2024 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

In 2019, seven out of 10 hamburgers and nine out of 10 hotdogs consumed in Mexico were made with Bimbo buns, with street food vendors (AKA “Special Channels”) representing 33% of the company’s total sales. But as macroeconomic pressures and fast-food competition intensified post-COVID, that percentage fell by 8% — resulting in an annual deficit of $192M USD for the company and diminished income for mom-and-pop street food stands across the country.

How could Bimbo help its 8,402 commercial allies increase sales, while strengthening brand awareness among both food vendors and end consumers alike?

The campaign's objectives were to increase visibility and drive traffic to street food carts, shops, and stalls across Mexico and to recover 10% of sales participation in Special Channels.

From the use of octopus and grasshoppers and well beyond, the creativity of Mexico’s street food is staggering. It’s also highly diverse, with each of these 8,402 individual small businesses selling unique and local recipes. But all that creativity isn’t reflected in the stands’ marketing and signage. They believed that if they could make the marketing as creative and powerful as the food, they could drive business at the vendor level.

“The Greatest Guide”: the world’s first fully generative search and signage system designed to put 8,402 of Mexico’s most creative hamburger and hotdog stands
on the map.

They started by collecting data from thousands of street food vendors across Mexico, both directly, and using the IVY and RTM data management tools created by Bimbo’s business analysis center. That data had previously only been used for placing purchase orders for buns. Data included: stand name, location and the ingredients of its
signature recipe.

Although the technology is progressing fast, the commercial application of generative AI at scale is still challenging. Throughout development, they discovered invisible walls everywhere. For example, generative platforms are likely to render burgers that look like Big Macs, suggesting heavy bias in their training data. And because this Mexican street food doesn’t look like ubiquitous fast food, and often uses ingredients not well documented on the Internet, they had to push at the edges of what AI could actually render, through rules-based decisioning.

To produce 8,402 data-driven point-of-sale posters they combined Mexico’s rich tradition of sign painting with the scale and efficiency of artificial intelligence — they built up an innovative, iterative workflow between human art directors and their AI models. Rather than bespoke art direction, their approach was rules-based (e.g., the rule of thirds), which they rolled up into a programmatic creative system. For example, their automated drop shadow had to work for both long, wide hotdogs, and narrow, high hamburgers.

Their generative stack:
OpenAI CLIP – image-to-text, to create prompts from selected images
OpenAI Dall-E2 – text-to-image to produce base food paintings, backgrounds
RmBGAI – for automated close cropping
Pillow – Python for compositing (essentially programmatic Photoshop)
Wand – Python bindings for ImageMagick, for compositing
Stability AI – upscale API, for increasing resolution to poster-size print specs

The campaign has more than 12,200,000 impressions across Mexico, more than 77,000 online map visits to date, 42,010 unique point-of-sale images generated for hotdog and burger carts, shops, and street vendors — five versions for each.

There was a 23% increase in sales among Bimbo’s Special Channels compared to the 10% target and they set a new record of more than 180% week-over-week
nationwide sales.

By putting 8,402 of Bimbo’s customers on an online map accessible to all, they not only supported the economic livelihood of thousands of families across Mexico, they also created a strong halo effect for the Bimbo brand. “The Greatest Guide” established an authentic connection between a multinational bakery giant and Mexico’s vibrant community of independent street food vendors and foodies. It also strengthened commercial relationships, including the trust and loyalty that Bimbo has built with some individual food vendors for over 40 years.

Credits

Performance Art – Toronto
Ian Mackenzie – Chief Creative Office
Colin Craig – Executive Creative Director
Ben Playford – Creative Director
Jess Willis – Group Creative Director
Pedro Izzo – Associate Creative Director
Arnaud Icard – VP Technology
Amanda Horsford – PM
Bradley Hodgkinson – Design
Nzegwhua Anderson – Experience Delivery Lead
Andrea Cook– CEO

Vector B – Mexico
Juan Luis Arteaga – Managing Director
Elizabeth Juárez –Creative Vice President
Manuel RuizAlsina – Group Creative Director
Montserrat Mora – Creative Director
Nathan Márquez – Head of Art
Esmeralda Velázquez – Account Director
Beatriz Sosa – Group Account Director
Gustavo Luna – Copywriter
Roberto Salazar – Designer
Jorge Bobadilla – Designer
Leonardo Kambayashi – Designer
Eddi Aguirre – Art Director
Pilar Valle – Planner
Diego Enríquez – Producer
Enrique Martínez – Creative Director
Diana Gil – Project Manager
Lourdes Alderete – Regional Creative Excellence Manager for Latin America
John Mescall – Creative Product McCann Worldgroup Creative
Adrian Botan – Global ECD, CCO McCann Europe Creative
Carmen Bistrian – Global Product Excellence Director

Production
Lauren Horn – School Editorial
Grayson Matthews – Audio
FFFRAME TV – Production
Catatonia Films – Production
Xander Bartole – FFFRAME TV / Director
Starcom Mexico – Additional company
Findasense – Additional company
FCB México – Additional company