Allwyn’s Tatiana Jouanneau On The Power Of The Simple Idea

“I learned early that you have to read the fairy tales of each country you live in. They help you understand people.”

It’s a lesson that shaped Tatiana-Vivienne ‘Tatiana’ Jouanneau, now group chief brand officer for gaming giant Allwyn, and laid the foundations for her instincts as a storyteller.

As a child, Jouanneau moved across 17 countries because of her father’s diplomatic career. Local children were not always welcoming, so fairy tales became her way in: a cultural compass that revealed how different societies think, feel, and connect. Today, she sees much the same instinct at the heart of marketing and brand building: finding the cultural route that will make people care.

“In Russian tales it’s all about strength and perseverance; in France it’s about wit rather than brute force; in Japan, harmony; in China, hard work,” she explains.

Her own career has taken her across 20 countries and 80 markets, including spells as global chief marketing officer at Duracell and marketing transformation officer at Logitech. Jouanneau now oversees global marketing for lottery operator Allwyn, which generated €9bn in revenue last year.

A shifting strategy

Jouanneau is preparing Allwyn for a new era. The company recently appointed Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B) as its global creative agency following what she describes as a “rigorous appointment process”. VCCP continues to handle creative for The National Lottery in the UK, while VCCP Roar remains Allwyn’s global PR agency.

At the heart of Jouanneau’s task is a tension: how does a business rooted in a highly transactional category become as entertaining as it is rewarding?

Part of the answer lies in reconsidering the brand’s architecture.

“We need to shift from local verticals and product silos into a proper brand architecture. And that architecture can’t just be a hierarchy; it has to be baked into the campaign itself,” Jouanneau explains.

Its communications must also entertain, with each campaign built around a simple idea that can, ideally, stretch across multiple verticals and countries. Jouanneau says each vertical contains around 40 products, meaning the central idea has to accommodate considerable complexity while respecting Allwyn’s roots as a lottery-led business and leaving room for its future, including potential M&A activity.

“It also has to celebrate people’s emotions. That’s one of the reasons I joined this company,” she continues.

Allwyn’s first global campaign from F&B is expected before the end of the year. But its local markets remain an always-on focus. For Jouanneau, managing such a broad portfolio of projects begins with managing complexity. She quotes Warren Buffett: “If you don’t manage it, it will find you — and it will kill you.”

Her principles include building local equity and consumer trust through respect, creating value through both global and local brands, and recognising organisational reality.

The last of those means understanding each market’s level of digital maturity, trade structures, and definition of great marketing. “You can’t micromanage that,” she states, adding that it requires a set of non-negotiables around tone of voice and messaging, while allowing flexibility across formats, channels, and media mixes.

A career built on consumer centricity

Looking back over three decades in marketing, Jouanneau traces many of her fundamentals to P&G, where she began her career and spent around 15 years working across different roles and countries. Central to that education was the belief that “the consumer is the boss”.

At Duracell, she says she learnt financial control: eliminating waste and concentrating her energy on fewer, bigger bets.

Logitech presented a different challenge. There, tight brand budgets were spread across around 40 product innovations each year, demanding that every launch be brought to market efficiently without sacrificing effectiveness.

“When I step back and think about what matters for this job: globality — knowing how to manage a global brand; consumer-first focus; strong foundations for a young brand and company; curiosity for an iterative creative process, because emotions aren’t precise; and a deep understanding of the investment drivers in this category, which ties back to financial control, organisational building, and capability development,” she adds.

At Allwyn all those skills are now being put into practice – and tested.

The world of marketing according to Tatiana Jouanneau.

What are you most proud of so far?

I’d highlight a few things. First, I’m genuinely proud of bringing consumer‑first thinking into the company — not just as a philosophy, but through our first ever global consumer segmentation. Without revealing too much, we’ve identified one segment that’s sizable, homogeneous, reachable, and strongly revenue‑accretive. Among our five segments, that’s our design target: Soulful Beam. The name alone tells you a lot about how they engage with the category and entertainment more broadly.

Second, I’m proud that we’ve found a big campaign idea I truly love. It’s only the second time in my career — after maybe 20 campaigns — that I’ve felt this level of conviction.

Third, we’ve built a real agency ecosystem. VCCP [Roar] for consumer PR, VaynerMedia, a fresh partnership from April for social, and F&B from the Stagwell group as our newly appointed creative agency. Internally, there’s been a huge amount of work: understanding the team, getting close to people in the markets, walking in their consumer shoes through market visits, and building a more relationship‑driven organisation.

So overall: consumer, campaign, agency infrastructure, and the local teams across our markets. That is what I’m proud of.

What was the first campaign in your career that you fell in love with?

The first campaign I truly fell in love with was at Leo Burnett. They came in with two ideas, presented the first, and I stopped them immediately — I don’t want to hear the second one; I love this one so much. And it really happened.

