Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Coca-Cola splits media duties between Omnicom and WPP, AB InBev reframes creativity as a hard metric, and Danone joins Nestlé in revising EU recycling claims.
Coca-Cola just restructured its global media model, AB InBev is treating creative effectiveness like a sales figure, and Danone's recycling climbdown in Europe is a warning shot for every FMCG brand on the continent.
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: Three stories worth unpacking this morning — Coca-Cola's big agency shake-up, how AB InBev is actually building a culture around creative effectiveness, and Danone following the pack on recycling claims in Europe.
Klara: That last one has real implications for pretty much every FMCG brand selling in the EU right now.
Marco: Big, practical stories. Let's get into it.
Marco: Coca-Cola has just made a significant change to how it buys media — and it tells you a lot about where big FMCG marketing is heading.
Klara: So for anyone who doesn't live in agency world — "media buying" is essentially deciding where to spend your advertising budget. Which TV channels, which digital platforms, which outdoor sites. It's one of the most important decisions a big brand makes. And for years, most companies handed that job to one agency globally.
Marco: Coca-Cola had that kind of relationship with WPP. One holding company — that's a large business that owns multiple agencies — handling the big picture globally. Now they've split it. Omnicom gets North America. WPP keeps the rest of the world.
Klara: And this isn't just a housekeeping change. It's part of a wider restructuring of how Coca-Cola thinks about marketing altogether — less traditional advertising, more experience-led brand building. Which means events, partnerships, things consumers actually participate in rather than just watch.
Marco: The scale here matters. When Coca-Cola moves, agencies across the industry take notes. The bespoke-team model — where a holding company builds a dedicated team specifically for one client rather than sharing resource across accounts — is becoming the expected standard for major advertisers.
Klara: Though I'd gently question whether the geography split is actually as clean as it sounds. Running a global brand with two different agency structures in different regions creates coordination headaches. What happens when a global campaign needs to run in North America?
Marco: That's a fair tension. But the upside is genuine market focus. A team built specifically for North America can move faster and go deeper on local culture.
Klara: For brand managers watching this — the question to ask yourself is whether your agency setup is built around your structure, or whether you've just inherited it from a previous era.
Marco: Moving on now — our next story is waiting.
Marco: Our second story is about AB InBev — the company behind Budweiser, Stella Artois, and Corona — and how they're fundamentally rethinking what marketing is for.
Klara: A bit of context here. For most of the last thirty years, big FMCG companies measured marketing success in relatively simple ways — how many people saw your ad, how much did it cost, did sales go up. Creative quality was often treated as a nice-to-have, not something you could put in a spreadsheet.
Marco: AB InBev's Global CMO Marcel Marcondes presented their alternative view at a major US marketing conference called the ANA Masters of Marketing. His argument was this: the company needs to stop thinking of itself as a buyer of ad space and start thinking of itself as a creator of experiences — things people actually want to be part of.
Klara: And crucially, they're not just saying that as an aspiration. They're building it into how the company operates internally. Creative effectiveness — meaning whether your creative work actually drives business results — is being treated as a hard metric, like a sales figure, not a soft judgement call.
Marco: That's the part I find most interesting. Lots of companies talk about creativity mattering. Very few build it into the bones of how they evaluate performance. AB InBev is trying to do that systematically.
Klara: I'd push back slightly on one thing though. AB InBev has enormous budgets. The discipline they're describing is much harder to build when you're running a mid-sized brand at Danone or Henkel without a dedicated creative effectiveness team.
Marco: That's true. But the underlying logic — measure creativity as a business driver, not an afterthought — doesn't require a huge budget. It requires a decision.
Klara: Which is the harder thing to get, frankly.
Marco: Our third story is up next.
Klara: Our third and final story today — Danone has just agreed to change the recycling claims printed on its plastic bottles across Europe.
Marco: A bit of background. For years, FMCG companies have been putting recycling-related messages on their packaging — things like "recyclable" or symbols suggesting the product can be recycled. The problem is that many of those claims are, at best, incomplete. Whether something is actually recycled depends heavily on where you live, what your local council collects, and what facilities exist nearby.
Klara: EU regulators have been tightening the rules on exactly this kind of messaging — what's called "green claims", meaning any environmental statement a brand makes to consumers. The direction of travel has been clear for a while. What's new is who's now being caught by it.
Marco: Danone's agreement follows similar commitments from Coca-Cola and Nestlé. That's three of the biggest names in global FMCG all walking back claims on their packaging within a short window. That's not coincidence — that's coordinated regulatory pressure doing its job.
Klara: And the on-pack claim matters enormously. It's not a TV ad that runs for six weeks and disappears. It's on the bottle, at the shelf, every time someone picks it up. It's one of the most visible pieces of brand communication there is.
Marco: For any brand manager in Europe right now, this is a direct signal. Audit your own sustainability messaging before someone else does it for you. The question isn't whether your claim feels true — it's whether it can survive a regulator reading it line by line.
Klara: I'd add one nuance though. The reputational risk here cuts both ways. Brands that get ahead of this and clean up their claims voluntarily may actually build more trust with consumers than those who wait to be forced.
Marco: That's the better play. Being transparent before you're compelled to be is a very different story to tell than being caught out.
Marco: Today's clearest signal — the brands that are growing are the ones being held accountable, whether that's for their creative output, their agency relationships, or the claims printed on their packaging.
Klara: So pick one of those three and ask yourself honestly: could yours withstand that same level of scrutiny right now?