Mondelez global agency boss: You don’t need to force your agencies into a creative shoot-out

Giampoli: “You can learn a lot of from agencies by studying their work”

The head of Mondelez’s global agency relationships has urged fellow marketers to avoid pushing agencies into competitive “shoot-out” pitches, arguing that offering project work is often a better solution.

Debra Giampoli, director of global strategic agency relations for FMCG giant Mondelez, which has a billion dollar marketing spend globally, told the ANA’s Advertising Financial Management Conference in Boca Raton that the company had experimented with project work for smaller brands with solid results.

“The small (Mondelez) brands were important to our growth but would get lost working with the same big agencies. They getting same attention, the same talent, the same quality of work,” said Giampoli, describing how they came up with something called Project Meteor. “To address this did something unusual we chose five small brands and we paired them with five agencies that we wanted to learn more about.”