'I'm a Firm Believer In The Creative Process' - Pepsi Lipton's April Adams-Redmond

“Tea changes everything,” claims ice-tea brand Lipton in its most recent campaign, which is its biggest pivot in more than a decade. With a launch film that features the surprisingly playful side of a crew of pirates and what they would do instead of skulduggery, it’s an attempt by Lipton to grow its share of the beverage market and showcase its distinctiveness.

Evoking summer vibes, this strategy is being led by global chief marketing officer April Adams-Redmond, who tasked adam&eveDDB with developing a series of films that would showcase the sensory experience of drinking Lipton Ice Tea and how it could refresh any person’s mood. ‘Pirates’ is the first part of a campaign that aims to offer joy and positivity to consumers when they most need it.

Adams-Redmond has over 25 years of experience with blue chip brands, beginning as a marketing consultant to both Dell and Diageo before holding several roles across six years and Coca-Cola and then six-and-a-half years at Kerry Foods. Joining Unilever in 2017 as global brand vice president, the University of Adelaide Graduate spent nearly six years in the UK before relocating to the town of Zug in Switzerland in 2022 to work within another multinational consumer foods giant, PepsiCo.

But marketing wasn’t her initial plan, having set her sights on becoming a broadcast journalist before she realised it wasn’t quite as interesting a role as it seemed on TV. Then she stumbled into the world of marketing through an entry-level role where she quickly progressed up the career ladder from junior brand manager to CMO.

“It was around that knack of being able to spot an insight, sniff it out, and then figure out how to make magic around it and how to make money out of it. I’ve built a career on that really,” she explains.

Pepsi Lipton is a circa $4bn joint venture made up of a portfolio of three brands: leading ice tea Lipton; Pure Leaf – the number one ice tea brand in the US; and Brisk, which is also a significant ice tea player in the US. Despite being a global operation, she says the central marketing team is “really small and lean” predominantly based in the UK, with a European team and regional marketers located globally. There is also a central digital team as well as social hubs.  

While admitting not to be a trained marketer, Adams-Redmond does describe herself as “a naturally curious person”, who likes to challenge herself and to stay on the cutting edge of communications by listening to what consumers have to say and taking those insights to translate into commercial opportunities. This is something she believes that makes her a bit different from her marketing peers.

She talks to Creative Salon about her experiences as a CMO as well as offering insights on plans for the brand currently under her charge.

Creative Salon: You've worked across several major food and drink companies. What's been the greatest shift that you've seen? In terms of marketing across that sector?

AAR: The consumer has changed quite a lot, the amount of fragmentation in the media landscape, the amount of fragmentation in competition, and different things vying for consumer attention. It's grown exponentially. And, the ability to cut through and land a message with people it's become increasingly difficult. I'm really depressed, and I'm sure a lot of other marketers are too when looking at the average viewability rate of some of the digital content, it's under a second. What hope do we have as marketeers to land a message, even if it is something consumers need and want, when your ability to land a message in a second is very challenged? And difficult for our agencies as well.

CS: Which is one of the reasons why the Creator Economy is booming and brands are flocking to them. What do you enjoy most about being a marketer right now?

AAR: I really like the process of unlocking an insight or an unmet consumer need and then working with creative agencies and teams find ways to make it magical. I like the challenge of it. I’m quite interested in the challenge of doing hard things. I've never been one to gravitate toward easier things. I like harder challenges; it’s intellectually stimulating, and I like the creative process. I'm a very firm believer that the creative process is never a straight line, and that my job is very often to protect that process from getting derailed by many different inputs and voices. It's a challenge, but I quite like doing that. It's fun and I like seeing the outputs of a creative process.

CS: And what was the insight that drove you to introduce a new brand platform for Lipton?

AAR: I think partly because the brand wasn't performing. So the brand was struggling with the fundamental drivers of quality growth; market share under pressure, penetration not growing, brand equity - flat. There’s nothing to create a burning platform a business challenge, right? So, the business challenge really set the context for us to reground the brand back in its roots around the goodness of tea and fruit.... there's a book by Sir Thomas Lipton called ‘Leaves From The Lipton Log’ that's all about excerpts from his life.

He's the founder of Lipton, and I was really curious about understanding where everything started, and then how do we reflect that playful, spontaneous, quite entrepreneurial approach of the founder of the brand much more in the modern day. So bringing the brand back into that playful space, but also rerouting it back in the goodness of tea and fruit, which is really our differentiator, and beverage.

