The US project was wide-ranging, also including an element to incubate start-ups internally, but Bough has started exporting the program to other markets, adapting it to suit the maturity of the local internet landscape, as well as Mondelez’s on-ground sales. Brazil was next, followed late last year by a partnership with the Asia-Pacific branch of ad agency network, Ogilvy and Mather. Mondelez imported its Latin American digital incubator, Fly Garage, to become the cornerstone partner for Ogilvy’s K1nd initiative, a recently hatched technology and design-oriented brand development unit. The partnership is being piloted in Australia and Southeast Asia.

China, with its own lively and quite distinct mobile ecosystem, could be next for a localized collaborative push. It’s a critical battleground that also doubles up as a classroom for the future of global marketing. “This market not only has ambition but also a level of innovation and pace of change that we are not seeing any other place in the world,” Bough says. “Let’s be brutally honest,” he adds. “It also has a totally different ecosystem of media partners on the digital and mobile front, which are taking lessons from the US and leapfrogging them. There is a lot to learn here. I firmly believe in a China-Out strategy. I see this continuing to be the marketing powerhouse for the future.”

As part of Mondelez’s digital transformation, Bough has already struck global deals with the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter, vast networks for digital distribution, but these power-players have little sway inside the world’s largest internet market, where local giants such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent rule the roost. These companies, already amongst the largest in China, have international aspirations too, Bough points out. Tencent’s popular mobile messaging app Weixin, marketed as WeChat outside China, is spending big, signing up football icon Lionel Messi to help promote the brand across growth markets in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. It won’t be long before Mondelez starts inking global deals with internet titans from China as well as the US, Bough speculates, although plugging into the innovation and fresh thinking coming out of China’s massive market, driven by a competitive intensity unseen in the US, is just as important. “This market is going to dictate different philosophies for us to think globally,” Bough contends. “There are sometimes not clear market leaders like [image-sharing site] Pinterest, for example. There are four of them in China, all driving different types of innovation. Pinterest does not have competition, there is no big innovation being driven there. It’s forcing us to think differently.”

That doesn’t mean Bough is neglecting other key markets. India for example is home to some of Mondelez’s most effective mobile marketing pushes, Bough points out, including work on the localized version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, still one of India’s most popular TV shows, and a partnership with Twitter around the IPL, the country’s biggest annual cricket tournament. India may lag China in terms of internet and smartphone penetration, but that’s no reason to hold back. “Text is a huge platform, and an underutilized platform to be honest,” Bough says. “At the end of the day, there is a very similar strategic approach or imperative around this device, but with just a different creative delivery.”