AI Rebuilds Trust, Agility, and Measurement in Marketing at Grupo Bimbo

Bruno Soeiro:

Hi, I'm Bruno Soeiro from Infosys Aster, and I'm joined today by Catherine at the ANA Masters of Marketing. Catherine, would you like to introduce yourself?

Catherine Berger:

Sure. I'm Catherine Berger with Grupo Bimbo. I lead marketing, transformation and services. So I'm really in charge of all of our transformation work from a marketing perspective, as well as all of our communications work.

Bruno Soeiro:

What we wanted to talk to you about today is AI and marketing. We've been hearing a lot over the last few days on the pivotal role that it's starting to play in everyday tasks, activities that we do. And we met on Monday during the working groups. I think we met in the brand creative and media working group. And in that session, Infosys unveiled some of its insights that we've been doing with ANA for the last 10 months. And you brought up a really interesting and striking topic that I think stopped everybody in the room. As the only marketeer who's taken on a metric that starts to look at top, middle, bottom of funnel buzz, as you would say, or spend and related to a sale or set of sales, could you describe in a little bit of detail how you've been able to achieve that?

Catherine Berger:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to talk through it. So when I joined Bimbo about six months ago, it was apparent to me that we needed to reestablish trust in marketing and really reintroduce and storytell, be marketers that market ourselves internally and really rethink the way that we are presenting our effectiveness internally. And in order to do that, we developed essentially a financial model that is based on, we have a very sophisticated mix model. So it was based on our couple of years of data of really understanding every consumer touchpoint and really thinking through how we can essentially relate those touchpoints to sales.

Certainly in a traditional mixed model regression model sense, but also start to think about how we could not only be backwards looking, but be forwards looking and start to model out different outcomes based on different behaviors, different spend adjustments, different approaches to marketing, and really relate every single one of those potential investments back to how that would impact sales, both long-term and short-term. I think that's really important because as we know, generally our CFOs are responsible for short-term sales and while that's very important, we are all stewards of long-term brand growth and we want to do both at once.

Bruno Soeiro:

Fantastic. I mean, that's phenomenal. You started with effectiveness, which is a great place to start. And tell me, did you use AI in any way in your modeling? Did you venture off into any agentic activity or was it mainly algorithmic modeling too?

Catherine Berger:

Yes, certainly. I mean, certainly based on algorithmic modeling, but yes, now we've got it to a place where it is an AI-based suggestive tool. So it's doing some independent thinking and agentic setup is what we're looking at as a next step so that we can really equip more marketers with the capability to do this and not have it be so centralized, but really democratize the tool. So yes, AI is definitely the foundation for how we make this embedded into the practice of our marketers from a day-to-day perspective.

Bruno Soeiro:

Fantastic. Now, if I was to look at governance structures and the talents, I mean, for short space of time, sounds like you've achieved what some marketers achieve over a longer period of time. How did you bring your marketing teams along with you on this journey and what sort of governance models or ideas did you bring that got everybody on board with this?

Catherine Berger:

It's very kind of you to say. I think that I used to have a boss, Dana Anderson from Mondelez. She used to say, "You got to get people excited to get on the bus." And so we started to really paint a vision and continue to paint a vision. I think it's an ongoing journey. We continue to paint a vision on what we want to be in the future and started to build evangelists, so kind of a near-end group of folks that really understand what we're doing. And those are sort of the individuals that hold out the hand and invite onto the proverbial bus. So I think this kind of model of there's a small group of people who really understand the technology, understand what we're trying to do with it, and can really invite people in one-to-one and get them kind of, "Let's do this together." That's been pretty transformational for us.

And it's also enabled marketers to feel like they've got somebody to reach out to. It's not all on them to go, "Here, you take this, you go run with it, go figure it out." It's very much a kind of a one-to-one sort of peer training type of a thing. And then it's very empowering because you have this tool at your hands that you can do all sorts of things with. And then there's certainly a reward for self-discovery, "Hey, guess what I just figured out?" And we've invited that to be shared in a public forum.

Bruno Soeiro:

That's fantastic. And in terms of now that you've got your goals, your priorities, how are you addressing the efficiency aspect within your marketing workflow? Or could you tell us a little bit about what you're bringing into it, what you're testing, what you're looking to test in the future?

Catherine Berger:

I think certainly we've seen a lot of really great examples in the last few days of driving extreme productivity within the creative and production pipeline. So that's something that we're absolutely experimenting with and trying to figure out where that fits in and how we can iterate better in every way, and then really leverage the talent of the individuals to be the creative thinkers, to be the strategists. So that's something that I'm really excited about continuing to experiment with and develop. And then I think I'm also looking forward to a much more kind of foundational data repository. I think a lot of companies are struggling with how to get everything coalesced and certainly that's something we're still working through as well, is how do we get the core data sources that we build all of our insights and all of our thinking on, structured in a way that we can really leverage AI to the fullest extent. And that's something that I think will be really transformational when we unlock it.

Bruno Soeiro:

Effectiveness is your primary driver for marketing, which is great because you're bringing alignment within the CFO organization, the CEO, bringing the light and beacon on marketing. How are you, on the other end, aligning with your IT CIO organization? And even as you're adopting some level of AI, have you got an extension of responsible AI or head of AI in the business that you've got to collaborate to accelerate the adoption and deployment of these things? How are you managing that?