It was 2008, and Procter & Gamble is still running the idea today, in an evolved form. At the time, I was working in Pakistan with three priorities. I delivered brilliantly on two, and completely failed on the third: creating feminine‑hygiene advertising that felt normal enough to be watched in Middle Eastern households. One TV, one family, and the moment anything “sensitive” appeared, the father or brother would switch the channel. My left‑brain approach — product, claim, superiority — simply didn’t work.

What I learned is that some of the best ideas come from emerging markets, where people speak openly about primary needs. I’d done extensive work in Africa on category normalisation: consumer interviews, conversations with local shamans who shaped cultural attitudes, and a lot of insight‑hunting. We discovered that to educate people, you had to entertain them.

So we created the category’s first musical; built on a real consumer insight. I’m a terrible singer, but the line went something like [she sings] “On the bus, I check; in the class, I check; every type, I check‑check‑check.”

It captured what women actually do. It was fun to watch, family‑friendly, and still delivered functional superiority and product demonstration — just in an entertaining way.

We launched it across the Middle East and Africa, and it later travelled into developing Asian markets. And that’s the campaign I’m still proud of.

So, what excites you most as a marketer?

What excites me most is a shift I believe is coming. I know the literature and the trends, but I have one personal conviction: marketing is heading toward its own version of quiet luxury.

Fashion spotted it first; brands built on quality, understatement, and elegance rather than noise. And with today’s tools: AI enablement, first‑ and third‑party data, impression standards, attention planning, I think marketing is moving from brand fame to brand meaning.

Less logo‑slapping. Less content hammered at you 30 times. Less unnecessary repetition. More meaning. More consumer‑tailored communication. We have so much content now that quantity has to become quality.

So for me, the future feels like the shift from loud branding to quiet luxury — from shouting to significance.

What is it that you look for that makes the perfect agency partner for you?

For me, this is where my P&G foundation kicks in. From day one there, the agency is a partner. You want someone who listens — of course — but also challenges you. None of us is smarter than all of us, and creative greatness matters.

Creativity is my first, second and third criterion. A big, grand creative idea tells you everything you need to know. If an agency brings you that kind of idea, it usually means they’re collaborative and they’ve understood what you want. If they deliver it quickly, they’re disciplined. And if the idea is simple enough to solve complex problems, they’re consumer‑first and strategically sharp.

So creativity isn’t just the output. It’s the signal of all the qualities underneath: partnership, discipline, strategic clarity and genuine consumer insight. That’s what makes the perfect agency partner.

How do you put together a brief for agencies, then, that encapsulates keeping the message simple?

For me, a good brief has a few things that must be true.

First, you start with the consumer. What’s the insight? What’s the underlying behaviour? What problem are we actually trying to solve? That’s the foundation.

Second, you set a clear creative ambition — and it has to be big. When I briefed the agency, I told them this is a once‑in‑a‑lifetime opportunity: we’re building a global brand on top of a sizable, growing revenue stream, backed by significant investment. We’re not competing with local lottery operators; we’re competing with the entertainment giants; Netflix, Disney. The ambition matters.

Third, you have to be fair and transparent about how the work will be evaluated. Agencies need to know what’s non‑negotiable for me, and where they have room to flex.

So the brief has three pillars: consumer truth, creative ambition, and clear evaluation criteria. If those are right, everything else follows.

Is there one campaign that has made you really jealous and make you wish you had done that?

There are plenty of campaigns I admire and learn from, especially from smaller brands that have to be bold because they don’t have huge budgets. Liquid Death is a great example. I also look closely at B2B brands when I’m thinking about websites. Pentagram and Notion are brilliant because they never sell features; they teach you how the workflow works. That’s the standard I’m aiming for.

Then there’s the courage of Burger King, You’re The New King, and Adidas, which shows how to use nostalgia without feeling dated. Nostalgia is a massive consumer trend, and they handle it beautifully.

But the one campaign that genuinely makes me jealous is a less‑known one in Europe: Rumoured for a Reason by Wieden + Kennedy New York for Miller Lite. I know the agency well, and they’re exceptional. The whole idea plays with gossip and rumour, and one execution sticks in my mind: a stylish guy opens his fridge, takes a selfie and says, “That’s the best light in the whole apartment.” It’s such a clever way to communicate functional superiority in a memorable, telegraphic moment.

It’s smart, simple, characterful, and exactly the kind of work that makes me think, I wish I’d done that.

So, what frustrates you most as a marketer, generally?

Here’s a tightened, polished version that keeps your tone, the impatience, the industry savvy, the forward‑looking energy, but removes the loops, filler and repetition. It now reads crisp, senior and intentional:

For me it’s not frustration, it’s impatience. 10 years ago, the industry was obsessed with impressions, and it took us years to align on standards. Today I’m fascinated by attention planning, and I want it embedded in campaign design from the start: an iterative process that lands the right level of attention before anything goes to testing, something I learned at Logitech.

But I’m impatient for the industry to agree on the model. What’s the standard? How do we move from fragmentation — especially in the US — to something more consolidated, like the UK, Australia, or the Nordics, who are far ahead in attention planning?

So it’s not frustration. I love the job. It’s more: we know this matters; let’s get there.