The ‘King of Cannes’, who has won more than 200 lions in a glittering career, has advised marketers to follow five golden rules in a standout session at Cannes in Cairns, Presented by Pinterest, yesterday.
There are some basic rules that marketers should follow to get ahead in an increasingly complex and under-pressure role, argues one of the industry’s top global CMOs.
These are: know your brand; write proper agency briefs; use technology for the right reason; be curious; and, ‘deliver the rice and beans first’.
Fernando Machado is the former global CMO of Activision, Burger King and led global development for Dove Skin Cleansing and Care.
He has overseen marketing campaigns that have won more than 200 Cannes Lions, including five grand prixes.
Award-winning campaigns under Machado’s watch at Burger King include the ‘Moldy Whopper’, which showed that a Whopper burger will become moldy over time because it is not loaded with preservatives, a gentle swipe at its golden arches rival.
In his presentation on the first day at Cannes in Cairns, Machado spoke about the challenges marketeers face today.
“Doing a TV spot is a tiny little fraction of the time that we spend in terms of everything we have to do and know,” he said. This includes “attribution of the channel, agency models, conversion, media fragmentation, AI, and I could keep going on and on about how much more complicated it has become”.
He added: “I would say the life of a marketeer (over my career) has become more difficult.”
Machado said there is a huge disconnect between what he learned by plying his trade as a marketer to what CEO’s think marketers should do.
“Sometimes the CMO doesn’t even report to the CEO, which I personally find a mistake,” he added. “How many CMOs you know became CEOs? I think I know one or two… usually the CEO comes from a background of finance, or sales or he was a GM.”
Machado said that it is often very difficult for marketers to prove that investments in marketing will lead to an increase in ROI, and called on agency partners to be more understanding.
“People on the agency side should have some empathy for [the challenges marketeers face] and try to understand what goes on on the client side, because people like me have to have the work approved to make it happen. But I’m really shit at predicting the future,” he said.
“So what I really like to do is try to focus on the things that are not going to change and the fundamentals of marketing.”
Top five tips
Machado’s first tip for marketers is “know your brand”.
“If the brand is a heritage brand like Dove, which was born in 1957, or Burger King, which was born in 1954, usually doing a little bit of brand anthropology…helps you understand why people think what the (brand stands for).”
An example is that when Machado became Burger King CMO, by asking consumers on the street he lesrnt that the Whopper had a stronger brand image than ‘Burger King’.
Under Machado’s watch, Burger King grew its annual brand growth from 3 per cent to 7 per cent, closing the gap on McDonald’s to just two percentage points. 
The second tip is to prepare good, concise briefs for agency partners, rather than a 75-page brief in which “nothing good ever came of it”.
For example, a plant-based mayonnaise that has zero market share with a simple goal in the brief: “to taste exactly like mayo”. This was illustrated in a bold campaign at his previous role at NotCo by testing it on mayonnaise haters.
Machado’s third tip is to “deliver the rice and beans first”. This is a Brazilian analogy for making sure that marketing investment delivers “sales and traffic” – lower funnel activity – to build trust to the c-suite before longer-term brand building activity can be sold in.
“What a lot of people get wrong sometimes is they see the world through the lens of our awards shows, or being in Advertising Age. What they don’t realise is that 95 per cent of the time you are breaking rocks (lower funnel activity) and only 5 per cent of the time doing cool shit,” he said.
“It you’re doing well driving sales and profitability, it gives you credibility to be able to do more long term stuff. If the short term is not working, it is very hard to deal with the long term.”
Another tip, Machado argues, is that marketers should avoid ‘shiny and new’ technology for the sake of it, like the metaverse, unless it makes sense for the business. He used an example of a bank creating a branch on the metaverse as a misguided activation, “who wild want to go there, not me”,
“Sometimes we get so excited about the technology or what we can do, that we forget to think about should we do it and what value it adds,” he said.
His final tip is to always be curious: “I’m super curious, which by the way, I think is one of the key characteristics for a marketeer to succeed is to be curious, and always learning.”
