CUSTOMER STORY
How Anheuser-Busch Optimizes Multi-Brand Web Workflows with Super Bowl Scale
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Anheuser-Busch adopted Builder and saw
20 Sites
published in the first 8 months
0 Tickets
needed to ship new pages
$130k+ saved
on development and shipping costs
Industry
Beverage
About Anheuser-Busch
Anheuser-Busch is one of America's most iconic companies. It holds a leading position in the U.S. beer industry with popular brands and breweries such as Budweiser, Michelob, Busch, Stella Artois, and Goose Island.
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Anheuser-Busch is one of America's most iconic companies. It holds a leading position in the U.S. beer industry with popular brands and breweries such as Budweiser, Michelob, Busch, Stella Artois, and Goose Island.
To build leading web experiences across dozens of brands, Tyler Hozie, Director of Technology at Anheuser-Busch, helped shift the company to a headless multi-brand architecture with SvelteKit and Builder.io that allowed developers to quickly build and iterate, and brand teams to launch content autonomously. Hozie, a technology leader in Anheuser-Busch’s cross-functional martech web team discussed:
- Why Anheuser-Busch shifted from a monolithic digital experience platform (DXP) to a headless multi-brand architecture
- How they decided SvelteKit and Builder.io was the best framework and headless CMS combination for their use case
- How they seamlessly launched and scaled many sites that can handle Super Bowl traffic
The Challenge
Simplify Web Development And Content Workflows Without Compromising Enterprise Scalability
The goal was to find the right solution not just for our web team, but for the brand teams and everyone involved.
— Tyler Hozie, Director of Technology at Anheuser-Busch
n March 2020, the martech web team was tasked with managing 24 brand websites on Anheuser-Busch’s monolithic digital experience platform (DXP), but faced several challenges:
- Even simple code deployments took two weeks. Because they were required to go through a cumbersome process with their previous platform and architecture, getting a single code deployment to market took two weeks. Even after focusing on optimizing the process, deployments still took a full week to get live.
- Developers couldn’t reuse components across brand sites. Their monolithic platform didn’t allow them to reuse components across sites, so if they needed to make a cascading change, they needed to manually update each site individually.
- The platform required niche expertise to manage. Because the platform had become a complex web, it was labor intensive to make minor web updates. And, because the platform and its code base required specific niche expertise to wield, contractor costs, on top of platform costs, racked up from the small changes. For example, in one case, it caused thousands of dollars just to add a font to a website. The Anheuser-Busch team was hitting a point where they nearly needed a full-time DevOps person just to manage the platform.
- The platform created a slow experience for visitors, especially on mobile devices. Because the platform server rendered pages from a single origin and had become bloated with code and functionality that the team didn’t need, the sites performed poorly.
We needed to have the visual side again, where our brand teams could go in and easily make updates… they shouldn’t need to create a ticket every time they need to update an image or create a new page.
— Tyler Hozie, Director of Technology at Anheuser-Busch
Hozie knew Anheuser-Busch needed a new platform that made it easier to develop and iterate many sites. In 2022, when their monolithic DXP contract was coming to a close, they decided to take control of their tech stack, bring development in-house, and fully rebuild all of their websites. Initially the lean team shifted all 24 sites to a static site generator without a CMS and worked to hook each up to a headless CMS, but they still faced challenges with the first headless CMS they procured:
- Developers had to keep getting involved for minor changes. In a perfect world, there would be a component for everything every brand ever needed, but most who have worked with a headless CMS, especially across dozens of sites, know that there are always edge cases and having a reusable component for every case slows development and adds component bloat. The Anheuser-Busch team needed a way to balance creating high-impact reusable components that are easy to manage without having to create a component for every one-off edge case.
- Content editors didn’t have a visual editing experience. To scale across the organization, the martech web team needed to work with a variety of technical competencies. Content editors who had technical expertise in web development could pick up the new headless CMS workflows, but those new to a headless CMS needed significant hands-on training to feel comfortable with the workflow. Setting up a preview environment helped, but still required significant training and frequent ongoing iterations to make sure content editors could quickly visualize their edits in context.
