How this Burger King marketing whiz gleefully trolls McDonald’s

Last December, Fernando Machado made sure that the best place to buy a Whopper…was at McDonald’s. To launch Burger King’s app-based ordering and payment, Machado and his team created “Whopper Detour,” which geofenced a 600-foot perimeter around 14,000 McDonald’s locations nationwide and triggered a coupon notification on app users’ phones for a 1¢ Whopper and directions to the nearest Burger King. The campaign—part of a years-long effort that has established Burger King as perhaps the most irreverent marketer among fast-feeders—scored 3 billion media impressions and 1.5 million downloads of the app, which earned it the No. 1 slot in the App Store. “We’re not the largest brand in the market, so anything we do needs to count,” says Machado, who joined Burger King in 2014 after 18 years at Unilever. “People just went crazy for this.” Machado built on the brand’s capacity to surprise less than two months later by making a Super Bowl ad out of a clip of Andy Warhol quietly unwrapping and eating a Whopper (filmed for a 1982 Danish art film about American culture), which led to Burger King being the most searched-for brand during the game.