most creative, effective company in the world,” it held two Lions. The ambition was met internally with scepticism, including from Marcondes himself. The starting diagnosis was honest: growth through M&A had left the company with enormous portfolio depth and limited capability to build any of the brands it was acquiring creatively.
The response was organisational. A global creative capabilities function was established, with a team whose sole mandate was raising creative standards at scale. The system built around that function has four components: training senior leadership to brief and assess creative work; a “brain trust” process where promising ideas are stress-tested by a designated external group before being refined; ongoing external assessment of creative output against industry standards; and an internal awards programme to surface effective work and replicate it across markets.
Around 2,400 people across the AB InBev organisation have been through this training. The output: from two Lions at the outset to more than 100 in the past five years, across 33 brands and 17 markets. Among those, the first ever Cannes Lion for Tanzania as a country, and a Titanium that was the first of its kind for China. Marcondes presented the geographical spread as the point, not the volume of awards, but evidence that creative effectiveness had become a distributed capability rather than one that depends on which market or which brand happens to have the strongest team.
Creativity is not self-justifying
The second lesson concerns whether creativity must justify itself commercially. Marcondes quoted his CEO asking, in direct terms, what the point of winning awards is if the work is not solving commercial problems. AB InBev now formally evaluates creative work against business outcomes, and Marcondes made the case through the example of its light beer built around what he called the “superior” combination of social and active lifestyles.
The product credential is specific: 95 calories and 2.6 grammes of carbs per serving, roughly half the carbohydrate count of a standard light beer. The creative platform follows the product logic rather than chasing cultural relevance for its own sake. Sponsorships are concentrated around sports consumption occasions. Work developed during the pandemic built digital environments to bring live match experiences to disabled fans. A Formula One campaign put real cars against virtual equivalents.
Marcondes presented each of these as the result of asking what creative tools could do to a defined business problem, not what would generate conversation in Cannes. The commercial endpoint he cited was the brand becoming the highest-volume beer in the United States.
Consistency is the most undervalued discipline in brand management
The third lesson is consistency. Brand managers change strategy because they want to leave a mark. Agencies pitch restages because they need fresh work. Companies chase cultural conversation because they want social traction. All of this, he argued, is ego, and ego is the principal enemy of sustained brand equity.
The analogy was football loyalty. An Arsenal supporter does not switch to Chelsea. Brands have constituencies who resist the club changing its colours, and yet the people managing those brands rarely resist the urge to change things.
Corona served as the illustration. The brand’s positioning, “outside is our best side”, has not shifted. When the brand turned 100 this year, the creative work did not announce the milestone by declaring how long it had been around. It demonstrated what the brand has always stood for. Corona has been the most valuable beer brand in the world for three consecutive years. Marcondes attributed a material portion of that to the compounding effect of holding the line over time. “Consistency compounds over time. For those who manage to have the discipline of staying consistent in the long run, it is gold.”
Advertising is the entry point, not the destination
The fourth lesson is about reach in a different sense. AB InBev has formalised what it calls “mega platforms”: recurring experiential programmes attached to major cultural properties where a brand’s proposition can be executed across multiple formats and touchpoints simultaneously. The internal decision framework for each platform requires three conditions: a genuine connection to consumer passion points, a clear link to beer consumption occasions, and enough commercial infrastructure to support multi-format execution at scale.
Stella Artois and tennis is the current example. The brand’s “perfect serve” proposition, pouring as craft and ritual, maps onto the central mechanic of the sport. At Roland Garros, the execution was built around the clay court environment; at Wimbledon, which started today, the brand adapted its own visual identity to comply with the tournament’s all-white dress code, producing packaging stripped of its traditional colour to fit the occasion.
The underlying argument is that advertising builds awareness; experience builds what advertising is supposed to lead to. Marcondes has made that distinction part of the approval process for every major brand programme.
What the framework does not resolve
What the four covered lessons have in common is that they describe an operating model, systematic, repeatable, designed to function across scale, rather than a creative philosophy. The risk that an operating model built to win Lions eventually produces work designed to win Lions rather than to sell beer is the harder question. AB InBev has earned the right to face it.