MAD STARS Announce Global Marketer, Fernando Machado, as Keynote Speaker for Mad Stars 2024

Fernando will share some of the outstanding insights and remarkable strategic thinking that underpin his history of successes for many of the world’s most valuable brands as well as his views on what it takes to build brands that stand out in their markets.

While in Australia recently, he told the industry, “I am more afraid of doing plain vanilla, boring and generic work, than I am afraid of trying to do something new and stepping into the unknown as a consequence of that.”

 

Fernando Machado, the only person to ever win Adweek’s Grand Brand Genius twice, is best known for his remarkable leadership of Burger King. Under that leadership, Burger King became the most awarded brand of the year in the World Creative Rankings client category in 2021, Creative Brand of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2020, 2021, and 2022, Client of the Year at the D&AD in 2016, Creative Marketer of the Year in Cannes 2017, Client of the Year at the One Show 2018 and Advertiser of the Year at the Clio Awards 2018. 

Ground-breaking, highly awarded Burger King campaigns, such as Moldy Whopper, Whopper Detour, and Whopper Neutrality, to name just a few, earned Fernando the distinction of being known in the industry as the master of pushing creative boundaries. He has been named Ad Age CMO of the Year, Marketer of the Year by The Advertising Club of New York, included in the Top 10 Most Innovative CMOs by Business Insider (twice) and included in the Top 100 Most Creative Minds in Business and the World’s Most Influential CMOs by Forbes. This year, he was inducted into The American Marketing Association’s 2024 Marketing Hall of Fame.

Fernando is currently an operating partner at a principal investment firm, Garnett Station Partners; senior marketing advisor at plant-based food manufacturer, NotCo; and board member at US cloud-based software company, Braze. Before that, he spent two years as a chief marketing officer at Activision Blizzard, where he was responsible for an array of inventive marketing initiatives for some of the most famous titles in the gaming industry, including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and Candy Crush.

However, Fernando's marketing genius goes back to his first tenure, at Unilever, where he spent eighteen years. There, among an impressive collection of successful initiatives, he led the outstanding Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign that revolutionized the way beauty brands talk to women and began a movement to change how women and girls perceive themselves that is ongoing today, its 20th anniversary year.

Fernando will be joined at MAD STARS 2024 by keynote speaker. Aeri Park, CEO of HSAD, a leading comprehensive advertising agency in South Korea, as well as an exciting assemblage of international innovators and legends who will share their inspiring experiences and insights across marketing, advertising, digital, ad tech, AI, and more.

Pre-registration for MAD STARS 2024 is available here until 31 July. The festival will be run from 21-23 August at BEXCO in Busan, South Korea.