Here, B&T hands the reigns to Kate Smither, also known as The Tall Planner, for an inspiring chat with her former colleague, legendary marketer Fernando Machado on the eve of his eagerly anticipated keynote at Cannes in Cairns, Presented by Pinterest.
I had the absolute privilege and pleasure of working with the brilliant Fernando Machado in London over a decade ago. I was a Global Planning Partner on Dove at Ogilvy and he was a Global Brand Development Vice President on Dove at Unilever.
The last time we had a chat, we were celebrating the success of Dove Real Beauty Sketches in Cannes, probably over a rose or two, and in a club where “Girls Run the World” was playing on high rotation, so as he heads to Australia, to be a keynote speaker at Cannes in Cairns, it felt like a good time to have another chat and a (virtual) vino. It also felt like the perfect chance for me to ask him all the big questions that have been rattling around in my brain as I watched his career go from strength to strength, since those days at Unilever house on Victoria Embankment
So, here goes…
Want to hear Machado’s keynote? There’s still time to grab your Cannes in Cairns tickets!
Kate Smither: First things first, Fernando huge congrats on being inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. Very well earned indeed!! I hope you are still celebrating just a bit.
Fernando Machado: Thank you! It was a huge honour indeed. It was fun to be in New York a couple of weeks ago for the event. The reality is that I feel very lucky to have worked with people who always had the patience to coach me and teach me what I’ve learned. Steve Miles, Simon Clift, Silvia Lagnado – the list is very long.
I also feel lucky to have worked with some of the best in the business, both as creative partners and as part of my team. Being inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame is amazing. But marketing is a team sport. No one does anything alone. So I feel this was a recognition to everyone I had the chance to work with and a celebration of creative marketing, which is the school I subscribe to.
KS: You’ve always championed creativity and the change it can make to businesses. Now that you are officially in the Hall of Fame, what do you hope your legacy as a marketer is?
FM: I honestly don’t think much about that. I mean, I just focus on doing my best in terms of creating enterprise value for the brands I work for. And to accomplish that I feel that I need to create an environment where creativity can flourish. That has to do with culture, people, processes, among many other things.
I believe that the legacy that any CMO should aspire to have is to leave behind a company that is more creative and thus able to create more value than before, even after they have left. So if you ask me what I hope my legacy as a marketer becomes, I would say that I hope it inspires more people to embrace creativity in marketing.
KS: You’ve worked on brands that attract huge creative attention and success, ones that have had moments of fame and are due for their next ones like Dove, or ones that deserve moments of fame like Burger King and NotCo. How do you know what work to make? When you get a call from NZ with an idea about the McWhopper how do you know what work to buy and how to buy it? How do you know what the next moment of fame for the brand is?
FM: I think you can only do great ideas consistently over time if you have clarity in terms of the positioning of your brand, an aligned vision of the strategic priorities for the company or the brand, and the right team to pull it off. Dove, Vaseline, Burger King, Call of Duty, NotCo, among other brands I had the opportunity to work with, all had a clear brand positioning.
Creativity should not be developed in a vacuum without brand positioning and a clear brief aligned with the business’s strategic priorities. When it comes to judging the ideas, I think understanding your consumer/target audience, understanding pop culture and having good creative criteria can help increase the chances of picking ideas that will have voltage. It’s never a guarantee, but if you ask yourself things like ‘Will people talk about this idea with their friends?”’or ‘Can I see the news covering this idea organically?’ and if you put on the side wishful thinking, you can increase your chances of choosing the right ones.
Also, one needs to be mindful that when great ideas are born, they are very fragile. You need to nurture them. Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” was very different when it was first presented than what we ended up executing. We nurtured it. We knew there was something there and we worked as partners with our agencies to make it better and better and better.
It was the same thing for “Whopper Detour” or “Moldy Whopper” or “McWhopper”. It would be very easy to ‘kill’ any of these ideas when they were first presented. But we as a team saw the potential. We could see people talking about the ideas. We could see press covering organically these ideas. And the ideas were well connected to our briefs and strategic priorities, thus they got funded. But we need space and trust to build these ideas and turn them into the success they became. It’s not easy. If it were easy everyone would be doing it.
KS: And on the other side, how do you know what not to buy? And what the boundaries of a brand’s creative potential are — or doesn’t it matter?
FM: Well, first we are a total pain in the neck when it comes to creativity. We try to avoid at all cost to do things that have been done before. And we are obsessed about creativity and design, so we have seen and done a lot. Second, we need to make sure the idea is delivering against a specific objective, that it is helping us achieve one of our priorities. We cannot simply jump on ideas in the absence of that.
