KitKat has won the Outdoor Grand Prix, and Nestlé CMO Aude Gandon credits a creative overhaul that has run for two years. The win marks the most visible external validation yet of the marketing organisation she has been rebuilding since taking the top marketing role at the world's largest food company.

The award, reported by Mi-3, caps a deliberate two-year effort to change how Nestlé briefs, produces and measures creative work. Gandon now says the next phase is merging data and insights into that creative process — a signal that the overhaul is moving from rebuilding craft to wiring consumer data directly into campaign decision-making.

What does the Grand Prix actually validate?

For a marketing organisation of Nestlé's scale, a Grand Prix in Outdoor is not a vanity prize. It demonstrates that a brand built on a decades-old tagline and format can still produce work judged best-in-class against global competition. KitKat has long leaned on consistent, repeatable creative assets; winning at this level suggests the two-year overhaul changed the quality of execution, not just process diagrams.

For CMOs watching from other large advertisers, the takeaway is sequencing: Nestlé spent two years on creative foundations before layering data and insights on top. Gandon did not attempt to rewire data and creative simultaneously. The Grand Prix arrived first; the data-insights merge is the stated next step.

Why merge data and insights now?

Gandon's framing, as reported, is that the creative rebuild has delivered — and the organisation can now afford to connect it more tightly to evidence. Merging data and insights typically means bringing performance signals, audience understanding and creative development into one operating rhythm rather than running them as parallel functions.

The structural question for peers is whether creative and analytics teams report into a single decision path or simply share meetings. Gandon's comments indicate Nestlé is pursuing the former: insights feeding creative choices earlier, with the creative overhaul strong enough to absorb that input without diluting craft.

What should marketing leaders take from it?

• Two years is the realistic timeframe. A creative transformation at global FMCG scale does not show measurable, award-level results in a quarter or two.
• Prove craft before instrumenting it. Nestlé's sequence — rebuild creative first, then merge data and insights — ran against the common pattern of bolting analytics onto unchanged creative operations.
• External validation matters internally. A Grand Prix gives a CMO concrete proof points when defending continued investment in creative transformation to the board.

What comes next?

Gandon's stated priority is the data-and-insights merge. If that phase lands, Nestlé becomes a test case for whether a creatively rebuilt, century-old FMCG portfolio can run insight-led marketing at scale without losing the brand consistency that made KitKat durable in the first place. The industry will be watching whether the next two years produce results as visible as the Outdoor Grand Prix.