Burger King’s Million Dollar Whopper Idea with CMO, Pat O’Toole

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[00:00:40] and AI is at a point where we felt comfortable leaning in, putting in as part of this tool and it makes the experience great. And the amount of time people are spending on our website, playing with these tools,

[00:00:52] looking at their Whoppers is like nothing I've seen from a brand engagement standpoint so AI was definitely the right way to go. To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move in an ever-increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy.

[00:01:07] Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry. Why it matters now and how you can keep up. Welcome to the speed of culture. Today we're thrilled to be joined by Patrick O'Toole, the Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King.

[00:01:27] Patrick recently joined as the DMO and we're really excited to have more. And Patrick, great to see you. Hi, great to see you too, Matt. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So let's dive right into it.

[00:01:35] You're out west launching a pretty big promotion called the Million Dollar Woffer Contest. We'd love to hear more about it and what the impetus is behind the promotion. Yeah, we're tremendously excited. We are just over a week into the Million Dollar Woffer Contest promotion

[00:01:49] and this isn't something new for us, but something that is rooted in something that's a big part of our heritage which is have it your way. So Burger King, we've always been about putting our guests first

[00:02:00] and allow them to have whether they're burger or meals customized in the way they want it. And Million Dollar Woffer is another articulation on that, a modern take if you will, and have it your way. We're inviting consumers to tell us any way they would top their waffers

[00:02:16] so they can pick from any ingredient under the sun. It's got to be edible and it has to be a non-allergent, but they tell us what they want on their waffer. So like a book, Gummy Bear is in and out by one, right?

[00:02:26] You can absolutely put gummy bears on it. That actually might be a front runner, so I'd give it a try. Whoa, send me the check. You can put whatever you want on it and then we're using some pretty cool technology

[00:02:37] with AI to both generate what your waffer could look like and then also, right, you are iconic jingle that's based on the waffer that you design. And so it's a great engaging, inviting program to get consumers to tell us how they want it their way.

[00:02:52] We're going to pick three finalists. The three finalists will be in restaurant in November, so their creations, we're going to make them. We're going to sell them to America and then we're going to ask America to vote on their favorite and that's going to be our million-dollar winner.

[00:03:03] And even if you're not a winner in your finalist, second place gets $200,000 and third place gets $100,000. So we're really excited about the program. You know, there's a lot of like about this promotion and the fact that you're doing it here in 2024

[00:03:15] because these AI tools really give such creative power to the end consumer in a way that we've really never seen before. It used to be if you had a program that, you know, gave consumers the opportunity to create their own content,

[00:03:28] the content wouldn't really come out so great. But now with some of these AI tools, if I understand you correctly, I can come up with my own ingredients, my own waffer and I can actually see what it would look like. That's exactly right.

[00:03:39] It's a really cool technology that we've built with our partners that give you an inspiration of, hey, I want to put gummy bears on my waffer and I want chocolate sauce and I want something crazy like a slice of pepperoni pizza.

[00:03:51] And what's fun about AI is not only can it do it, it does it with pretty darn good accuracy. That's really fast, right? So it does it typically within 15 seconds that you can see and you can look at it and say, you know what,

[00:04:04] it's not what I thought it was going to be. You can go back and change your ingredients. But as we looked at the program and promotion, we wanted it rooted in brand ethos of having your way and then we looked across the landscape

[00:04:14] of how do we make this as engaging to the consumer as possible. And AI is at a point where we felt comfortable leaning in, putting in as part of this tool and it makes the experience great. And the amount of time people are spending on our website,

[00:04:27] playing with these tools, looking at their waffers is like nothing I've seen from a brand engagement standpoint. So AI was definitely the right way to go. Yeah, a lot of people don't really even know how to access the text-to-image tools. So just bringing it to the consumer

[00:04:41] in an easy way with a brand they trust is a great way to just really even teach them about the immense possibilities that are now at their fingertips. Yeah, and I think we'll probably shout about it later, but AI is just such a powerful tool

[00:04:55] and we're obviously in its infancy and there's so many different uses for it. But why we like AI as something to put into a consumer-facing program is just when you talk about it, it's the ease of use for the end consumer. A lot of emerging technology isn't user-friendly.

[00:05:11] It takes a lot of steps. It takes a depth of knowledge. It takes research. This one, it's as simple as just typing in the ingredient. You can even spell it wrong and we fixed that for you. AI fixed it for you.

[00:05:22] And then it shows you something within a matter of seconds. So amazingly powerful tool. It's so great for how the teams figure out how to use it and it makes for a really fun 10, 15 minutes that millions of consumers are spending with our brand since the Confess launch.