There are a lot of drinks out there, right? And a lot of different types of drinks, but there are very few drinks that are really made from tea and that have as much tea heritage as a brand like Lipton does. So, it was all about just getting back to the brand roots and figuring out how to reframe the brand roots for a modern take.

CS: You’ve come up with the statement ‘Tea Changes Everything’ which is quite empathetic. Where did that come from?

AAR: Tea has unique properties. It uniquely gives you an uplift, and at the same time, chills you out, calms you down. So, there's nothing like a good cup of tea to sort out the day, right? So we recognise that the properties of tea are uniquely up lifting, but not in a way that you would get from a cup of coffee or an energy drink, and we thought, ‘Well, let's just lean into that. What if we were to dramatise this unique lift and show in a slightly hyperbolic way, in line with the zany personality of Sir Thomas Lipton? What if we were to dramatise that and make that a point of distinction?’

CS: So was that the brief to the team at adam&eveDDB?

AAR: To dramatise the unique properties of this lift. That was basically the one line brief to the agency and then do it in a distinctively Lipton way. I remember the first creative meeting with the creative teams coming in and presenting, “What if we could lift the mood of a grumpy pirate? What if we could lift the mood of a villain? What could happen?”. Well, that could change a person and it could have a contagious effect on those people around them, and that could change everything. We know that tea can't change the world, but maybe it can make things a little bit better in the moment, right? And I think that's what they were trying to dramatise in a clever and creative way,

CS: Why did that resonate with you?

AAR: Well, it was the bravery of it, the creativity, the willingness to take the brand into a space where it would surprise people, and get people to reappraise the brand and get noticed. This ability to cut through in a sea of sameness was what appealed to me.

CS: While we’re talking about working with the agency, what is it for you that makes a really strong agency partnership?

AAR: It's the trio of a great strategic planner, a great client service person, but at the centre of it all, just really brilliant creativity and brave creativity. Because I think it's easy to do safe creativity. I think it's harder for creatives to try to do something different because they're like artists in some way. When you try to push yourself into a space that surprises people, it's a vulnerable space, right? So I think creatives that are willing to be vulnerable and brave and take some risks, is just the heartbeat of any great agency.

CS: Is there another campaign or piece of work out there that you've not been involved with that really made you jealous? That made you think, ‘Oh, I wish I'd been involved in that.’

AAR: I often look at some smaller brands for inspiration. So Duolingo and e.l.f. really. I love the way that they leverage community to build brands, and I'm very inspired by that. In fact, I've been challenging adam&eveDDB with how we think differently about how we build the brand through community like Duolingo does. I'm always really interested, because these aren't brands with massive budgets either. When you're in a PepsiCo, Unilever, or a Diageo, you're obviously thinking of massive budgets, and yes, they're helpful, but they're not always necessary. I mean, you see these brands doing really clever, creative things, and they're doing it in clever ways.

CS: What frustrates you most about marketing or being a marketer?

AAR: There are two elements to it. I think one is being able to see the impact tangibly, to ensure that the marketing team gets proper credit for the work. I think demonstrating marketing return on investment is an art and a science, and it's not always straightforward, but it's necessary in business today. So that frustrates me a little bit that we don't have all the tools at our disposal to be able to do that quickly. Sometimes it's playing a bit of a long game and brand building is a long game. And trying to convince a CEO or a board that this is really good for brand building long term, but then you don't see the results for a year or two down the road. It's a little bit challenging to justify the investment.

And I think the second thing would be just the vulnerability of being a marketeer, because I think very often marketing ends up being, well, everybody's got an opinion. When you try to do something brave in marketing, there's a million judges out there, but very few people that are empowering of the marketeers and are always judging the creatives and agencies as well. I always feel for them. It was like putting your work on the line in front of an audience that judgment on work that you spent time and invest a lot of your personal effort into. I just think the vulnerability of it is sometimes challenging. It's not so much for me, because I think over time, it builds up a very thick skin. But for my more junior marketeers, I always feel for them. I've been there. I know what that feels like, you know? And it's tough.

CS: Finally, what excites you most for the future?

AAR: I think what excites me most is the ability to take the creative platform of ‘Tea changes everything’ to the next level. I think we're only just getting started. Sometimes platforms start out and it takes a little bit of time to really build momentum. I'm looking forward to what comes next. I feel like we're at the cusp of some really exciting things beyond what we've already done.