One of the things we never understood about Anheuser-Busch back when the Busch family ran it was their reliance on Fleishman-Hilliard, a public relations firm, when we thought A-B was plainly large enough to have an in-house corporate communications department.
That changed toward the end of the Busch family’s proprietorship. A-B created an in-house public relations team, A little over a year ago, Anheuser-Busch InBev, the current owner of A-B, launched draftLine, an in-house marketing and advertising agency. draftLine isn’t an American innovation, having started in Columbia and then expanded to Mexico.
The unit works like any other agency. Tracy Stallard, who runs the unit, told the Association of Naational Advertisers draftLine has two goals: (1) to sell more beer, and (2) to make sure the company is still in business 100 years from now. What sets draftLine and other in-house teams apart is working for the same goals the company has. It also enables A-B to recapture at least part of the usual 15% commission paid on media buys.
That doesn’t mean draftLine is getting all the advertising business. A-B still has an estimated 50 external agencies working for it. Still, Stallard says there are clear advantages to an in-house agency:
“Agencies primarily are hired to work on brand problems,” Stallard said. “But, at an agency, most of the compensation scheme is based on the volume of work rather than the volume of beer that sells.
“That can push us in the wrong direction sometimes,” she added, and even “make us produce maybe too much of the wrong work.”
One of the other things an in-house unit does is capture the profit that an external agency generates, thereby expanding the funds available for expanded marketing.
One of the things we never understood about Anheuser-Busch InBev was its decision almost immediately after taking control of A-B to eliminate a small unit that produced a lot of the clothing and similar items bearing A-B brand logos. The only reasonable explanation we’ve ever heard was the ABI needed quick cash to pay down the debt it assumed to buy A-B.