There is a fine line between sustained excellence and simply having a very large media budget, and the Cannes Lions festival has once again declared that AB InBev walks on the right side of it.
The Belgian-Brazilian brewing conglomerate, whose portfolio includes Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona, and dozens of other brands that appear on signs behind baseball dugouts and soccer pitches worldwide, has been named Creative Marketer of the Year for the third time. It is the first company to achieve that distinction since the award was established in 1992, when the advertising industry still believed that a single well-placed television commercial could make a brand famous overnight.
(Whether three wins in five years represents an unprecedented streak or simply reflects the festival's institutional enthusiasm for a sponsor that brings considerable delegation to the South of France each June is a question best left to observers less charitable than this one.)
"AB InBev has embedded creativity into how it operates, not just how it leverages marketing," Simon Cook, the chief executive of Cannes Lions, said in a statement that managed to deploy the word "scalable" with a straight face. Mr. Cook called the recognition "historic," which is technically accurate, in the way that any first occurrence of anything is historic.
Marcel Marcondes, the company's chief marketing officer, connected the honor to the bottom line, noting that the company's approach has delivered "all-time high revenues." He credited agency partners and internal teams, a customary acknowledgment that manages to be gracious without being specific about which agencies, precisely, are responsible for which revenues.
The brewer will deliver a keynote address when the festival opens on June 22, continuing a tradition in which Creative Marketer of the Year winners are invited to explain their success to an auditorium full of people who would very much like to win their business.
Original story published in adweek.com: "AB InBev Wins Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year"