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Fernando Machado
CMO | Burger King
Two words best sum up Machado’s year: “Whopper Detour.” The
award-winning campaign, which nabbed a Grand Prix in the Direct Lions
and six gold Lions across two categories at Cannes, resulted in 1.5 million
Burger King app downloads and 3.5 billion earned media impressions—
all as a result of telling consumers they
could unlock a one cent Whopper if they
visited a rival McDonald’s location. It
was a modern twist on a classic direct
marketing campaign and produced a
37-to-1 return on investment, the burger
chain claimed.
To cap off the year, Burger King
partnered with video game publisher
Activision to celebrate the release of
the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot in October. It provided fans
of the video game an opportunity to enjoy food from its Burger Town
restaurant in real life. Burger King transformed one of its locations in
Long Beach, Calif., into the fictional restaurant for a day, and was open
to the public, serving menu items inspired by the game.
And last month, the burger chain had a hit again, this time with an
unlikely premise: showing a Whopper slowly succumbing to mold to
underscore that the popular sandwich no longer contains artificial
ingredients and can degrade naturally. As Machado told Adweek when the
campaign launched: “We created a path to be more comfortable with work
that is bold and challenges the rules of advertising.” —R.C.Gail Tifford
chief brand officer
WW International
In the two years since Tifford joined WW
International, she’s played a large role
in ushering in a new era for the company
formerly known as Weight Watchers,
one that’s more focused on health and
wellness than pounds on a scale. And she’s
touched various aspects of the business
along the way, helping relaunch its product
line with refreshed packaging as well as
forging partnerships with unconventional
organizations like Daybreaker, which hosts
alcohol-free dance parties around the world.
For Tifford, 2019 was all about launching,
listening and—perhaps most important—
iterating based on feedback. For instance,
when members and consumers expressed
concerns that WW had strayed too far from
its original focus on weight loss, her team
was quick to make amends in its advertising.
“We iterated in our campaign to address
that and really bring weight loss to the
core,” she notes. —Minda Smiley