AB InBev Cuts SKU Count 25%, Chases 2x ROI on Mega Platforms

AB InBev in May became the first company to win the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year award three times — and Global Chief Marketing Officer Marcel Marcondes ties that creativity directly to an 11% revenue increase in Q2 2026.

"We're reaching all-time high revenues, and we see our share price having good performance," Marcondes said during an Oct. 21 presentation at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando. "The business is moving [in] the right direction, and that's the beauty of means and ends going together, hand in hand."

Marcondes has held the chief marketer role since April 2022. His tenure roughly coincides with a strategic pivot away from growth through acquisition and consolidation toward organic, brand-led growth.

"For every company that wants to grow organically, the only way to go is to go through brands," Marcondes said. "It's all about genuinely becoming consumer-centric and brand-led. This is what triggered this whole process of changing ways of working, changing everything, so that we could move from being a brewer to becoming, hopefully, a top CPG."

How does the megabrand model work?

AB InBev operates more than 500 brands globally, but it no longer invests in all of them equally. The company assigns each brand a role in each market through an inverted pyramid: megabrands drive growth at the top, followed by expansion brands that accelerate growth, defensive brands and, at the bottom, brands to deprioritize.

The restructuring has been aggressive. AB InBev has:

• Cut 25% of its SKUs over the last couple of years
• Reduced meaningfully invested brands from 500 to 50
• Concentrated 60% of volumes in megabrands, which receive more than 60% of investment

"These are the brands that will drive the future, and these are the brands that therefore require disproportionate levels of investment," Marcondes said. "This makes us much more agile, much more focused, and the business flows much better."

The company aims its marketing at the intersection of consumer needs and business problems, not creative ideas built for buzz. Moderation trends shape its innovation agenda: the Balanced Choices portfolio — no-alcohol lagers, protein-heavy next-generation brews, low-calorie, low-carb, gluten-free and zero-sugar options — now accounts for about 10% of beer revenue.

Consistency still compounds, Marcondes said, and legacy brands cannot be sacrificed for "new shiny toys."

"It is much harder to build something new from scratch versus making sure that whatever you've been spending years, decades, and in our case, sometimes centuries building remains up to speed," the executive said. "That's a discipline that is very important and very tricky for marketers."

Corona illustrates the payoff. The Mexican lager, which celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2025, has kept its marketing anchored to nature and its lime ritual. That consistency helped the brand grow 65% over the last five years and become the most valuable beer brand in the world, per Kantar BrandZ data cited by AB InBev.

Why is AB InBev moving from ads to experiences?

The brewer is shifting from advertiser to experience provider. Nearly 70% of consumers say they will spend more money on experiences, per a StubHub report Marcondes cited.

"Especially after COVID, we are all focused on not postponing happiness for tomorrow," Marcondes said. "It's hard to think of something more powerful for us to build brands … than being part of those experiences, or if possible, being the provider of those experiences, so that we can establish a deep connection with consumers, not only rational but also deeply emotional."

AB InBev organizes this work around "mega platforms": consumer passion points in sports, music, streaming and travel. Marcondes rejected the sponsorship framing.

"This is not about sponsorships. It's about … big passion points that are also beer occasions, because we need to have credentials to play, that allow us to have a strong commercial execution," he said.

The FIFA World Cup sponsorship ran across media, packaging, trade marketing and experiential marketing around Michelob Ultra. This year, AB InBev signed as the exclusive beer and cider partner across all Live Nation properties in the UK, covering festivals, venues and outdoor shows where consumers extend their experience through "zebra striping."

Across mega platforms including the World Cup, the Olympics, Wimbledon and Tomorrowland, AB InBev sees ROIs two-times higher than traditional media ROIs, per data shared on stage. Its Netflix partnership moves beyond product placement into co-developed content, including Stella Artois' work on season two of Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen."

"The brands … are so deeply involved in the story that when we produce content together, it should be almost impossible for anyone to differentiate what is advertising from what is just another episode of the show of the series," Marcondes said.

What role does AI play?

Marcondes framed technology as an enabler of a fundamentally human business, pushing back on industrial-revolution hype circulating at the conference.

"Don't talk about the tool. Talk to me about what it's going to give us and how it's going to make our work better and more effective. That's what really matters," he said.

Borrowing from pilot flight-hour requirements, AB InBev requires commercial leaders to spend at least 30 hours per year in face-to-face contact with consumers; the company recently surpassed the 50,000-hour mark. Those insights feed digital twins and synthetic audiences that speed concept development.

Internal creative agency Draftline pairs AI with that field data for personalization at scale. It compiles social listening across 200 markets, enabling cultural agility — Michelob Ultra turned an iconic New York Knicks playoff moment into an ad within hours.

Engagement share, not impressions, is the success metric.

"We don't track impressions, because we can buy impressions. We track share of engagement," Marcondes said. "We are obsessed about always making sure our brands are the number-one brand connected to the platforms and the passion points that we decide to be part of, and that's what we've been building. That's what we track every day in our work."