Mondelez is slashing poorly performing advertising costs, as the FMCG giant instead spends more on parts of the digital spectrum it knows yield strong returns.
The Cadbury’s and Oreo owner said the digital push is part of a move towards a more sophisticated and measured marketing model.
In its recent earnings call, Mondelez saw a 4.1% revenue jump from its cash cow brands, despite a distinct chop in marketing costs.
Brian Gladden, chief financial officer at Mondelez, said that he pictures growth by “getting productivity and allowing us to spend those dollars on real working media”.
“The team has done a really good job in managing the spend,”he added.
“We made some great progress in driving productivity in the spend around non-working, consolidating media accounts, reducing the spending and driving productivity and then moving more to digital. So all of these elements, I think gave us some flexibility to take the spend down a bit but also to continue to get value from the spend.”
Mondelez has focused recent media spend on streamlining its media spend, choosing platform’s such as Facebook and Google to deliver more targeted results at the same time as shifting more spend into the automated ad space.
“getting productivity and allowing us to spend those dollars on real working media”.
Marketing performance has also been stimulated by the company-wide adoption of zero-based-budgeting, a way in which the firm can pull funds from costs that have no impact on sales.