5 Minutes with… Jess Vultaggio
Jess Vultaggio has been with Kraft Heinz for more than 13 years as a brand manager and head of marketing across a multitude of divisions and legacy brands. Nowadays, as Kraft Heinz's vice president, creative culture and effectiveness, a role that she took on in April of this year, Jess is hyper focused on fostering an environment within that business and its brands that allows beautifully impactful creativity to flourish. "We believe that creativity is good business," she tells us. Within her organisation, she also oversees The Kitchen, Kraft Heinz North America's prospering in-house agency.
To find out more about Jess's ambitions and plans for the future of Kraft Heinz creativity, and how a little ‘brand therapy’ helped re-energise the company’s creative spirit, LBB's Addison Capper chatted with her.
LBB> You've been in your current role for about five months. How would you describe what it involves?
Jess> For the two years prior to this role, I was our head of brands and creativity for North America, where I oversaw all of the creative work coming out of North America, including from our in-house agency, The Kitchen. During those two years, we combined marketing powers in Canada and the US into one North American powerhouse – with about 25 people centralised, focused on creative. My role then included a bit of capabilities, but at the time you could really manage capabilities and culture a little more one on one.
Now, after two years of incubating creative into this powerhouse, we put it back into the business. So our creative leads are sitting side-by-side with their brand counterparts, getting really embedded into the business, all to ensure that the work we're doing is truly connected to consumer insights, and we’re driving strategy that is fully connected to the business. In the decentralised model we’re now following, there is a need to really solidify capabilities, learning and development, and routines and rituals, intentionally driving a culture across not just a 25 person group, but a 300 person marketing organisation, and my role has evolved to address that need.
LBB> The big two words that stand out to me in your new title are culture and effectiveness. Let's talk about culture. How important is a consistent creative culture when you're working with so many brands, external agencies and in-house creative teams? And how do you plan to nurture that culture?
Jess> At Kraft Heinz, we've really seen that our culture is our difference maker. You can have a great strategy. You can have great people. You can have great partners. But it's the environment that those people exist in day-to-day that’s really going to make the difference between on-paper perfection and if that team can translate it to great work. Creatively, I'm a firm believer in building a culture where you're allowing individuals to shine, and for all your partners and cross-functional teammates to bring their own perspectives. But you really need to establish together what success looks like and consistency in how you want to work together. And we aim to build a way of working fuelled by transparency, trust and respect, and shared passion and ambition. Because that's the fuel that we can all come back to.
LBB> Tell me about the effectiveness element. What does it mean in terms of your responsibilities?
Jess> We believe that creativity is good business. You can put something out in the world that simply works, or make it exponentially better by doing it creatively. Being able to be more creatively bold and impactful in how you interpret insights, how you translate them into a brief and then, of course, how you answer the brief is what is going to make the difference in being able to punch above your weight. And that's really core to making the work effective.
In my current role that specificity around effectiveness is about how we distil a repeatable model to raise the floor on effectiveness. For example, our Heinz brand is on fire. We have five plus years of an amazing brand idea that has grown in North America, has attracted great ideas from across the globe, and now is officially a global platform, and it's driving phenomenal business results.
We want that to be a consistent thing that we can say across our portfolio of brands. So, it's really about people understanding not only what good looks like, but at the end of the day, did the work work? And if so, why did it work? And how do we get more of that upstream to drive greater impact?
LBB> How do you interact with Kraft Heinz's marketing department? What is that relationship like?
Jess> I'm in our central growth organisation in North America. I'm deeply embedded within marketing, as a partner and a consultant to our brand teams across creative best practices, ways of working, and in the creative work itself with our agencies. Then, within my organisation, I oversee The Kitchen, where Tom Evans, the head of The Kitchen, and his team are a real key to effectiveness. They're our frontlines of understanding the consumer, what's trending, what people are responding to, and to reading signals and helping us understand and gather insights about surprising things that really took off, and how we do more of that. I also oversee our ‘creative capabilities’ team, focused on creating a shared language around creativity, raising the bar on what great creative looks like and how we deliver it, and also looking at how we bring in inspiration from the outside, and learning and development. Finally, inclusive marketing also sits within my organisation, with a focus on making culture-first, inclusive thinking and practises a super power of our marketing organisation. All of those teams impact our total marketing organisation and agency ecosystem.
LBB> In terms of agencies, how do you find yourselves interacting with The Kitchen and external partners?
