What you need to know:

• Top marketers set the tone at Cannes by backing a full bore return to creative risk taking over safety first approaches – and to harness both bots and customers to build brand.
• Amazon's top marketer said the world's biggest advertiser has pretty much systemised creativity - and knows what will work. Hence marketing teams are given free rein on what Claudine Cheever claimed is the world's largest out of home network: parcel packaging. But some caveats apply on the really big stuff. It's also tapping customer reviews to build brand.
• Likewise Mars has flipped to CX as a brand builder - but where the customers are in charge - and reverse engineered teams and agencies. Meanwhile Lead Chief Marketing Officer Gülen Bengi thinks she may be closer to filling in below the line holes MMM can't.
• $50bn healthcare giant Novartis has likewise gone all in on big creative platforms – a massive reversal of its decades-long risk averse approach in a highly regulated environment, per marketing and customer experience chief, Gail Horwood. It's working – and she think's going harder and faster – but getting everyone pointed in the right direction earlier – is marketing's best growth hope.

Global CMOs at three category giants are actively pushing their marketing functions and teams to be far more creative, eschewing low risk approaches and CX luggage matching in a bid for fully fledged distinctiveness that moves the growth needle. For Amazon, Mars and US$50bn healthcare giant Novartis, it’s working, but in different ways.

The challenge is how to measure creativity. Mars is touting an “edge case’ attribution model that tracks below the line. Above and around the line, Amazon reckons it has systemised it.  

“The vision for my marketing organisation is to be breakthrough creatively and measurably effective,” VP Global Brand and Marketing Claudine Cheever told a packed auditorium at Cannes.

But there’s the rub. 

“In order to be creatively breakthrough, it [means] it’s never been done before. It is something that's orthogonal; it's lateral thinking. And then when you measure things, what do we do? We look at benchmarks. We want scalability. We want repeatability. So how do you reconcile those two things?”

The way Amazon is tackling it is by “atomising the elements” of storytelling that works – and then using that formula for its ads to tell the same story a different way. It’s been doing that for the last nine years – from a priest and imam buying each other kneepads in 2016 to sledging grannies last Christmas, only with a cushion for their bums rather than their knees. Each year has been a variation of the same theme – “sharing joy” through buying something that helps someone else.

“And so that storyline, from the beats of the story to how the UI shows up, we call it ‘thought it, bought it’ – there’s a moment where the customer goes ‘I can do something kind for someone and bring them joy’. Then – whoop – Amazon selection, value and convenience enables that, and then the box comes to the door, which is a very important moment,” per Cheever.

(She says the Amazon box packaging is the “world’s largest out of home network” and doesn’t think twice about letting marketing teams own what goes onto it: “It’s one less meeting in my calendar.”)

“So we have these atomised, distinctive branded assets – it's almost a scientific formula, almost a formula for creativity. But how you tell that story is different every single time,” said Cheever. 

“We tell that story over and over again, but then we know it's going to work because we've atomised all the elements, and we have benchmarks and measurement to know with pretty good confidence it's going to work.”

Now Cheever wants to go further and show just how much Amazon’s brand investment adds to the firm’s enviably fat bottom line.

“I just spent a few days with a bunch of economists, PhDs and mathematicians with my head of planning at the Kellogg School of Management. We were going deep on, basically, can you prove the commercial value of long-term brand building? Can we construct a one-year hold out? Can we do these things? And it was phenomenal,” said Cheever.

But also, not phenomenal.

“One of the professors from Kellogg presented this study they'd done on 288 consumer packaged goods ads – and they had proven all this risk mitigation, all this science… and the amount of long-term lift was [drumroll]… a basis point. It was so small.”

At that point Amazon’s head of planning Chris Marchegiani asked whether the big brains had considered whether the creative was actually any good, or the impact of the media plan. 

In short, “They proved the statement that 50 per cent of my advertising is [wasted],” per Cheever. More management consulting brain work is likely required on precisely why it’s wasted, but from Amazon’s perspective, Cheever has the receipts, probably more than anyone in the history of the world to date.

“The power of creativity is so, so important, and that can often get lost in these scientific measurement questions. So that is what we have to continue to champion: Was it a good story? Did it move people's hearts? Did they remember it? Did it build memory structure?... But economists are super sceptical about that. I found being in that room, being really a creative champion, was actually just really my role. So that's kind of how we think about it.”

Risk vs. stagnation

Cheever is perhaps more willing than most top marketers to let her teams run with creativity – and not sweat the risk – for good reason. She traversed Ogilvy, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann and Spark Foundry before taking the top brand job at Amazon, now the world's biggest advertiser, and with a $60bn ad business of its own.