[00:05:37] Yeah, and even like when social media first launched and took mainstream popularity, a lot of brands tried to build apps within Facebook and it was just clunky and hard to use and brands kind of got on too clever

[00:05:49] and the great thing about AI is you don't need to be an engineer. All you need to do is have an imagination and I think what Burger King's done a great job at over the last couple of years specifically is really continuing to weave the brand

[00:06:02] that lacks the kind of pop culture in a really seamless way and I think now you're able to really amplify that through what I think is a really smart promotion so I can't wait to see how successful this is and you mentioned having your way of the song.

[00:06:15] You know, that song obviously from an outside perspective just seems like such a smash hit and obviously the brand continues to lean into it. Talk to me about what goes behind, I guess producing a song like that which is the brand Anthem. How do you know it's right

[00:06:29] and how do you know when to step on the gas to really make it so closely connected to the brand ethos like it is today? Yeah, and you know, it's funny you talk about being smashed it I think when the Spotify

[00:06:40] the end of the year results came out of how often did Spotify wrap? Yeah, wrap. Thank you. I was blanking on it but Spotify wrap was over 5,000 people. That was their most dream song of 2023 was our have-it-your-way jingle which was pretty cool and our creative agency OKRP

[00:06:58] did an amazing job of looking at the brand heritage and a brand like Burger King that's been around as long as our brand had coming on 70 years is we've taken consumers on a journey and sometimes when you're the marketer in my chair you forget about that journey

[00:07:15] that journey that's been built over decades and the story that we've been telling consumers for decades and this was a part of our story that came out in the 70s there was this iconic jingle around have-it-your-way that supported the tagline and what the team did with OKRP

[00:07:31] is they looked at hey, there's something to this how do we modernize it and make it relevant to today's guest and how do we evolve it to what our strategy is now and they did that they had a great earworm jingle

[00:07:45] and then the amazing thing about being a marketer today is with social media that consumers take things and make them their own and that's also was an insight that we took to Million Dollar Wopper but people just started remixing it it was in their head

[00:08:01] and they thought let's have fun with this song and then the amazing remix came out of our jingle and it just took off from there as to where it was one of Tiktok's top hashtags for the first quarter of last year was a brand jingle

[00:08:15] so the amount of just earned media and just being top of mind is a brand that needed it quite candidly over the past couple of years we haven't been top of mind with especially younger guests massively accelerated that meaning to the heritage with a powerful idea

[00:08:33] in today's world and feeding it the right way what it can do for a brand like Burger King and was it one of those things where you and the team heard it were you there when it was first presented

[00:08:43] I wasn't there I was actually in the interview process right you're in the interview but when the team heard it were they like yes that's it or is it one of those things where it took a lot of convincing to get the team to even run

[00:08:53] with it to begin with I just hear the stories because I asked the exact same question and I said how did you guys land on this and just like any brilliant idea there was some debate it was a is this right we want to lean into this

[00:09:07] your lyrics are let me get the straight whopper whopper whopper that's what we're going to sing but I'll give credit you know the Marcom's team here is just exceptional and they had conviction and the leader of that teams are she fought for it

[00:09:23] look this is a great creative idea with the brand needs our insights and analytics on the same page and we have franchisees that have been with the brand for decades and some of them are like yeah I think we should and so

[00:09:37] the story is I know it is there was a good amount of debate there was a team that stuck to it and our CEO Tom Curtis who's been leading the brand for a couple years now Tom today the teams got conviction the agency has conviction

[00:09:51] we're going to lean in and obviously the rest is history yeah so let's rewind back the clock a little bit just into your career because you know before joining Burger King you spent 15 years at PepsiCo and you know it's definitely a common theme

[00:10:05] here at the speed of culture podcast that some of the most prolific and successful marketers either started their career Proctor & Gamble or PepsiCo and they really cut their teeth there if you had to zoom out and look at your 15 years there what were some of the key

[00:10:19] learnings and what is it about that company that you think breeds such great talent and future leaders in the marketing field it's a really good question and I showed up at PepsiCo on the bottom floor at the time at the time they hired out of graduate

[00:10:33] school I came in with a class of just brilliant people so I think it actually starts with how they recruit and what they look for in candidates and they brought in a great group of talented people I was at the Pre-to-Late division down on Dallas

[00:10:47] but they were doing the same thing in Chicago with Baker and they were doing the same thing in New York with their verges business they brought in a lot of talented people and what drew me to PepsiCo was it was a rotational program through marketing so

[00:11:01] everybody had to go through all of the disciplines and at the time there were innovation shopper marketing and brand marketing they've since added food service marketing which is really interesting based on where I've ended up and actually a lot of my peers have ended up

