Business Problem

AB InBev planned billion-dollar marketing budgets across three disconnected tools:

• GRA — splits a country's marketing budget across brands

• MBA — splits a brand's budget across media vehicles, 52 weeks out

• MROI — reports past media and campaign performance

Built separately, they behaved separately. Inconsistent taxonomy — "Country," "Market," "Business Unit" and "Portfolio" all meant the same thing. Rigid workflows — planners had to start from an ideal plan every time and walk the same linear path, with no way to pause, go offline, or re-enter. Fragmented insight — historicals lived in one tool, projections in another, so building brand context meant manual stitching in Excel.

The ask: Consolidate three products into one platform without losing the depth any of them offered.

What I designed with the team

• One module hierarchy across the suite, so an executive and a media agency SPOC navigate the same mental model

• A modular scenario planner — start from an ideal plan, a budget target, a KPI target, last year's plan or an Excel upload; edit, simulate and maximise in any order

• Budget constraints with hard and soft overrides — reserve a sum outright, or nudge the algorithm toward a contracted spend

• Global Media Performance Overview — country-vs-global benchmarking in a single red-to-green read

• Vehicle Mix Analysis and response curves — where spend saturates, per brand, vehicle and week

• My Deck — save any visualisation with commentary and present it, killing the manual report-building cycle

Design Impact

• Three products became one suite — a single source of truth for global marketing spend

• Planning stopped being linear. Users can enter and exit the scenario exercise at any stage, online or offline — the single biggest complaint from Phase 1–3 users

• Taxonomy standardised across every module, removing the ambiguity that broke cross-market comparison

• Reporting time collapsed — My Deck replaced hand-built decks for both Global Executives and Connection Partners

• The platform scales by role, geography and time — including time-bound access for contracted media agencies