Mondelez axes sluggish media to fuel digital drive

Mondelez is looking to ditch non-working ad costs in favour of a more reliable and efficient digital push, as the industry steers towards a more sophisticated and measured marketing model.

The digital drive comes off the back of a 4.1% revenue jump from its cash cow brands, despite a distinct chop in marketing costs.

Brian Gladden, chief financial officer at Mondelez, said that he pictures growth by “getting productivity and allowing us to spend those dollars on real working media”.

“The team has done a really good job in managing the spend,” he added.

“We made some great progress in driving productivity in the spend around non-working, consolidating media accounts, reducing the spending and driving productivity and then moving more to digital. So all of these elements, I think gave us some flexibility to take the spend down a bit but also to continue to get value from the spend.”

Mondelez has focused recent media spend on streamlining its media spend, choosing platform’s such as Facebook and Google to deliver more targeted results at the same time as shifting more spend into the automated ad space.

“getting productivity and allowing us to spend those dollars on real working media”.

Marketing performance has also been stimulated by the company-wide adoption of zero-based-budgeting, a way in which the firm can pull funds from costs that have no impact on sales.