The Marketing Geniuses Behind Burger King and Anheuser-Busch Reveal Their Trade Secrets, to Each Other

It’s rare to hear unguarded conversations between two of the industry’s leading CMOs. How often do major marketers truly let loose during press interviews or run-of-the-mill conference panels? That's why Brandweek is asking world-class CMOs to interview one another: to find out what keeps them up at night, why they aren't using agencies of record anymore and how they are making failure a part of their process. In this issue, we've paired Anheuser-Busch InBev’s U.S. CMO, Marcel Marcondes, with Burger King’s CMO, Fernando Machado. (3G Capital's founders have a stake in A-B InBev; 3G Capital owns Burger King's parent company, Restaurant Brands International.) The two men worked together at Unilever in Brazil and just partnered on a campaign to revive Budweiser’s beloved “Whassup” with a cameo from the Burger King king himself. If you’re wondering, yes, this conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, kicked off with the two executives shouting “Whassup” at each other. —Kristina Monllos Fernando Machado, Burger King: What would you say was, in the recent past, the AB InBev campaign that caused the biggest impact? Would you say it was [Bud Light’s] Dilly Dilly? Marcel Marcondes, Anheuser-Busch InBev: It was Dilly Dilly. We saw this penetrating in all different elements of culture. One great symptom of something really deeply connecting to culture is ramifications in local culture. So Dilly Dilly became Philly Philly in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Eagles won this year in the Super Bowl for the first time, and Philly Philly became their rallying cry. What do you think is your biggest hit recently? Machado: Probably Google Home of the Whopper. We used a 15-second TV spot one night only to create a global conversation around the Whopper. In essence, it was just a product spot and we ended up [creating conversation] because we were breaking the fourth wall. We were playing with technology. Despite the fact that there were, like, less than a million Google Homes back then, we ended up getting 10 million impressions. [It] made people talk about the product, and it was fun. People truly engaged to the point that people changed the description of the Whopper sandwich on Wikipedia just to make fun of us, which we embrace because we are in the era of engagement and not of interruption. [kickout id="1"] [kickout id="2"] Marcondes: We don’t have the luxury of time anymore. This changes dramatically the way marketers should get their work done. They jump in whenever they see an opportunity, or it’s too late. How do you see that [affecting the way] you do things at Burger King? Machado: We like to believe that we are pushing to move at the speed of pop culture. [That] requires you to have your finger on the pulse of pop culture and try to identify what people are going to be talking about and trying to insert the brand in a relevant way to make the brand part of the conversation, sometimes even hijack the conversation itself. It does require a different profile of people, in terms of being in tune with what’s happening out there. It does require a different type of agency in the sense that you need to move really fast. Marcondes: Here, we’ve been trying to dramatically change the way we get things done. We’re relying much more on social listening versus on traditional research. Also, to be able to connect to modern times, not only do we need to be much more agile, [but] we also need to change the KPIs we track. Maybe the most important KPI to track is what you said is the “talk-ability.” Are people really talking about what we do? This is becoming much more important for us than the traditional KPIs. [kickout id="3"] Machado: It’s funny because the old ways are so ingrained on people. I get questions like, aren’t we concerned with the fact that people are watching less TV? Aren’t we concerned that the Netflix and Amazon Primes of this world don’t allow for advertising? Usually, when someone asks something like that, I feel that the person is still living on the old paradigm where paid media and interruption in one-way communication, with the advertiser communicating to people, is the most predominant way of communication. When actually what you’re describing, which is to insert the brand in conversations, you need to be fast and furious if you’re going to do that because the conversation never stops. If you’re part of the conversation and if you’re surfing pop culture, you’re not interrupting anyone. You are adding value. Marcondes: Many people would say that we live in an environment that is averse to creativity. How do you feel that in your routine? How does company culture influence creative work? Machado: Prior to coming here, I spent my whole life at Unilever. The cultures are definitely different from each other. Coming here, everyone had the ambition of doing cool things for Burger King. When I started, [the CEO] said that the main job that we had to do was to make the brand cool again. But there is a difference between saying that and managing to take the leap that is required. Doing things different brings uncertainty to the table. Uncertainty brings fear, and fear brings many no’s. We started slow. We started with one campaign and then another campaign, and then people start to feel more comfortable. But the ambition was always there. What’s your experience? Marcondes: At the beginning, marketing was more a support function here, and now the company has fully matured in the spirit of understanding that marketing must be in the driver's seat. What about agencies? How do you see this transformation happening with the agencies? Machado: Our case is not a very common one. We have around 17,000 restaurants for Burger King, but we only own 50; all the others are franchised. In most of our key markets, we have a master franchisee. The master franchisee has a marketing team who is empowered to pick an agency for the country. So we have a range of agencies, which is different than my experience at Unilever, when I used to work probably