For years, AB InBev followed a formula that read like it was written by bankers—mergers and acquisitions, economies of scale, and finding cost efficiencies. It was all about process, informed by Six Sigma techniques and zero-based budgeting. For decades, that playbook worked. AB InBev became the world’s largest brewer.

But our growth hit a ceiling. There was no one big left to buy, and our biggest brands were stagnating at time when we were being challenged by upstarts and the emergence of new categories of drinks. Studies from McKinsey and other leading consultancies make clear that unleashing creativity has a real impact on bottom-line growth—but our creativity was lacking. In 2017, WARC ranked AB InBev 42nd on its list of the world’s most creative advertisers.

Securing the future of our business required us to reimagine it. We had to build a brand-new growth engine with creativity at its core, and then embed the changes across our entire business—a global network of colleagues that is 160,000-strong—in order to fuel creativity and innovation. And so, a new creative ecosystem was born, and the CreativeX platform was at its center.

In 2018, we set an ambitious goal: to become the best company in the world at creative effectiveness.

Anyone can have ambition—but systemizing creative effectiveness across a 164,000-person organization requires more than just ambition. It requires a change in culture, supported by a system of processes, tools and capabilities, along with an ecosystem of strong creative partners, to pull it off.

Enter CreativeX—a transformation program designed to nurture and systematize creativity across the organization. The program includes our Creative Spectrum, which gives our teams a universal “language” to discuss and rate creativity. Brain Trusts, comprising creative leaders from outside the company, helped improve creative ideas and measure our progress. And the CreativeX awards program celebrated and scaled our best work.

We supported CreativeX with a new Marketing Academy to upskill our entire marketing organization, equipping us with the capabilities to win in the world of modern marketing. We created a new Culture & Capabilities team to champion and lead this change throughout the organization. And we launched an internal creative agency—draftLine—to be bring us closer to consumers and culture in real-time.

Together, these initiatives helped our business lead with creativity to build brands – and growth.

Since 2018, this ecosystem has transformed the way our business thinks and works. Within a short period, CreativeX was taking hold and cultivating a new creative mindset and culture across our organization.

Our global Creative Spectrum scores – our universal tool to measure creativity - have risen consistently every year. Our Marketing Academy has a 96% completion rate, driving a 2x increase in skills above the CPG average. Submissions for our CreativeX awards have soared, with 258 submissions from 60 brands across 25 countries in 2022 alone.

Our work has reached new heights, too. In 2020, we launched Contract for Change to transform agriculture in the U.S. by incentivizing farmers to go organic. During the pandemic, our Tienda Cerca initiative, inspired by a Colombian sales representative, gave small retailers across Latin America access to e-commerce solutions overnight, helping them survive in difficult times. And through EverGrain, we innovated a creative solution for global food insecurity—converting spent barley into a nutritious product—creating a new revenue stream for our company.

Our creative culture was not only impacting our marketing efforts, but also the solutions we bring to market -- helping us build new brands and fuel growth.

Our business has fundamentally transformed. We're no longer buying growth. We're building growth - and quickly.

Together, these new creative initiatives and innovation are driving big business results. Organic growth has increased steadily, and in 2021 total sales volumes reached an all-time high, with total revenue up by more than 15%.

Our business is setting the standard for creative engagement and impact. From 42nd in 2017, we’re now ranked #1 on WARC's Creative 100 and Effective 100 lists. In the last 3 years we've won 83 Cannes Lions for 17 different brands across 10 countries. And we were just recognized as Creative Marketer of the Year.

We're also innovating at an industry-setting pace. Innovation delivered more than $5B of revenue in 2021, representing 10% of total revenue for our company. Our share of innovation continues to grow across most of our key markets. And for the first time ever, we were named one of the world's "Most Innovative Companies" by Fast Company in 2022.

Put simply, thanks to the creativity we've unleashed through CreativeX, business is booming.