[00:11:15] if you look across the landscape you'll see Martin said QSR in restaurant and came up with PepsiCo but when they do that they teach they do a lot of really teaching the fundamentals of marketing and making sure that the teaching and coaching is there but they also lean

[00:11:31] heavily into on the job experience and so as you rotate through these disciplines you're picking up these skills and then you start connecting dots and I always talk about when I was in shopper marketing I was actually I had an act for shopper marketing I tended to like

[00:11:47] get more certain a lot of people that were going through the rotation and there was a point in time where they're like hey Pat do you want to just stay in shopper marketing? I said no I want to have a chance to run the brands

[00:11:57] and my first big brand assignment was being a director on Cheetos and when I got to Cheetos because of the time I had spent in innovation because of the time I had spent in shopper marketing I actually could connect the dots into a way that

[00:12:11] if I didn't have those experiences would not have landed the way I did it was like hey I see an idea coming from Goody Silverstein and I automatically take it through to in Kroger in Columbus Ohio how in the world is this going to show up to consumers

[00:12:27] and Pepsi just does such a good job of ensuring that people are in the full funnel and then it's a culture thing too that they build it's an affiliate of culture as to where yes you've got these brilliant people that you're kind of moving through the ranks

[00:12:41] with but we all know we have to lean on each other and our success depends on working well with each other and that's something that's embedded in and it creates great leaders it creates great marketers and obviously it's put a lot of industry leaders out

[00:12:55] of having these programs and after that much time and obviously working your way up from the bottom to the CMO title at Mountain Dew which was I believe your last title before you left what goes behind the decision to make that leap

[00:13:09] and to come over to a company like Burger King because many people they either stay at places for three years or they're there forever and you know you kind of staying for 15 and making a jump I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision talk to us about what's behind

[00:13:21] the decision like that. Okay so I had a mentor at PepsiCo his name is Ron Pritchard he just got named that the head of North America by which he's over there Ron was always he always put people first and Ron and I were having

[00:13:33] career conversations and he said hey make sure when you leave PepsiCo that you get one chance to leave make sure you go to the right role and the right company and so he always kind of planted that like don't jump just

[00:13:47] to jump and maybe you're in a bad role or you've got something where things aren't working out it was always he see the bigger picture and so as I went through PepsiCo I had no intent of being a CMO at PepsiCo or at Burger King and so

[00:14:01] I just kept going through the ranks I love what I was doing I love learning I love the culture and as opportunities came up I always had that in the back of my head of is this the right jump or is there a better future

[00:14:13] PepsiCo and so as I took on a lot of brand roles I went from Cheetos, Tostitos, Doritos and then it was like wow I looked after all the O's next for me at PepsiCo and it was the chance to go international and I thought hey

[00:14:29] going somewhere else is not going to give me the experience of going international which then translated the ability to do beverages which ultimately led to me being CMO of Mountain Dew but during that time I had a food service role and I was just so intrigued

[00:14:45] by this industry and I loved Burger King as a kid like Burger King was my brand as I grew up there's a lot of reasons that I loved this brand I obviously saw the amazing work that the teams were doing at Burger King and so when this opportunity

[00:15:03] came up and it wouldn't have been the same for a lot of other QSR restaurant brands but this brand in an area of the country that I grew up an hour away from Miami so there were so many things that came together

[00:15:15] and I kind of checked the box and I actually talked to Ron and I'm like this is it, this is the one and so that's how it came but obviously PepsiCo was a great place to be and a lot of people have an amazing whole career there

[00:15:29] and I think for me it was like the time I started my wings a bit and we tried something different and I couldn't be happier with my decision to come Burger King We'll be right back with the speed of culture after a few words from our sponsors

[00:16:04] I'm moving that Burger King is obviously tangential to a lot of the brands that you worked at at PepsiCo but it's primarily a franchise model correct so with the completely different business models so as a CMO how does that make your role maybe different than a traditional

[00:16:22] CPG or food and beverage company given that you do service the franchise model and so I think that's the biggest thing that I've seen in the past is that given that you do service the franchise and you touch the end consumer as well Yeah it's an added layer

[00:16:40] and that was honestly the biggest fear that I had coming over is that Pepsi Beverage in North America has a franchise model, it has a bottler model but it's a small percentage and it's a different type of franchise they're bigger corporations not your individual owner that you

[00:16:58] sometimes get here at Burger King and so when I came over there was probably some kind of give and take you pick up franchisees but you do less of the internal or you do less of something else it's another layer but what it also does

[00:17:12] is as a marketer it's another stakeholder that makes you want to do amazing work right because you've got consumers that you want to love your brand you've got a team that's working their tail off to ensure that we're doing the best marketing possible but then you've got this

