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.
Read more at AdWeek: https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/marketing-geniuses-behind-burger-king-and-anheuser-busch-get-candid-for-inaugural-cmo-to-cmo/
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