Catherine Berger:

Such a great question. I think it's so critical to be partnered with our IT professionals. And we're really lucky at Bimbo. We've got a team of IT professionals and legal professionals who are very motivated to really figure this out with us. I think what's really special about marketers in particular is we're often driving this type of programming, driving this type of change. And I would certainly say that's been the case at Bimbo, but really it's been an evolution of understanding needs and use cases and marketers sort of bringing IT along on the journey and vice versa. So it's absolutely a journey, to use that word and I think it's very apt. So just partnering together and trying to figure it out together. And the world is changing so quickly, so also trying to future-proof as best as we can.

Bruno Soeiro:

No, that's really great to hear because we're chatting to some other marketers and they're saying, "Look, I've become an IT competition because I'm adopting faster than they are and for my survival, I have to do it." So I completely agree on your journey. And in terms of, we discussed how you're getting a foundational, how do you intend to embed AI and efficiency? Are you going to start looking at how are you producing content or using mastered assets that are human inspired and drive those variances? Are you looking to potentially get into digital twin technology that can 3D model your product and permeate digital shelves and move into videos and so forth? Where do you think the highest level of excitement there?

Catherine Berger:

We are a food company and fundamentally believe that the connections that people experience around food are what we provide. So there are some elements of our business that we think are critical for them not to be manufactured. So food photography, for instance, we want to show our product and all of the elements of our product, even some human elements we think are really critical to be human. So there's some elements that we're really protective over and we think that that's what makes our brands our brands. However, all of the complexity other than that is kind of up for grabs in terms of driving more efficiency. Again, iteration is really interesting and this idea that we can produce tens of thousands of pieces of creative and content, really experiment with them versus going through a 10, 12 week production process and getting a handful of assets and then doing the sort of old-fashioned testing.

So I think I'm most excited about that sort of iterative sense of, "Okay, what about this? What about this? Let's just try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks." I'm also really excited about synthetic testing with synthetic consumers, if you will. We spend a lot of time, and I still believe it's so valuable to talk to consumers. We spend a ton of time testing things and a ton of time validating, and this idea that we can do that at least on a smaller scale, meaning showing thousands of pieces of content to a synthetic consumer audience and understanding eye tracking and how that might result in a digital sale, that to me is just completely breakthrough from an efficiency perspective and an effectiveness perspective. So I think that's really exciting.

Bruno Soeiro:

I was recently talking to a marketeer who's looking at, they've taken an old world of building brand trust models on, I interview 5,000 people a year and I invite them in, I speak to them, which is great. Now what they wanted for the compound on top of the trust model, they want to look at brand health and this is where synthetic data is playing a significant role, but also meta crawlers that are looking into people's comments from a brand perspective, "I had this wonderful breakfast." And the longer the narrative, the higher brand health, which gives you into brand love. Are you exploring that compounding effect on top of-

Catherine Berger:

First of all, I think it's table stakes, we have to be exploring that. So if we're not, I think we're falling behind and we're really thinking about how do we adapt to the way that consumers are searching, the way that consumers are kind of speaking to machines as if they're people. So I think that's really important. Something that's really exciting to me is kind of the sentiment behind those types of comments. And I think up until today, it's been sort of this human intuition that's been able to suss out the sentiments behind it. Think about bread, for instance. Bread has been a staple of the human diet for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

It's practically as old as civilization and the emotions around bread today, they vary so much by country, they vary so much by individual, but we're in a world where protein's king, but bread is still such a foundational element of human nutrition. So really understanding the emotion behind these purchases and even the emotion behind, "I had a breakfast that I loved." And what that satisfied for you from an emotional perspective, I think that we can really start to train and rely on our AI partners to do that for us. And that's really huge. So I'm really excited about that.

Bruno Soeiro:

If we look at what we've heard over the last few days and how fast AI is changing, from here comes the internet without repeating that story, what excites you the most in terms of, we can't think a year ahead nowadays, it's weeks and days.

Catherine Berger:

Yeah.

Bruno Soeiro:

What's the most exciting area of AI, whether it's generative, agentic, or the one we haven't heard about yet that excites you the most as a market here?

Catherine Berger:

As marketers, we're trying to see around corners. We're trying to predict what's going to happen. We're trying to take sort of seeds of sentiment and seeds of ideas and really understand, is that going to grow into a tree or is it going to not really go anywhere? And I think that seeing around corners is something that we can really start to now finally think of AI as a partner in. And I'm excited for, tell me about flavor trends around the world. And that used to be an incredible research endeavor. And now we can start to see, with AI, you can start to see, "Oh, well, this is actually picking up speed really quickly." When we think about crawling the internet. We can start to leverage the machine learning to really take over some of this really big work. And I think the growth that can come from this idea of where are we going and how do we predict trends in a more reliable way is super exciting. And so I think moving from a productivity and efficiency conversation into a, here's how we think about growth, that's what I'm really excited about.

Bruno Soeiro:

I mean, that's a fascinating way to look at it. With that, I wanted to say thank you so much for-

Catherine Berger:

Thanks for having me.

Bruno Soeiro:

Taking time out of your schedule.

Catherine Berger:

Of course. And we're hoping continue to enjoy Masters. Thank you so much.

Catherine Berger:

Yeah, thank you.

Bruno Soeiro:

Appreciate it.

Catherine Berger:

Of course. I really appreciate the time.