The Wizard of Whopper

Fernando Machado is the marketing genius who turned Burger King (and Popeyes!) into a buzzy, relevant, always-on-point brand. Here’s how he pulls it off.

- By Liz Brody

Burger King had a big announcement to make: It was removing artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives from its Whoppers. But the company was in a bind. The other burger chain had already, how shall we say, McDone the same thing. If Burger King simply ran ads pushing its fresh food, that wouldn’t have much impact. At worst, it would be seen as trailing its competitor.

What could it do to steer the conversation? Burger King’s marketing team started confabbing on WhatsApp, their chat tool of choice, where some of their most creative brainstormings take place. That’s where they pulled in three agencies and worked out a plan. You likely saw the result: On February 19, Burger King released ads of its famous burger, now liberated from additives, rotting over 34 days—growing fuzzy and putrid with greenish, purplish mold, eventually slumping into itself.

Stomachs everywhere lurched. That day, Twitter mentions of Burger King more than tripled, and a week later, they were still up 22 percent over the previous seven days, according to social media analytics company Sprout Social, which crunched the data for Entrepreneur. The press went crazy, too, with coverage in Forbes, CNN, People, and The New York Times. As it turns out, nothing cuts through the fast-food noise like mold.

But this was just another day at Burger King HQ in Miami. The brand has become known for pushing out-there marketing campaigns that hijack the culture’s fleeting attention span and, as a result, boost business long-term. And now the same live-wire marketing is coming out of Popeyes, which, like Burger King, is owned by RBI, a fast-food parent company with $5.6 billion in revenues last year.

The secret sauce? A Brazilian soccer nut named Fernando Machado.