Jess> One of our focus areas is on developing our overall agency ecosystem and relationships therein, including The Kitchen. We're constantly in touch with and have - on-purpose - very informal relationships with our agency partners. We’re all one team, and don't want to feel we only speak to each other ‘in the boardroom’. We don't want to let pretence and politeness get in the way of real conversations. Rather, we look at how we make sure we have systems to ensure that feedback is happening, that it's consistent, and that people know what the expectations are. It's the combination of both interacting through the work and then interacting to say, how do we make even higher performing teams?
LBB> You’ve been with Kraft Heinz for a long time! How has the business and overall world of marketing and advertising evolved over the years in your eyes?
Jess> Yes, for 13 years! To generalise, when I started, about 90% of your media spend and the way that you were communicating to consumers was through TV and other mass channels – and people were paying more attention to what you were saying. That made the most important thing you did about figuring out the story you were going to tell through film or print. But today, we are so fragmented in every way possible. Consumer attention is divided, the platforms they can get information on is fragmented, and it makes the whole problem of what to say and where to say it to breakthrough that much more of a complex puzzle to solve.
What people go to platforms for can really differ, too, based on the individual. So, for Kraft Heinz, our in-house team and media teams play a larger role than they would have in the past of helping our brands and entire integrated agency teams stay at the front of what's happening in culture, how to resonate best with our consumers based on channel selection, and being able to move at the speed of culture for maximum relevance. Years ago, you just wouldn't need that.
The whole in-house dynamic is also radically different, and what's exciting now is to see the momentum. Tom and the team at The Kitchen have done a phenomenal job in building the agency’s culture and creative output, and doing both their own original work and also helping amplify existing work together with the rest of our interagency team. The level of talent we now get inquiring about how to get in-house, specifically into The Kitchen [is amazing]. We’re only three years old, so that momentum is due to the reputation and quality of the work that the team has accomplished. That's exciting for our brands, because it means we’re attracting great talent to be always-on dedicated stewards, who are obsessed with the brands and connected to the business in a way you might not be able to accomplish otherwise.
LBB> You mentioned the word fragmented there. Well, in this fragmented world, with so many platforms and channels to consider and the push to personalise to the nth degree - is the big idea for your brands still relevant? What does it mean today?
Jess> Yes, 100%. The big idea, and the brand is maybe even more relevant now, but in a different way. Big brands aren’t the badge that they once were, where consumers say, 'I know this is going to be good, I'm going to buy it because it's a big brand'. In fact, we know consumers are perhaps even increasingly sceptical of known brands, on that search for discovery. But the idea of being a brand with a big idea and way of expressing yourself is as important as ever, when it comes to building relevance, memory structures, connections, familiarity and ultimately trust and loyalty, in a fragmented communications landscape. It's critical to know what your brand looks and sounds like, and what it believes in at the DNA level to drive that consistency – whatever topic, and whatever platform you’re on. If you don't have that north star, there's a lot of risk of losing yourself and your authenticity.
LBB> Creatively, it really feels like Heinz has hit somewhat of a stride in recent years. With that in mind, what are your big ambitions with this new role?
Jess> On the overall momentum of Heinz and beyond, we are so proud of that, because it has been a journey. I talk about it internally as going through 'brand therapy' across our portfolio.
At Kraft Heinz, we have a beautiful portfolio of legacy brands that at one time were very proud, knew who they were, and sang it proudly from the rooftops. But over time it’s like we ourselves fell out of love with our brands, and everything we did started to feel more functional, safe, and even apologetic. Our brands lost their shine and their swagger.
So, the first step in the journey for Heinz and any of our brands is about re-finding the love. Understanding that we're not for everybody, but we have many who love us. Then driving an internal mindset shift for the brands, that our brands are worthy of love and worthy of the type of work and the type of iconicity that they once had. And then we had to believe that we as marketers were capable of delivering it. Everything from that mindset shift and belief to strategy and execution is an always-on journey, and one of continuous improvement. We're really, really proud of what we've accomplished there, particularly for Heinz.
In terms of aspirations for the future, we have pockets of greatness across our portfolio of brands -- powerful ambition and incredible work that makes it from idea all the way through the process and out the door. And we need more of that. We need consistency of excellence across our portfolio, and of building that culture and ambition and delivery across our brands. And like I said, we’ve proven we have it. It's just about building the muscle memory, confidence and strengthening the belief beyond the Heinz portfolio. All of our brands are going to get there – they deserve it. And our dream over the next two to three plus years is getting the rest of the portfolio singing just as proudly.