[00:17:28] group of hundreds of franchisees and a lot of them who started working in our restaurants as teenagers and they love the brand they had the opportunity to buy into the brand and now have their entire livelihood based on the success of this brand so I came

[00:17:46] in and I thought this is an area that's an outage for me personally we don't have a lot of experience and so I over in that that I was working in restaurants I was flying around the country million dollar walker actually was an idea

[00:17:58] that came from a franchisee like the infancy of it from a conversation with a franchisee as did a couple of our pieces of innovation they came out like great stakeholders invested in the business it gives me an extra gear wow we're also trying to serve this community

[00:18:16] of entrepreneurs who are putting their faith in us and wow what an amazing responsibility that is and now that you're there you're still getting your fee web but you're obviously up with great promotions like million dollar walker more broadly when you look

[00:18:30] at the category you look at some of the opportunities for Burger King obviously one of the first things that comes to mind for me is just continued digital transformation your Gen D customer has an expectation when it comes to how they interact with your

[00:18:44] brand both online and as they go through the drive-thru or even in store that is much more rigorous than it used to be right it used to be oh wow cool they have an app so how much time are you spending thinking about that digital

[00:18:56] experience and where does that fall in your pecking order in terms of things that you're focused on it was a big focus right out of the gate it's marketing it's not its own thing anymore and actually structurally when I came in it was

[00:19:08] a bit of its own thing it was under our chief visual officer who he and I were tight we were very close and part of his role is hey as that comes to life in restaurant back to house and part of his team was consumer

[00:19:22] facing and we talked about it was hey it actually makes a lot of sense because of how the world is transformed that everything consumer facing needs to be part of the marketing strategy and so we brought the CRM app loyalty team over into marketing and quite candidly

[00:19:38] if we didn't make that move million dollar walker wouldn't have happened right now it's like that team has led this entire experience that you're looking at they took their technical know-how put the consumer hat on and joined in with the marketing team been able to create really engaging

[00:19:56] programs that like you said Matt we're not going to win today's consumer if we treat digital like its own thing and it's just kind of a bolt on it's you know million dollar walker is digital ground up and most of our things are going to be that way

[00:20:12] because it's not just for young consumers you know like my mom on her iPhone she was like one of the first people to build a whopper you know she can't win but she does that she mobile orders she shows up to her brother

[00:20:24] king in Denver and they all know her but you know she's a royal perks member her friends her family is and that's kind of how consumers are going today not just Gen Z but obviously there in the vanguard yeah and royal perks of course your loyalty program

[00:20:36] and you talk about how the loyalty team had sort of disproportionate digital chops that allowed them to help be a driver of the million dollar whopper contest your ability to have that loyalty program and collect that first party customer data

[00:20:50] and mine that data and understand who your customer is and what they like to order and all the personalization that comes from that you know that really is mission critical right now especially with all the changes that we've seen with the google cookie crumbling and the apple privacy

[00:21:04] changes so is the aggregation that data big part of how you're looking at deploying personalization for the brand moving forward yeah it is a tool that we have that if we are not maximizing it we're leaving things on the table cpg companies like a pepsico

[00:21:22] would kill for the amount of first party interactions that we get as a brand because of our app and the type of business that we're in and so as we look to design what the user experience is like we want it to be amongst best

[00:21:36] in class and a lot of reports are telling us actually we have a really good app we do acquisition programs $100,000 Whopper there is definitely an acquisition element to it but then it's how do you use the data for the things that you're talking about around having these one-to-one

[00:21:52] interactions with consumers obviously in a cocalist world if you have a more robust first party data set you're going to be able to more accurately market and have less waste to consumers that where you typically use cookies for targeting you can now use one

[00:22:10] and we look like other kinds of things so it is such an important part of our strategy moving forward and we also find as everyone else does and I will get to exact figures but if people in your loyalty program they visit more often

[00:22:24] they tend to spend more with your brand and so it's just such a critical part of how we're going to grow in the future yeah and Burger King I mean like many other iconic American brands grew their brand on the back of really like the TV industrial

[00:22:38] X where at first there's only four or five channels and you know you guys get their own the airways and more successful you got your bigger checks and you're able to get that reach of frequency and now we all know it's a different world

[00:22:50] at CES last month there was so much talk about you know addressable television and CTV and the ship to streaming so in order to be a marketer of an iconic brand like Burger King you really have to understand the importance of data

[00:23:04] and all these new channels so you can still create that scale but do so it's a way it's efficient and that lands the plane in terms of the right message for the right customer at the right time yeah it is so exciting

