Killer creative operations mean nothing without killer creative ideas
Aude Gandon, global CMO of Nestlé, shares her Marketing Manifesto for 2024. She’s one of five CMOs shortlisted for the WFA’s Global Marketer of the Year. Here, she courts your vote with a reminder that at the core of these huge brands, there must be good ideas.
What usually makes a great headline in The Drum? Probably change. Like moths to a flame, we marketers are mesmerized by the new and shiny, from the cookie-less world to Gen AI. But the more preoccupied we become with the ever-changing ‘science’ of marketing, the more I see the unchanging ‘art’ of marketing dying.
I’m not telling you to delete your database or shut down Dall-E. As an ex-Googler, I would never tell you the ‘science’ of marketing is unimportant. At Nestlé I brought in Creative X to apply AI to ad testing to 500,000 digital assets annually. Return on media investment rose 66%. We set up 41 Nestlé Content Studios that deliver 51,000 creative assets per year to ensure that each asset is tailored to the specific needs of the platforms and our different audiences. Furthermore, our home-grown Marketing ROI app helps every marketer predict the ROI of their decisions.
I’m proud of this work and the colleagues I did it with.
But killer creative operations without killer creative ideas are dead in the water. The secret to digital revolutions has always been to pair the tools of the time with the timeless principles of effective marketing.
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These timeless principles are based on something that has been around much longer than ChatGPT: the human brain. Marketing must be original, emotive, consistent and often participatory for the consumer’s brain to pay attention, encode memories and later bring the brand top-of-mind. This requires more than the data-science powers of the machine: it requires a creative leap by the marketer. While AI can imitate patterns in data, all data comes from the past. And as Bill Bernbach said, “What was effective one day, for that reason, will not be the next.”
So, it’s the marketer’s job to hypothesize the attention-earning, emotion-sparking themes of tomorrow, to add surprising data sets from wider culture and to ask original questions.
What kind of creative work do you get when the ‘art’ and ‘science’ of marketing combine? Nestlé’s Milo, the world’s leading cocoa and malt beverage, champions the lifelong ‘grit’ learned in sport, not just for some children, but all. The campaigns are inclusive of all genders, abilities and backgrounds. They put less stereotypical sports stories in the spotlight in a world where only two of the top 100 best-paid sportspeople are female, like Filipino female Olympic weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz. At the height of the pandemic, the content-rich Milo Home Ground platform (in partnership with FC Barcelona) maintained access to sports for every child during lockdowns.
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This kind of marketing does more than earn attention or operate with investor-pleasing efficiency. From little more than storytelling and simple services, genuine value is created around a physical product. In a world desperately in need of more sustainable growth, I couldn’t think of a reason to be prouder to be a marketer.
My WFA Marketing Manifesto ‘pledge’ is, therefore, to reboot the industry-wide decline in the ‘art’ of marketing. Action against this pledge is underway. In 2023, we launched Nestlé Creative Pulse, a creative excellence training and culture-change program. It included a new Nestlé Creative Scale, Creative Council, brief, creative testing approaches and training on the art of spotting ideas. In 2024, it will cover the art of insights and marketing innovation.
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My pledge is bigger than one CMO and one company. This is why I’m delighted to be shortlisted alongside the other incredible contenders for CMO of the Year.
Watch more from Aude below.
There are five shortlisted CMOs: L’Oréal’s Asmita Dubey, McDonald’s Morgan Flatley, Nestlé’s Aude Gandon, AB InBev’s Marcel Marcondes and Mattel’s Lisa McKnight. You can vote here. The WFA has extended the voting window exclusively for The Drum readers. That shuts at noon BST, Friday 2. So make it snappy. The winner will be crowned on February 27.