“I've been at Amazon nine years and … the whole corporate culture is really based on creativity and taking risks and doing experiments. We say that if you know it's going to succeed, it's not an experiment. So we really make sure we give the team a safe space to make mistakes.

“For me, creativity is about pushing down decisions; about enabling faster, decisions; about speed as a leadership decision, and how I can get out of the way.”

Which is why Cheever is happy to let marketing teams have free range on the Amazon boxes to do whatever they think will best harness that massive owned channel that would otherwise just be a box.

“We have an entire owned and operated out-of-home network channel on our boxes; we have the largest out-of-home network in the world. I no longer review any of it, and I consider that if I have to review it, that's a defect. If there's an escalation, I'll get involved. But I love nothing more than when the team says, ‘we’ve got this’. So that really is something that that we try to do more and more – just push down decision-making and really encourage risk taking.”

But within reason. Cheever talks about “two-way doors”, i.e. letting staff and agencies experiment with messaging on delivery boxes because they can stop, walk back through the door and try something else. Versus “one-way doors”, like changing Amazon.com’s brand identity for the first time in 23 years, given “even a change of pixel on the store can create billions of dollars of lost sales”, or a risqué Super Bowl ad with potential blowback beyond the media outlay.

“Whatever that really edgy moment is – is that going to be good for my brand or bad for my brand? – that's a one-way door. And that one, you get a lot of senior eyes on it. You make sure are you really measured about it, and you have a much more thoughtful, slow conversation about that one-way door,” said Cheever. “Because you can't take that back.”

Brand platforms: competitive inoculation

In a highly regulated market, healthcare giant Novartis has for decades played comms and messaging laboriously safe. “For a large part, people let regulatory concerns potentially get in in the way of creativity,” according to Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Gail Horwood. 

But now it’s entirely flipped that approach. 

Horwood has a better grasp than most corporate marketers of the value of creative storytelling. She cut her teeth at Condé Nast and was later creative development boss at Time before running ecom and later digital at Johnson & Johnson, then overseeing US marketing for Kellogg. She also found time to be adjunct professor at NYU’s Centre for Publishing.

Horwood switched to healthcare at the tail end of the pandemic with a remit to better connect brand, marketing and CX through the line at Novartis, one of the biggest pharmaceutical, life sciences and agribusinesses in the world.

Slightly different to selling cornflakes, but arguably the fundamentals remain the same – and Horwood is testing the theory: Over the last 18 months she has put “every marketer in the company” through a five-part program “that focuses on what we can do, not what we can’t do and how to unlock creativity, not just in our ideas, but in our executions”.  

The upshot was building a brand platform to remind people to go for annual breast cancer screenings – one in two people skip them in the US – and launching it large at the Super Bowl. Called ‘Your Attention Please’, it’s been described as “a barrage of boobs” – and definitely captured attention with the intended audience; half of those watching the biggest game in the US sporting calendar are female. 

“It’s been a juggernaut,” said Horwood, with the firm now committed to a major ongoing partnership with the NFL, the first healthcare firm to do so.

“It’s unlocked a lot of really interesting ideas. We really want to unlock the power of [American] football and have people pay attention to their health. It’s never been done before, but it was all the result of this focus on creativity.”

Build bigger platforms, win

Healthcare firms have a relatively short window to build brands before medicines become generic and exclusivity is lost, said Horwood. Plus, the products that come to market can take 20 years to develop, “they are moonshots”, and the subject matter – deadly diseases – is “heavy”. 

Which means going large and making that short window count is a strategic imperative. 

“I think creativity is even more important, because we only have 10 years [exclusivity] … so I think it's even more important to be distinctive and build those memory structures. To be something that people remember is to be talked about in a positive way and having an impact,” said Horwood.

“But it’s not only the creative, it's the platform. The days of individual executions are long gone. I think channel executions are fine, but you have to have these big, meaningful ideas and platforms to build upon, and we need to actually do it pretty quickly in healthcare.”

De-risking risk

Giving marketers the freedom to take risks requires some guardrails – and strong foundations from the beginning: “Understanding what you will and won’t do, your tone of voice, what’s culturally relevant,” said Horwood.

“Pre-planning and cross-functional planning, I can’t stress enough. That is not just a checkbox. These days, every platform has personalisation, has privacy, has risk. It has so many different aspects of legal and regulatory compliance and our brand marketers and agencies together – from ideation. While some might say that slows you down, it also speeds you up in the end – and everybody is respectful of the creative process. Ideas are only ideas until they are executed,” she added.

“So pre-planning, scenario planning and strong cross-functional teams early [is key].”