with just one or two agencies. With the model that we have, what I see is agencies are evolving. They are super-fast, agile, nimble—they throw ideas at us all the time. We have ongoing briefs with the agency, which is not very common. Today we have more ideas than we can deploy, and it’s working. What about you? [kickout id="5"] Marcondes: If we take the amount of agencies times the amount of brands we have in the portfolio as well, we end up having something like 50 partners working with us too. We talk about the ideas first in a neutral way. It’s less important what the specific brief is and more important for them to know what the brand stands for. The best idea wins. Specifically, for Budweiser, we don’t have an agency of record anymore. We have a fixed roster of four or five different agencies that are constantly working in a creative environment so that we always have different ideas coming from different points of view. This year, we had two pieces of content that went to the Super Bowl coming from two different agencies. Creativity requires partnership, it requires trust, so we need to build the relationship with our partners and it takes time. Machado: Do you have agencies collaborating together on one idea? Lots of people come to me and ask, "Isn’t it difficult to make different agencies collaborate together on the same project?" Well, to be in our roster, one of the criteria is that you need to be able to collaborate. Marcondes: Two months ago, we did our very first agency summit. We brought all of our agency partners together in the same room to deliver this message: From now on it’s going to be all about collaboration, all about making sure that the idea is the only thing that matters. If you do this right, your partners will believe that it’s worth collaborating because you will be fair in the way you make the decision. Machado: What are the things that worry you? What keeps you awake at night? Marcondes: How to really do things that are relevant and attention-grabbing is something that keeps me up at night, because it appears to me like the team needs to be working under a constant state of learning and evolving. There’s not such a thing anymore as a recipe in terms of how to build brands. Attention and also leading and developing the industry are the two big things that keep me up at night. What about you? [kickout id="4"] Machado: All the work that we are doing in terms of improving the quality of our food. We are fast food, and we come with the stigma that the food is not good, when happily that’s not really the case. We are doing a lot of work in terms of cleaning up the ingredients, thinking about the nutrition, thinking about sustainable sourcing and lots of other things, which may not be as glamorous as advertising, but it has to be done. Today I spend more time on that than on advertising, but people don’t necessarily see that. When I think about fast food and the killers of our industry 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if you want to be competitive we need to continue to evolve on that front. [Another thing is digital technology] disrupting our industry in the restaurant, the drive-through, the way we connect with people through the mobile app from Burger King—all those things. Self-ordering kiosks [will have] an impact on the way we design the restaurant, the way we advertise to people, and it’s evolving really fast. Marcondes: Coming back to our conversation on the role of the CMO, I’d like to say that actually the CMO role should maybe become the CCO role, which is a chief consumer officer. What we do is pay attention to whatever is relevant to our consumers, and as a consequence of that we are the ones that have to act. We just launched the very first organic beer in the market with Michelob Ultra. [We just launched] the first partnership between Budweiser and Jim Beam doing beer aged in bourbon barrels. We just launched Bud Light Lime and Orange brewed for the very first time with real citrus peels exactly to make beer more natural and healthier. It’s all driven by marketing as a consequence of deeply understanding the needs of the consumers. Really, the role of the CMO is way bigger than it used to be before, and this is a critical thing for the longevity of our profession. Machado: Part of the role of the CMO is to be able to identify those trends and traps in the marketplace—things that are not necessarily causing an impact today, but if you don’t start doing the work today it will be too late. Marcondes: We just created a group that is called Apollo 11 here. We have a specific team that is separated from the day-to-day business, only developing new ideas, and the criterion is these new ideas need to have potential to become the next big thing. We need to have long-term thinking, and we need to take our chances. Machado: Coming back to that, how do you guys deal with failure? Marcondes: We learn from the mistakes we make so that we can do better next time. [We’re aiming] to be proud of the mistakes we make instead of regretting them. Let’s spend much more time and energy and money developing more pilots so that we can try out new things. Let’s fail faster, and let’s not be afraid of failing. We’re trying to bring failure literally into our routine in an organized way so that we can calculate the risks. What about you? Machado: We are really open and transparent about failures. Failure in a project is something acceptable as long as you are doing a new mistake. That’s the mind-set that you need when you’re trying to predict the future, when you’re trying to do innovation that will disrupt the marketplace—because when you’re trying to do those things, the chances of failing are much higher because you are going into uncharted territory. In advertising, in technology, in design, we try different things, many of which don’t work. And it’s good because we learn.

Brandweek

The Marketing Geniuses Behind Burger King and Anheuser-Busch Reveal Their Trade Secrets, to Each Other

Fernando Machado and Marcel Marcondes get candid

Kristina Monllos

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Kristina Monllos