Business problem

How do you measure the real ROI of marketing spend — and use it to allocate next year's budget with confidence?

• AB InBev allocates marketing budgets across 16+ brands in every country it operates in — Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois, Modelo, Cass, Jupiler and more.

• Every market reported differently. GHQ directors chased executives country by country, then manually reshaped the data before any comparison was possible.

• No shared source of truth. Market managers couldn't evidence past performance to justify next year's ask; leadership couldn't validate whether a plan matched forecast numbers.

• Constraints lived everywhere. Fixed contracts, soft and hard limits, big bets from the top, key initiatives from the ground — none of it visible in one place.

• The ask: One platform usable by global executives and local marketers alike, regardless of geography, hierarchy or data fluency.

Design impact

• One language for performance. Standardised spend, net revenue and ROI views across markets — cross-country comparison went from a manual exercise to a filter.

• Context before commitment. An executive dashboard that plots historical trends and forward projections for any brand or market combination, so planning starts from evidence.

• Engines: a brand benchmarking model. Brands categorised by pricing, brand power and market share — giving teams a defensible way to prioritise where money goes.

• Scenario planning, not spreadsheets. Executives model higher and lower budget cases, layer in constraints, and compare scenarios side by side before committing.

• Weighted allocation, made visible. Custom weights on marketing drivers through an intuitive engine — precision without needing to read the algorithm.

• Cognitive load down, confidence up. Information architecture built from co-design workshops with the AB InBev product team, structured to match how executives actually think about budgets.

• From reporting tool to decision tool. Teams stopped assembling reports and started arguing about strategy with the same numbers on screen.