Mars: CX creative risk feeds brand

Mars Lead Chief Marketing Officer Gülen Bengi tells her staff “there is no failure, there is no success; it’s just an iteration. You need to make sure that you work on the right consumer problem and then iterate and scale.”

But like Horwood at Novartis, she said Mars has made a concerted effort to connect brand and CX, and to up the creative ante across the piste, both internally and externally as it shifts towards handing the brand over to consumers – literally.

Bengi said Mars’ focus is now squarely on “two-way engagement” over messaging and “inviting fans and communities into our brand’s worlds to co-create experiences that have no dead-ends – every engagement leads to another one, or to the ‘buy’ button.”

Per Bengi, handing the brand house keys to consumers is “the only way to create personalisation at scale”. But it has also meant realigning marketing and sales and bringing deeper data analytics and digital firepower to the brand teams. Meanwhile, “we have completely rewired our agency ecosystem and connected it across the consumer journey.” 

Jose Mourinho bot: The hungry one

While marketers have for years talked about customer-centricity and two-way conversations over one-way comms, Mars is walking the inversion talk – and enabling new forms of consumer creativity to enable that shift.

Cloning Jose Mourinho is a case in point. For Euro 2024 Mars built a Mourinho bot that meant fans could “roast their friends” for rookie mistakes, a play on Snickers’ ‘you’re not you when you are hungry’, harnessing the caustic wit of the Portuguese coach.

“That caught fire,” said Bengi, “and that is how creativity and personalisation at scale can come from anywhere.” Though she acknowledged the guardrails that had to go into making sure the Mourinho bot didn’t go too far off-script, as is the great man's occasional wont.

MMM: missing full picture?

How to measure the impacts of creative free-ranging creates a new challenge – one that Mars thinks it might be getting closer to solving. Bengi will later this week unpack an “edge case” with attribution start-up Alembic, (previously trialled by Delta Airlines) which she thinks might better thread the needle. 

“Today, 50 per cent of things that [form] part of brand building are non-paid [media],” said Bengi. “So your usual MMMs [market mix models] and full funnel measurement cannot capture them.” (It’s a black hole lamented three years ago by former ANZ CMO turned NAB everyday banking managing director Sweta Mehra.)

“We are piloting a very new method with an edge case … where anybody who says anything under the sun for your brand, we can pull together and have a direct causality link to a sale in the US, in one of the biggest retailers. We've done it with Snickers,” Bengi suggested.

Though reiterating it is “an edge case” she said Mars was “able to attribute even a conversation where Justin Timberlake picked up a Snickers ice cream that went viral. [Swimmer] Michael Phelps picked it up, and then the sports community picked it up, and then NFL picked it up. Now we can say: ‘all right, this is where it started; this is what amplified; this is the sequence, and this is how much sales it drove’. We couldn't do that before. Now we can.”

How that theory holds up beyond social virality will be interesting to gauge – but Mars and Bengi think they are on to something.

Bots mobilised

All three marketers are deploying AI across their function. 

“We have the ambition to bring AI to all of our processes that don't add value,” per Novartis’ Horwood, with the company this year mapping out “the future of work” in an AI world.

“So unlocking creativity and time for storytelling, for synthesis, for collaboration. It's everyone's job – and we have identified key processes that we have put a deadline on, and we will move to. It's not building AI into everything, but AI where appropriate, agents where appropriate, and then creativity where appropriate.”

Like Mars and Mourinho, Amazon has also been building bots to unlock the creativity hidden in the millions of customer reviews sitting on its platform – and using them to fuse CX, product and brand.

“These are incredible stories. Some of them are Shakespearean in how good the writing is, but they're impossible to find. It takes man hours, it takes so long,” said Cheever. 

Amazon’s answer? Develop an AI agent and train it to find funny reviews and then hire Hollywood A-lister Adam Driver to read them in monologues as ‘A Real Serious Actor’.

The upshot: “It ended up being one of our biggest social campaigns of the year.” 

Now Amazon’s building “adversarial” agentic agents that argue with each other under a program called ‘Copy SAW’, short for “said another way”. The aim is to create copy for a company of engineers that is more “Amazonian” in tone, per Cheever. One of the agents (presumably the most powerful) is called “Queen Claudine”.

“Basically it's like having a group of writers who all have slightly different approaches: One agent might be the really witty one; one agent might be a bit emotional – and the way the tool works is that it basically optimises and iterates amongst itself. So I would think as you start to hear more and more about agentic [AI], start thinking about multiple agentics and adversarial agents,” she advised.

Either way, for marketers tempted to play it safe, the final word went to Novartis’ Horwood.

“Don't lose the creativity. I've built my career at the intersection of art, data and technology. The future of marketing is creativity – and in not losing that in an age of AI.”