Iconic brands in a new age

An interview with Kraft Heinz's in-house agency leader, Tom Evans

Especially in the AI age, it matters how the sausage gets made. I’ve spoken about this before, but your outputs really only can ever be as good as your inputs and it’s clear Kraft Heinz have been at the bleeding edge of the whole speed of culture movement, with - for instance - the Taylor Swift stuff last year. 

That is where everyone's trying to get to. So I thought this would be a timely conversation with Tom Evans - the North American head of their in-house Agency, The Kitchen. 

Everyone is in that same zone of wondering how we set up marketing work for success and there’s few better to answer it than Tom.

Raffi Salama: Tom, can we get a super brief intro please? 

Tom Evans: Hi, sure! My name is Tom Evans, and I head up The Kitchen which is the inside Agency for Kraft Heinz.

RS: Awesome. Thank you. It’s fair to say that The Kitchen is the envy of many big brands around the world. I would love to understand how the marketing team structures have evolved at The Kitchen over the past few years, and what really has driven that need for change.

TE: Well, firstly, as you know, we've seen massive growth. So since The Kitchen's inception, which was in 2021, we've gone from supporting five to over nineteen brands at Kraft Heinz. 

We've gone from pilot to a fully fledged offering, and our team has gone from ten to over a 100 and that has been driven by demand within Kraft Heinz. So by offering a unique value distinct from what external agencies offer, we are building something that's just tailor made for our brands and the needs of today's landscape. What’s cool is that, because The Kitchen is relatively new, we've been able to build the proposition from scratch. So we have this agile structure as the core foundation. It’s been interesting to leave some of those traditional adland legacy issues behind, and instead structure our agency to the needs of our brands and the modern consumer. So we're structured across six multi-disciplinary pods. 

This kind of modular structure really helps with the flexibility we've needed for the growth. 

So as the demands placed on The Kitchen have increased, we've been able to grow our size without changing the fundamental structure or losing any of that agility.

Then, as we evolve The Kitchen, we're constantly looking to plug it in further upstream. So I spend more time these days thinking about the structure of the bigger Kraft Heinz organisation and our place within it which is probably just as important if not more so than the structure of The Kitchen itself. So we're working very hard to integrate The Kitchen within the wider business units as much as possible, so we can shorten the distance from business problem to creative solve and have that kind of proactivity and agility as much as possible. 

Ultimately our aim is always for there to be no noticeable difference between a brand manager within the business unit and a kitchen “chef” in terms of knowing and understanding our brands inside out.

RS: I love that concept of The Kitchen having a “chef”! 

TE:  We were just recently rethinking our values and we used to say kitchen “cook” and then we're thinking because Cooks sort of put food together for the sake of eating, whereas for chefs it’s all about the best ingredients, being intentional and delivering something of quality. It's just little things like that which help to reinforce the mission and the values of what we're doing.

RS: Love it. We’ve spoken about the speed of culture, and I'm almost sad because I think it's going to become a buzzword; even though it is actually useful like terminology. But when you think about the unique advantages or strengths this structure gives the business, how do you think that helps so much?

TE: Yeah, it is a bit of a buzzword and I slightly recoil every time I say it but I can't think of a better option right now because speed and agility really does go to the heart of everything we do. For us what’s key is being more involved in that internal process giving us permission to take shortcuts vs the more linear external agency models. The difference between us and an external agency, for example, is that we don't always need to be briefed. Another example is that we’re not worried about driving The Kitchen’s revenue in the same way. We're not protecting our bottom line. We're not worrying about billing by the hour. We have no time sheets; which, by the way, is the biggest recruiting tool we have!

RS: How do you then think about your own KPIs? 

TE: It’s a weird one. I feel like the sort of the external agency model is somewhat broken. The idea of billing  by the hour just doesn't work because people just end up inflating hours. And then there’s the bait and switch, when  you send in your senior teams to do the pitch and then the work is given to your junior people to execute. So you are maximising profit that way. I must admit, as someone having an operations background, it kind of scared me to remove them. But over time I've really grown to appreciate that they are completely redundant. What we get to do with The Kitchen is just focus on the quality and impact of the work. We just don't have to worry about anything else and I can see the creatives when they make that switch and they suddenly realise that you just have to focus on the work and make it as good as you can; that is a huge unlock.

RS: Agreed. For decades it feels like we've just been accepting it how it is but no one's actually prodded at the base and asked why couldn’t it be like this? On that: what are the biggest misconceptions about the model?

TE: It's counterintuitive, but it's all too easy if you want the speed, agility and autonomy to try and move away from the business, just go off and do your own thing. But the counterintuitive thing is actually that it’s the very worst thing you can do if you want speed, agility and autonomy! 

You have to integrate yourself even more within the businesses, so that you do have that close connection with legal, plus corporate communications and PR, or whomever you may need. You have the rules, you have the structure, then you can run within it. But if you don't create that framework and structure you're just running wild and that is not what you want to do for anyone.

RS: Makes total sense. Can I ask the AI question now…How do you think about integrating some of that new technology? 

TE: The Kitchen acts as Kraft Heinz's innovation hub: so we are really passionate about tech and pushing it forward. We're doing a lot of work around GenAI. It’s not perfect yet; I don't know if you've ever got GenAI to create a Kraft Singles for example, but I promise you it's not something which is very appetising! But it’s early days and experimental, as you can imagine… 

There's a ton of legal considerations to keep in mind, but it has been super fun running these hackathons and giving these creatives new tools. To be clear: I don't see AI as something removing jobs. It’s more about them being exciting tools that elevate what we can do and how we can do it. It’s pretty cool to think about how we unlock, for example, the treasure trove of assets we have… where AI basically delivers personalised assets against subsets of audiences which increases return on ad spend, and figure out repeatable patterns regarding which content works for which audience. Of course, you need the human touch to come in and be like: “that's a terrible design that makes no sense whatsoever,  give me 30 more options and I'm going to curate the right one” So it’s more likely to support our humans than replace them.

RS: Super clear. When you're dreaming up where The Kitchen can get to in the next few years, what’s the dream?

TE: Historically The Kitchen was sold as the social agency of record for these brands and that was the right place to start. But now I just think social media is too small, too narrow a vision. When you start thinking about consumers, they don’t think of it as social or digital, for them it's just culture and conversation. It's trends and communities. It's human connection. So for me, I think when I get excited about The Kitchen is a wider aperture as to what we can do, and have a broad connection to culture because that’s our connective tissue.

So when you start taking that sort of picture… Kraft Heinz has hundreds of brands, and even if we don't worry about the bigger brands that have their external agency partners, you can start to think about taking more full creative ownership of some of these smaller brands. Ones that are really creatively exciting and they're really important to the company, but they don't have any external agency support. When you’re working with a smaller brand, you honestly have a bigger chance of moving the needle and having a bigger impact. 

I look at Liquid Death for example as a brand where I love their work because everything is so harmonious: they gave the marketing department the keys to a whole new company and this is what you get! They take huge risks, but the business impact you can see is enormous and if we could take some of those smaller brands, have that ownership and that holistic viewpoint… That would be a game changer for us and Kraft Heinz. You’re sort of building out the agency model of the future, which is exciting.

RS: I love it! That’s so compelling and it feels win-win-win-win for talent, consumers and brands..