Creativity Doesn’t Grow Business. Culture Does.

Everyone talks about creativity in marketing. Few companies build a system around it. AB InBev has won the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year award three times, an absolute record. But the award is not the interesting part. The interesting part is how they built an organizational culture where creativity is not a department, but a business function.

A recent article on Marketing Dive details how Marcel Marcondes, AB InBev’s Global CMO, presented this approach at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference. The takeaway is clear: creative effectiveness is not a moment of inspiration. It is the result of repeatable, measurable decisions anchored in strategy.

As a strategist, I care less about individual campaigns and more about the systems that produce them consistently. What AB InBev has done offers concrete lessons, even for brands that are orders of magnitude smaller.

In markets where marketing budgets are a fraction of what global players spend, this question becomes even more pressing. How do you make every dollar invested in marketing count? Not by running more campaigns, but by building more strategic discipline.

Less means more. But nobody wants to hear that.

From a portfolio of over 500 brands, AB InBev reduced to 50 those that receive meaningful investment. The rest? Deprioritized or eliminated. They cut 25% of their SKUs. Not from panic, but from strategic clarity.

Each brand received a clear role in an “inverted pyramid” structure: megabrand, expansion, defensive, or deprioritized. Megabrands generate 60% of volume and receive over 60% of investment. Corona, for example, grew 65% over five years and is now the world’s most valuable beer brand, according to Kantar BrandZ.

The result: revenue up 11% in a single quarter and all-time high revenues for the company.

For any brand, the principle holds: you cannot be relevant everywhere, to everyone. Focus is not a limitation. It is a multiplier. If you have ten products and budget for three, do not spread the budget across ten. Choose three and make them unforgettable.

It is tempting to believe more products mean more chances. But AB InBev proved the opposite: by concentrating resources on fewer than 10% of its portfolio, it generated the largest growth in company history. Focus does not just save budget. It creates room for every investment to be meaningful.

Don’t measure impressions. Measure whether you matter.

“We don’t track impressions, because we can buy impressions.” The line belongs to Marcondes and summarizes a fundamental shift in mindset. Their core KPI is not reach. It is “share of engagement”: how much people interact with the brand, not how many saw it.

The difference seems subtle, but it is enormous in practice. An ad that 10 million people ignore is worth less than one that 500,000 share, comment on, and weave into their conversations. Classic ROAS does not always capture this reality.

This does not mean data does not matter. Quite the opposite. But what you measure matters. If your primary KPI is “impressions delivered,” you will optimize for volume, not impact. And volume without impact is just paid noise.

It is a shift we see in the market too. More and more companies are asking not “how many impressions did we get?” but “did our presence actually matter?” Answering the second question requires entirely different metrics.

Experiences beat ads. And the numbers confirm it.

AB InBev has invested heavily in what they call “mega platforms”: the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics, Wimbledon, Tomorrowland. Not as a traditional sponsor, but as an active part of the experience. The result? ROI roughly twice that of traditional media.

A StubHub report cited by Marcondes shows that nearly 70% of consumers are willing to spend more on experiences than on products. Not on deals. On moments.

Their partnerships with Live Nation and Netflix illustrate the same logic. Stella Artois did not buy a product placement in season 2 of “The Gentlemen.” It co-produced content where the brand is so woven into the story that it is hard to tell the ad apart from the show. Ads that stick work exactly this way: they do not interrupt, they integrate.

The scale may differ for smaller markets, but the principle holds. A brand sponsoring a major event should not just be there with a logo. It needs to create a moment that attendees want to share. The experience becomes the ad.

And if mega-platform partnerships are out of reach, the principle still applies at a smaller scale. A brand can co-create content with a relevant creator, turn a local event into a memorable activation, or sponsor an experience that makes sense for its audience. The point is not buying visibility. It is creating participation.

Know your consumer. Not from a dashboard.

AB InBev implemented a straightforward rule: every commercial leader must spend at least 30 hours per year in direct contact with consumers. Face to face. Not through reports, not through screen-mediated focus groups. The policy is modeled after pilot flight-hour requirements: you cannot make decisions about people you do not know personally.

The company has accumulated over 50,000 hours of direct contact. In a global company with hundreds of millions of consumers, this is not an optional KPI. It is a discipline.

It is a lesson many marketing teams forget. When was the last time you spoke directly with your client’s customer? When was the last time you left the dashboard and listened to how real people talk about a brand? Data shows you what people do. Conversations show you why.

You do not need to be AB InBev to apply this. A founder who spends one hour a week reading reviews, talking to customers, or listening to support calls will make fundamentally different marketing decisions than one who only looks at analytics. Direct contact is not a formality. It is the source of intuition that no dashboard can generate.

Technology serves the strategy, not the other way around

AB InBev uses AI for social listening across 200 markets, has digital twins and synthetic audiences for rapid concept testing, and its in-house creative agency Draftline produces personalized content at scale. When a viral moment emerged during the New York Knicks playoffs, the team turned it into a Michelob Ultra ad within hours.

But their approach is not “AI first.” It is “strategy first, AI-enabled.” As Marcondes puts it: “Don’t talk about the tool.” Technology is simply how fast and precisely you can execute a strategy that already makes sense.

And that is perhaps the most important lesson. Creative effectiveness does not come from a tool, an agency, or a big budget. It comes from a culture that decides: what we prioritize, how we measure, where we show up, and how well we know our consumers.

Build the system. Creativity will follow.