Creative Capability Is Your Next Competitive Advantage.

Most leadership teams say they value creativity. Almost none invest in it as if they mean it. That gap is expensive and seeing AB InBev winning at Cannes Lions 2026 again this week, the evidence has become even harder to ignore.
 
The difference wasn't budget. It was a system — built from scratch in 2018 by the late Jodi Harris — that trained 2,400 marketers to brief and judge creative work, introduced a shared framework for what good looks like, and set up a quarterly creative council to deliver honest feedback. Not annually. Quarterly. Because creative confidence is perishable. It needs regular contact with high standards to survive.
 
CMO Marcel Marcondes put it plainly on stage: "Creativity, when used at the service of solving real business problems, is a true competitive advantage." And then, critically: "Consistency compounds over time."
 
They didn't hire 2,400 creative geniuses. They built the conditions in which ordinary marketers could do extraordinary work. That's the point.
 
Here's what those conditions actually deliver:

• ‍Cut-through. In a world of infinite content and shrinking attention, the brands that break through aren't the ones with the biggest media budgets. They're the ones whose teams had the confidence to do something genuinely unexpected — and a culture that didn't kill it in the first review.
• ‍Velocity. Teams with high creative confidence kill bad ideas faster. When people feel safe to say "this isn't working," you stop throwing budget at the wrong destination. Creative safety isn't soft. It's efficient.
• ‍Resilience. Markets move. Strategies go stale. The teams that navigate disruption aren't the ones with the most refined processes — they're the ones with the creative flexibility to find a new path. You can't buy that flexibility. You build it, slowly, through consistent practice and honest feedback.
• ‍Talent. Your best people are choosing where to work based on whether they get to do work that matters. When creative energy is absent, the people who care most leave first. The ones who stay stop caring.
   
  The uncomfortable truth is that most creative energy doesn't die from a lack of talent. It dies from leadership behaviour. Ideas reviewed by committee until they're unrecognisable. The safe option chosen every time because nobody wants to own the risk. Feedback that comes too late, is too vague, or isn't invited at all.
   
  If you're a CPO or on the SLT: when did someone last bring you an idea that genuinely surprised you? If the answer is "a while," it's worth asking why.
   
  AB InBev started building their creative culture in 2018. The trophies came later. That's how this works — and it's also the reason most companies never get there. The returns aren't immediate enough to survive a quarterly planning cycle.
   
  One more thing worth noting: AB InBev is using AI at scale to personalise campaigns, but Marcondes described a deliberate "sandwich approach" — humans at the start and end of every process, technology in the middle. As AI gets better at execution, creative judgment becomes the thing humans distinctively bring. The ability to know what's worth making, and why.
   
  That's not a soft skill. It's the skill.
   
  Creative energy isn't the nice-to-have. It's the thing you can't afford not to have. Do you want your people serving up next-level ideas and facilitating groups like a pro? Check out how we can help.

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