Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Omnicom wins Coca-Cola's North America media account, Diageo expands Dentsu Creative into U.S. trade marketing, and AB InBev's CMO reveals its creative effectiveness framework.
Coca-Cola just handed its North America media to Omnicom while keeping WPP globally — a rare split that could reshape how big FMCG brands structure agency relationships. Plus what AB InBev's CMO is doing differently on creative culture.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
Enjoying the show? A quick rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps other marketers find us.
Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Something caught our eye in every single story today — agency shake-ups, a big strategic bet, and a rare peek inside how one of the world's biggest brewers actually thinks about creativity.
Klara: Media, trade marketing, and creative culture — three topics that touch pretty much every brand manager's week.
Marco: So settle in.
Klara: Let's go.
Marco: Coca-Cola has just split its media buying between two separate agency groups — and it's one of the more unusual arrangements you'll see at this level.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need a bit of background. Media buying — that's when a brand pays an agency to plan and purchase all its advertising slots, across TV, digital, out-of-home — is usually handled by one agency globally. It keeps the strategy consistent. Coca-Cola had that setup through Publicis, one of the world's biggest agency groups.
Marco: Then Publicis walked away from the Coca-Cola North America account. The reason? A conflict of interest with PepsiCo. You can't serve two direct rivals, so Publicis had to choose — and they chose PepsiCo. That opened the door for a full pitch process on the North American business.
Klara: And Omnicom won it. So now you have Omnicom running media for Coca-Cola in North America, while WPP — another holding company — keeps the global remit everywhere else. Two separate agency groups, one brand.
Marco: This kind of split is almost unheard of at this scale. And I think it tells you something important. Coca-Cola isn't just filling a gap here — they're using this moment to restructure how they buy media. Two agencies competing for performance within the same brand creates internal pressure that a single agency never faces.
Klara: I see the logic, but I'd worry about consistency. Your message in France, your message in the US — if two different teams are planning those separately, how do you keep the brand feeling like one thing to consumers?
Marco: That's a real challenge. But Coca-Cola has enough internal marketing infrastructure to manage it. Smaller brands couldn't pull this off.
Klara: Worth watching as a model. Right — our next story is coming up now.
Klara: Diageo has just expanded its relationship with Dentsu Creative to cover trade and shopper marketing across the United States.
Marco: Some background. Diageo and Dentsu Creative have been working together for over 25 years — so this isn't a new relationship, it's a deepening of an existing one. The expansion brings Dentsu into trade and shopper marketing, which means the activity designed to influence what people actually buy when they're standing in a shop or browsing a retailer's website.
Klara: And the timing matters here. Diageo's North America business has had a rough stretch — declining volumes, brand pressure, and a very public period of commercial difficulty. So the question is: why lean into shopper and trade marketing now?
Marco: Because that's where the battle is happening. Trade marketing — getting your product visible, well-positioned, and promoted at the point of sale — delivers results quickly. If you're under pressure to show recovery, you move closer to the shelf.
Klara: I understand the logic, but it makes me a little uneasy. Shopper and trade marketing drives short-term conversion — it gets people to pick up your bottle instead of a competitor's. What it doesn't do is rebuild the deeper brand appeal that makes people want your product in the first place. Those are two different jobs.
Marco: That's a fair distinction. But sometimes you need the short game to stabilise before you can play the long one. Diageo isn't abandoning brand building — they have a new North America marketing chief in place. This feels more like reinforcing the part of the operation that can move fast.
Klara: Maybe. Though if the shelf activity isn't backed by a compelling brand story, you're essentially competing on price and positioning alone. That's a tough place to recover from.
Marco: Worth watching closely. Our third story is up next.
Marco: AB InBev's global marketing chief has gone very public with something most big companies keep quietly internal — a detailed framework for how they build creative effectiveness across the whole business.
Klara: AB InBev is the world's largest brewer. Brands like Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois. At that scale, getting your marketing to work consistently isn't just a creative challenge — it's an organisational one. Most companies measure creative effectiveness as a performance metric, something you track after the fact. AB InBev seems to be doing something different.
Marco: Their global CMO, Marcel Marcondes, presented the full model at a major industry conference in the US — the ANA Masters of Marketing. The core idea is a shift in identity. They're no longer thinking of themselves as a company that makes advertisements. They're repositioning as a company that creates experiences. And critically, this framework isn't just sitting inside the marketing team — it's being embedded across the whole organisation.
Klara: That second part is the interesting bit. Embedding something culturally — making it part of how people actually work, not just a slide in a strategy deck — is genuinely hard. Most companies announce a new marketing philosophy and then it quietly disappears. What Marcondes is doing is essentially treating creative effectiveness like a business operating system.
Marco: And the fact that he's doing it publicly is itself a strategic choice. My read is that radical transparency about your methodology can actually strengthen your position. It signals confidence. It attracts talent who want to work that way. It shapes how agencies and partners show up.
Klara: I'd push back slightly on that. Sharing your model openly also hands your competitors a playbook. The advantage isn't in knowing the framework — it's in the years of practice and internal culture it takes to actually run it. That's not something a rival can copy from a conference presentation.
Marco: Which is exactly why publishing it costs AB InBev very little and earns them quite a lot.
Marco: Today's thread is clear — the biggest brands in FMCG are restructuring who they trust, where they invest, and how they measure creativity.
Klara: So look at your own agency relationships and ask one honest question: are they set up to drive growth, or just to get the work done?