Tim Ovadia has a lot going on at the moment. The global VP of Stella Artois at AB InBev is in London this week not only for the Wimbledon tennis championship – the brand is the tournament’s ‘official beer partner’ – he’s also in the UK capital for the closing stages of this year’s ‘Perfect Serve’ bartender-focused competition.
Ahead of the final of the latter this evening (7 July), Ovadia, talks Global Drinks Intel editor Olly Wehring through where Stella sits in 2025.
What’s your role and remit?
In layman’s terms, I’m responsible for building and growing the Stella Artois brand around the world. I partner with over 20 markets and work with them on a daily basis. I’ve been doing this for seven years now.
Stella Artois is a brand I’d always admired – it’s always been famous for creating some of the most iconic advertising in the world. So it’s been really exciting to lead the next stage of growth and see the brand appeal to a new generation of beer drinkers.
What condition was the brand in when you assumed your position in 2019?
What I found was that we’d been focusing on too many things that weren’t necessarily connected to what had made the brand famous in the first place. We had a brand that people loved, but we needed to reconnect with what had made it a global success in the first place. We needed to spend more time focusing on what the DNA of the brand was. Once we’d achieved that, we needed to simplify our strategy, our programme and our people to focus on delivering the things that resonated with consumers in the first place.
We all understand the complexity of the modern world and today’s media landscape; how fragmented and confusing that can be and how many different options we have open to us, as marketers. What’s most important is to understand what makes you successful and focus on doing a few things that matter, rather than fragmenting your effort and your time across too many things that don’t necessarily move the dial.
That’s easier said than done – amazing brands don’t get built overnight. Stella is very much a brand that was built – and whose soul lives – in the on-premise. We had to reconnect with bars and pubs to get them to fall back in love with Stella again, and execute that in a way that we know consumers love – that took time as well.
How difficult has it been to position a legacy brand in today’s marketing environment?
We were fortunate in that we had all the pieces of the puzzle already there – we just needed to put them back together again.
We knew we had great liquid – that’s where it always starts. We knew we had a well-recognised chalice gloss that was designed to maximise the beer’s flavour and to protect it for as long as possible. We also knew that this brand lived in bars and pubs around the world. So, the strategic side of this was relatively simple.
Translating all this into the real world obviously takes time, but when we spoke to bar owners and their staff, we had a very receptive audience. They were delighted that we were in investing in them, especially coming off the back of Covid. What we were saying was ‘this is the ritual that made Stella famous in the first place’.
Our customers care about the quality of the beer as much as we do – so that was the easiest sell of all. It’s the same with educating bar staff about the perfect serve ritual – from rinsing the glass to the angle of pour and skimming the head – which they find genuinely interesting.
The response we’ve had from the on-trade has been incredible.
What has been the direction of travel strategy-wise for the brand in a geographical sense over the last seven years?
The simplest way to describe how we look at Stella’s markets is, we have original or legacy markets – like Belgium and the UK – where the brand has grown to be developed and mature. They’re clearly still very important markets, because they’re so large for us.
Then we have growth or emerging markets for Stella, many of which surprise people. There’s China, for example, as well as Brazil, Colombia, the US and South Africa.
In South Africa, the growth model has been very similar to the UK; built in the on-premise and positioned as a really premium brand. In five years, Stella’s grown from being very small in South Africa to being the country’s largest premium draft beer. That’s something we’re really proud of.
In China, we have big plans to continue to capitalise on the premiumisation trend in beer. The global platforms that we have for Stella – such as our partnership with David Beckham and our sponsorships of Wimbledon and the French Open – are ways that will hep us grow the brand in China.
How does provenance and brand heritage play with younger LDA drinkers, in your experience?
In fairness, we do lean into our provenance in different parts of our marketing mix. In its packaging, for example, we reference Stella’s heritage and history in a very big way. It’s also certainly part of the focus of the ‘Perfect Serve’ asset. Earlier this year, we took 50 brand ambassadors from around the world to Leuven [in Belgium; the home of Stella Artois] to become Perfect Serve ambassadors.
One of the things we know resonates very strongly with younger drinkers is the concept of being authentic. We position Stella’s core purpose as a brand as being about the pursuit of genuine worth. We definitely think this is a strength of Stella’s when it comes to recruiting the next generation of drinkers.
You’re in London for the finals of Stella’s ‘Perfect Serve’ bartender competition this week.
Perfect Serve is very much a foundational pillar of getting back to the soul of the brand; investing in the on-trade and educating bar staff around the world.
We have ten finalists from around the world spending four days before the final competition in London. During those four days, they’ve been learning about our history and provenance, how to manage beer systems and how to execute the perfect serve. That to me shows the commitment we’ve got to our heritage.
We’ll have two former Wimbledon champions, Maria Sharapova and Andre Agassi, coming to present the award to the winner on the night.
Do younger LDA drinkers know who David Beckham is?
My job is to make Stella a relevant and compelling brand for all of our drinkers. We need to recruit drinkers from across the board; that means in different age groups and in different countries. We believe that if your brand can tap into a universally-compelling human truth, then that crosses generations. The idea that some things are worth more in lfe is relevant to all drinkers. We chose David Beckham for exactly that reason. David has cross-generational appeal, which made this a very deliberate decision.
We also chose David because we believe he represents the brand’s values of both style and substance: He’s incredibly stylish and he’s about to be awarded a knighthood. Finally, he’s a true global ambassador.
Are you satisfied with the level of attention Stella Artois receives internally from AB InBev, compared to Budweiser, Corona and Michelob Ultra?
I should get you to talk to my boss for me! We have incredible resources, so I’m certainly not concerned about that.
Stella’s grouped with Budweiser, Corona and Michelob Ultra as the group’s global brands, because that’s exactly what it is – a brand with global appeal and strong growth potential that we’re betting on and investing in today and for the future. As one of those four global brands, we have the absolute privilege to be able to tap into the incredible resources and execution capabilities of the AB InBev network.
What’s really important is that each of our global brands has a very strategic and specific role to play. We want our growth to be sustainable and to do that, we need to have complementary propositions amongst those four brands. Stella’s role is very clear; our mission is for Stella to be the number one premium draft beer in the world. That’s a different mission to Budweiser’s and Corona’s, for example.
That focus also informs our innovation agenda and acts as a guiding light for the brand in the off-trade as well. One of our most successful innovations has been the PerfectDraft machine – we’ve sold 120,000 in the UK. Another programme that has been developed along similar lines is ‘Stella Signature’, which we’ve just launched, allowing consumers to personalise a chalice glass for a moment that’s worth more in their lives.
This is live in the US at the moment and we’re looking to expand it further around the world.