KS: From Vaseline to Dove to Burger King and NotCo, many of the brands you have worked with have had clear purpose-driven focuses. Dove and the mission to make beauty a source of happiness not anxiety for women, Burger King with your reframe to make the brand champion the core idea “Be your way” vs “ have it your way” and the original Vaseline skin work that still lives on as recently expressed by Louis Piereck’s work “Skins for skin.” What difference does brand purpose make?
FM: Life is too short for you not to be working on something that can create a positive impact on people and society. And there is plenty of data that points to the fact that brands that have a purpose have the potential to perform better than the ones that don’t have one.
But the purpose needs to be linked to what the brand can deliver. The purpose should also be something that the company truly believes in. That’s the only way to deliver against it in an authentic way. At Dove, you could ask anyone what they are up to and most people would answer ‘We are here to make women feel more beautiful.’
KS: And what role and responsibility do brands have to take on societal issues such as same-sex rights, self-esteem or animal cruelty? How far is too far on purpose and how far is too far for brands?
FM: I think it really depends on what can the brand deliver in terms of products/services and on how much the company/brand believes in it.
KS: What brand or business taught you the most in your career? What was the moment when you realised you were good “at this marketing thing?”
FM: Ha! I think the person who taught me the most in my career has been Steve Miles. It was not a brand or business, it was a person. Steve was my boss for around three years when I worked for Vaseline. Then he was my boss again during my four years at Dove. And he continues to be a friend and a mentor. I wish we had time to connect more often, to be honest with you.
I think the moment of realisation to me was not around ‘I am good at this marketing thing’. I think the moment of realization was more like ‘I could be good at this marketing thing’. It was more like a ‘fake it till you make it’ than a moment of accomplishment. I grew up being good with numbers. My dad was an engineer and I ended up studying engineering. But I always had a creative side to me. I love drawing, I was the type of kid who sat on the back and was always drawing and making jokes during the class.
My first real job was an internship at a Unilever laundry detergent factory in the countryside of São Paulo in Brazil. And one day the marketing team came to visit and presented the innovation plan, the design, the advertising and everything they were working on around the products we were manufacturing at the factory. That was the realisation moment for me. I had no idea about marketing before. But seeing that they had data, insights, P&L plus design, advertising and conceptual thinking, made me feel like ‘Hey, maybe I could be good at this marketing thing’. I always had this duality. And I firmly believe that you need that to do well in marketing.
KS: How do you stay good in a fast-changing world where tech, agencies, marketing and creativity all shift every minute?
FM: I am terrible at predicting the future. But I am pretty good at focusing on the things I believe will not change. So I am curious about change and new things, especially technology. But I try to master the more fundamental things in marketing, such as crafting a strong brand positioning, briefing, influencing and building a great relationship with creative partners, among others. In a world that constantly changes, having a solid base can help.
KS: And for those big defining moments or brands, how do you let them go? I mean you’re always part of their narrative and their brand story but how do you disconnect when you leave them given you invest so much into them? Or am I just being too sentimental because I always watch closely what brands I’ve worked on do next?
FM: I am the type of person who can spend hours and hours in the supermarket. I check every single product and brand. I check even product categories I never worked on. Yes, I know, I am kind of odd. So naturally I always keep an eye on the brands and categories I worked on. Also, our world is very small. So I do have a good connection with the folks who now manage brands I worked with in the past. In many cases, I helped build their teams or part of their teams. It ties back to the legacy question. I want them to succeed. If things collapse after you leave you probably haven’t done your job as a leader that well.
KS: Finally, two things. The first is a question of what you wished you’d worked on. Is there a brand that got away?
FM: I don’t know. I think there are so many cool brands out there. And even when they are not cool, that also poses an interesting challenge to the marketing team. I am very passionate about our industry. And as a Brazilian, I am hopelessly optimistic. So I see opportunity everywhere.
KS: And lastly, when it comes to Australian creativity and the industry here what do you admire about it? And what Aussie brand piques your curiosity the most?
FM: Well, I was a massive fan of the work Carlton Draught used to do. I love “Play It Safe” from the Sydney Opera House. And, since my wife is Australian and we have small kids, Bluey is pretty much always on here. I don’t necessarily follow the brands from Australia, but there are some people I do admire and always try to keep an eye on what they are up to. Brent Smart and Mark Ritson are two of them, for example.
