Dhiren Amin is Heinz Kraft’s CMO Asia and will chair the Instant Impact Jury at this year’s WARC Awards for Effectiveness. Here, he offers entrants advice on what to include in their papers.
Describe your role.
My role is about top-line growth through a combination of mixed management, innovation acceleration and improving the quality of our communication inputs and deployment. And of course, making life delicious for the people we serve; as one of the world’s leading food companies.
Tell us about how you work with your agency partners across Asia and how you ensure that the objectives you set help to build in effectiveness in your communications right from the start?
Effectiveness starts with a really sharp definition of what you want a piece of communication to achieve. The role of an effective marketer is clarity, choice and craft. Clarity on what needs to be achieved for the business, not just the communication and how it translates to a comms challenge. Choice – choosing the most clutter-breaking idea and media. The work with agency partners is about the final C – craft; pushing them to build the craft of the assets that you’re making and deploying from a media and creative standpoint.
What is the one campaign you have seen in the last year that has really made an impact on you (not from Kraft Heinz!)
Any from Burger King; they did a lot of good work last year.
The Burger King comms saying ‘buy from any restaurant just so long as you buy because it keeps people in jobs’ was magnanimity done well and would have driven tremendous brand preference for Burger King. It also came from a good, selfless place which taps into what organisations want to do: help people while ensuring that the business still performs.
This piece of work captured that sentiment: 2020 was a struggle, but putting people first was the priority.
What is your one bugbear when reading effectiveness papers?
There are two: the first is exaggeration where people use lofty language to overcome an obvious gap in fact. The second an inability to define the problem or strategic challenge. It suggests either that they haven’t given enough time to sharpen the thinking on the entry or haven’t sharpened the thinking in the actual work, which is scarier.
What are the metrics that you would expect to see in a paper demonstrating an instant impact?
There’s no effectiveness unless you’ve moved your sales or you’ve moved your market share or number of consumers. Anything else is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m excited about chairing the Instant Impact category because entries can’t hide behind simply quoting awareness or engagement. Impact is about a sales or a competitive win, and I’d urge people to think of their cases in those terms.
What advice would you give to entrants of the WARC Awards for Effectiveness?
Focus on the word ‘effectiveness’. It’s about work that moves business not showcasing work that looked good. If it move hearts, great, but if it moved wallets, it’s effective. One without the other is not enough.
What are your hoping to see in the papers that enter this competition?
Well written, well-articulated business challenges with an impact on business results achieved through clutter-breaking work.
The WARC Awards for Effectiveness are open for entries until 1 April and the entry fee has been waived for 2021. Email effectiveness@warc.com if you have any questions.