- Scaling to dozens of brands was prohibitively expensive. To set up and manage dozens of spaces with many content types that could scale across all of their spaces, the Anheuser-Busch martech web team found that after they scaled to all sites, they would likely be paying as much for their new headless CMS as they were for their costly monolithic DXP.
The Anheuser-Busch team needed a CMS that:
- Allowed web developers to quickly ship and iterate across sites. The web developers on the martech team needed to simplify the way they built, tested, and deployed, and iterated code so they could increase their release cadence from weekly to hourly. They needed a platform that kept their code clean, enabled them to reuse components across brands, and allowed them to make an update in one place and have it reliably, and safely update across multiple brand sites. For example, if they built a carousel component for one brand, they wanted a way to quickly allow other brands to use that component with their own custom branding and still make on-brand tweaks.
- Gave content teams a visual editing experience. Despite having a positive relationship with each brand team, after implementing the first non-visual headless CMS, the web team was inundated with tickets to create custom components for important, but one-off, use cases specific to a single campaign on a single brand’s site. To reduce the amount of tickets they were getting, they needed a headless CMS that allowed content teams to more quickly self-serve editing, previewing, and customizing content and components without having to submit a ticket.
- Helped them meet mobile Lighthouse score goals. Hozie and team determined that a headless Jamstack approach, where the front-end of the web experience is decoupled from the back-end, supported performance improvements that allowed them to hit their goal of mobile Lighthouse scores of at least 50 across all sites. The CMS had to be headless and it had to have performance improvements like built-in image optimization.
- Cost-effectively scaled to dozens of brands and handled Super Bowl traffic. The many-brand CMS needed to make business sense, achieving economies of scale, and it needed to be enterprise-ready with features such as multiple environments and auto-scaling so they could feel confident driving traffic from people scanning QR codes on their Super Bowl ads.
The Solution
An Enterprise-Ready Multi-Brand Web Architecture With Builder.io And SvelteKit
Builder makes everyone's lives easier, it makes it easier for us to maintain, and it makes it easier for the brand teams to maintain.
— Tyler Hozie, Director of Technology at Anheuser-Busch
After completing their journey from a monolithic DXP to Hugo to a headless CMS and finally to Builder, Anheuser-Busch:
- Made it easy for developers to build once and deliver to many sites. For a lean team managing dozens of brand sites, every decision needs to have scale in mind. Now, each sprint, the cross-functional team reviews the latest designs and decides to build it. With Builder they have the flexibility they need to allow designers to create it as a reusable symbol, code and deliver it as a shared component, or use a traditional headless data model. The ability to easily switch between spaces and use components across each is making it faster to build once, update everywhere. It has also made it easier to stay within the corporate digital guideline principles that govern compliance and legal standards.
- Gave everyone autonomy to build and ship experiences with content. With the Builder.io visual headless CMS, designers, project managers, content authors, and brand teams now ship landing pages and digital campaigns on their own. They can make changes on their own using custom components or the reusable Builder symbols. Now that other Anheuser-Busch brands have seen the successes of other brands with the platform, they have asked to accelerate the adoption of Builder-enabled sites. Even non-brand teams are using Builder. For example, the martech web team set up the benefits team with their own Builder site. Hozie said, “We set up the site, passed it off to the team to use, and then we don’t hear from them for another three or four months.”
- Achieved performance standards on mobile devices across all sites. By going headless, using SvelteKit, and using the built-in image optimization from Builder.io, the web team achieved their mobile performance score goals for all sites using Builder.
- Cost-effectively scaled to many brands and for Super Bowl traffic. Eight months in, the Anheuser-Busch team has scaled to 20 sites already with Builder, they successfully drove traffic from three Super Bowl ads to their sites during the 2023 Super Bowl without batting an eye, and saved at least $130k by deprecating a drag-and-drop page building tool teams were using to work around their old platform to launch new websites for campaigns. According to Hozie, “the biggest thing that’s come of it is that brands are coming to us and want to move to it. We create the structure for them and then let them take it from there because they are the ones who know their brand and what they need most.”
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