BUILDING BETTER BRANDS

Brands

1. The Kraft Heinz Company

2. IKEA Canada

3. Pfaff Harley-Davidson

4. Over The Bridge

5. Molson Coors

6. Decathlon

7. Black and Abroad

8. The Royal Canadian Legion

9. Black Business and Professional Association

10. Good Fortune

10. SickKids Foundation

What difference has an obsession over even the smallest touchpoint made for our top brands this year? Strategy asked the highest ranking Creative Report Card finalists to find out.

What’s sparking creative change?

We’re in the midst of a pretty exciting transformation. Since 2019, Kraft Heinz has been driving an impressive turnaround story with creativity and marketing as a lynch pin to its success. In 2022, we rebuilt a powerhouse North American team from the ground up with a focus on creativity, connecting at the speed of culture, building engaging personalized experiences, and leveraging data to drive a more intimate relationship with our consumers.

How’s that turned into so many borderless, mega-creative ideas? We’ve transformed our marketing to be more consumer-obsessed by renovating legacy brands and leaning harder on creativity to grow love and relevancy – finding what makes our brands unique, identifying ownable brand and product truths that really resonate with consumers, and listening to what’s happening in culture with an eye to moments where all of that can be combined to get to an explosive idea. Unleashing this kind of change has been possible with the creation of The Kitchen, a best-in-class in-house agency that listens, creates and moves at the speed of culture, but also in partnership with our incredible external agency teams, which have built enduring creative platforms that modernize our brands and ultimately drive the business.

And the ROI?

We’re making big strides against our creative ambition to be the indisputable creative leader in food and that progress is getting noticed. In the last 24 months, we were ranked number four on Ad Age’s Marketers of the Year list. In 2022, we had our biggest year at Cannes with 11 Lions and 28 shortlists, saw engagement grow +7% and earned +6% to record highs. The Kitchen North America has built 3,000-plus assets across social platforms like TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. This kind of agile content creation has delivered more than two billion impressions and grown ROI for the company’s marketing spend.

The bottom line?

It’s a great time to be a marketer at Kraft Heinz and we’re ready to keep building on this momentum.

IKEA is known for meatballs and much-loved (and envied) advertising. How do you top that?

Over the last year, we struck a healthy balance between IKEA Canada’s long-term brand building efforts and short-term tactical communication in favour of long-term so we could tell stories authentically – allowing IKEA to build brand affinity and reflect our core values of diversity, equality and sustainability. The recent launch of our new “Bring Home to Life” brand platform builds on our ambition to support the emotional value of our brand beyond our functional offering, not only with consumers but co-workers as well. Grounded in authentic, human stories, marketing led the initiative to infuse the new platform in every co-worker and customer touchpoint, from marketing campaigns to the in-store experience, from online at IKEA.ca to