Driving Creative Excellence Through Innovation

Heineken is a category leader in creative excellence, with global brands recognized for their commitment to pushing creative boundaries and connecting with consumers. This success is driven by the network of partners around the brands—including a long-term partnership with Dentsu and a collaboration with CreativeX.

“We think less about distinctly media and creative, and more about advertising as a whole.” 

Andre Zanetti de Vicente is a Global Digital Director at Dentsu, and alongside Client Director Andrea Metzger, has been central to a unique partnership with CreativeX on the Heineken account.  

Andrea positions the work as a three-way partnership between Heineken, Dentsu, and CreativeX. She provides the Heineken market teams with a regular scorecard, built from CreativeX data, to track their performance in terms of creative excellence. 

She underscores the importance of creative excellence for Heineken. “Creative excellence is a huge competitive advantage. If you consistently drive creative excellence, you’re able to scale brand equity.” In a sector like alcohol, where markets can turn ‘dark’ (i.e., you’re no longer able to market alcohol explicitly), building this brand equity is of even greater importance. In short, it means “your brand assets have the strength to stand on their own if needed.” 

In the alcohol industry, there are a huge number of brands and products competing for marginal increases in market share. “It’s very hard to win loyalty, and in the same breath, very easy to lose it.” This is where creative excellence comes to the fore. 

For Andrea, it comes down to “getting the creative right so that the media can succeed, and the campaign can succeed.” Creative and media teams need to be briefed together on the project from the outset, so that the campaign works harmoniously. 

Building on Andrea’s point, Andre views the right creative as the combination of high fit for purpose (the propensity of an asset to perform its intended function and drive brand impact) and high fit for platform (assets developed are aligned with platform best practices). 

“Fit for purpose is the message landing, it’s the consumer engaging with that message and being influenced in their decisions. Fit for platform considers how audiences consume content on different channels, and the message being delivered in the right format. A combination of those is what will do the job. This is what creative excellence means.” 

Andrea focuses on “establishing a strong foundation,” ensuring that all best practices are in place before ads go live. As she underscores, if you improve creative quality, “it has huge impacts on efficiency, effectiveness, and ROI.” 

Andre is responsible for digital best practices and digital products, as well as uncovering creative and consumer insights. Understanding what works and what can be applied at scale to drive impact. 

Across his career, Andre has seen the media landscape transform. He started in the world of offline planning and TV, but digital became more and more embedded in his work. To some extent, he says, “the distinction between digital vs. not doesn’t make sense anymore, everything is digital in some capacity.” 

The team takes a global learning agenda approach, codifying learnings across all activities to embed into existing frameworks. Dentsu has worked with CreativeX to run meta-analyses identifying the creative levers driving effectiveness across different platforms. Generating new learnings for marketing teams around the world to apply. 

“It’s all about testing, learning, and scaling. When we see that something’s working well, we think about how we can scale it across other markets.” 

To some extent, it’s about best practices from an operational perspective, as well as what’s being applied across the creative assets. Building in enough time to run assets through the CreativeX pre-flight tool before they go live, and ensuring necessary changes have been made. 

On AI? “There’s still so much we can learn in terms of how we can use it and better integrate it into our workflows.” 

A sentiment that Andre echoes. AI’s potential to “connect the dots” and address specific pain points across a business is what he sees for the future.