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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.”
