‘We’re building the plane while flying’: AB InBev’s in-house team plans structural changes as it takes on more work

By Seb Joseph

While many advertisers have slowed down their plans to take more marketing in house until after the pandemic subsides, AB InBev is doing the opposite.

In fact, the brewer’s European dratfLine team is growing.

It had 40 full-time execs at the end of 2020, up from the 20 it launched with a year prior. Plans are already underway to hire another 26 over the coming weeks to cope with the volume of work.

The team, which spans strategy, creative, media and production, worked on 648 briefs last year after marketing plans were thrown into turmoil. For context, that number of briefs was around 100 the year before. And, the number of inbound briefs are likely to rise again this year. Indeed, more marketers know they can call on dratfLine now — proof that all costs are not created equal, even when the company is run on the lean and mean approach of its owner, private equity-like firm 3G Capital.

It wasn’t easy, but the team delivered when they were needed most, said Dries Mertens, managing director of dratfLine Europe.

“A lot of people will say we built an in-house team and are doing things like media buying in-house because we wanted to save money and not pay agencies as much,” said Mertens. “There may be a bit of that. But the real point here is that you can’t have an integrated approach to marketing if all these different specialisms, from creative to media buying, aren’t joined up.”

Sure, he had always envisioned dratfLine as a key cog in a wider marketing machine, but never so quickly. For Mertens’ bosses, however, the argument for dratfLine was clear. Thanks to the pandemic, the brewer faces complex, urgent marketing challenges with varying degrees of sensitivity depending on the market and situation.

Sometimes execs are brought in to help brand teams adjust strategies for smaller brands in local markets, whereas at other times they could be setting up social media campaigns. The scope of work is as wide as it is frequent. Plans for more than 40 brand partners across Europe changed almost overnight at the onset of the pandemic, for example. And yet, work is never taken away from agencies —at least not yet. That’s not the intention of dratfLine.

dratfLine’s execs are a support crew of sorts, said Mertens, able to understand the different nuances of each brief and complete them within a much shorter timeframe than external agencies, especially for biddable media and in-store promotions.

In many ways, the events of 2020 proved to be the ultimate stress test for AB InBev’s in-house team in Europe. Other advertisers didn’t fare as well. Widespread budget cuts for permanent staff made it particularly difficult to grow in-house marketing teams. Every deficit is good for someone, however.

“Smart marketers will fight to make their case however, as the practitioners’ talent pool has never been more fertile for those trying to build internal capability and capacity,” said Ruben Schreurs, group chief product officer at Ebiquity. “A …read more

Source:: Digiday