[00:23:16] to be able to be in this period of time where the industry is changing and evolving and we need to make sure that we are on top of it but it's also a time where scale does matter right we're just you know the Super Bowl was last week

[00:23:30] and you know our sister brand Popeyes didn't add there that got amazing reach or amazing our media and it's doing great things for a big launch that they had and a lot of brands can do that we could do that and we can also do the very targeted

[00:23:46] tactics that you're talking about and so we're trying to figure out hey how do we best place our bets within that and sometimes having the budget that we have it can drive to a little complacency it can drive to a lack of creativity

[00:24:00] or it can drive to hey we're going to go try all of these new things because we have the ability to do that if we fail it's not going to have this big of an impact and you can get distracted and so we have a

[00:24:12] philosophy of making sure we're spending a right amount of time on what we know works well and drives the business but also the right amount of time and resources on what's next how do we learn and how do we become as efficient as possible

[00:24:24] so we can be in a leadership position and be ahead of the consumer or be probably ahead of the consumer with the consumer and as they're starting to change we can be as efficient as we can with every dollar that we spend

[00:24:34] yeah in terms of efficiency I know one strategy you're also focusing on just driving more volume during weaker day parts or maybe you don't have as much volume so you can kind of fill those slower hours and continue to drive essentially the revenue increase in growth

[00:24:48] that you're trying to unlock yeah you can get so targeted and so smart with how you do it and so that's what we're looking at so day parts is a part of it where under indexing is a part of it there's a lot of ways that we're using

[00:25:02] that data to help continue to grow the brand yeah so shifting gears as we wrap up here Patrick I mean you have an awesome job you're out in California right now overseeing a very cool promotion that deals with the Whopper which everyone loves and AI

[00:25:16] but we all know it's not all fun and games and you also have a very high pressure high stakes job as well obviously you had to have made a lot of right decisions along your journey in your career to put you into position you are now

[00:25:30] what do you think some of those decisions you made right along the way that maybe we can impart on our younger listeners so they can maybe one day end up in the CMO seat as well yeah I said earlier is I didn't have

[00:25:42] an intent to end up in the see like when I started at PepsiCo it's because I liked marketing and I really wanted to work on brands that made people happy and when I looked across you know as I was going through school and doing all the cases

[00:25:58] there are certain brands you use because they're solving a problem for you a problem that you don't really want right like you spilled something and you have to clean it up or you have a medical condition you need to get back

[00:26:10] to store you got in a car accident and you need help. Are brands at PepsiCo and Burger King nobody has to consume them they choose to because it makes people day better it brings joy it brings happiness and that's something that I constantly remind the team of

[00:26:26] and so from my perspective is I went through my career I was driven by the fact that hey I get to work on these brands that people are choosing to bring into their lives and how do we continue to meet people's needs

[00:26:40] to bring more joy to them and so as I went through my career it wasn't until I was director level that I realized that maybe there is a bigger leadership opportunity for me either at PepsiCo or outside of PepsiCo and from that point on

[00:26:56] I just approached every job very simply to try to leave it much better than I found it and as it became a people leader I looked at and say how can I make my team how can I actually ensure that they're

[00:27:10] getting what they want out of their career in life in general but also how do we make sure that we're all collectively working to make this brand or this shopper marketing program better than we found it and as I did that it continued to put the right

[00:27:28] types of results on the board that helped me move up and I always wanted to learn on how I could be better in areas where I had outages and we talked about the franchise DPS but I'm always looking at hey when I'm in these conversations where am I

[00:27:44] not bringing as much value as I would like to right so if there's conversations about an area where I'm weaker I go try to get strong and I'll listen to podcasts of okay we had a metaverse program as a mountain deal I'm like

[00:27:56] I don't know what they're talking about and I read every single thing that I put on it to try to figure it out and same thing with functional outages like whether it be in finance or in operations I sit in meetings and I'm like jeez

[00:28:08] I'm not as good as I want to be and so I'm going to try to strengthen that and the combination of those things got me to a place as to where others saw it in me before I saw it in myself others said hey like you actually

[00:28:22] you could be a CMO and I'm like well I actually really just enjoy being the tostitos guy this is great but when others started giving me that confidence I took it as hey this is real and how do I actually try to repair

[00:28:36] that if and when I do get to that seat I can make as big an impact as possible both to my teams my organization and to good customers that's awesome well I appreciate you going through that so to wrap up here

[00:28:48] is there a mantra quote that you like to live by that kind of maybe sums up your journey in your career and maybe the way you approach every day in your current role yeah and I hinted at it a little bit in my last

[00:29:00] answer and there's a quote or a story that's attributed to John Lana and about when he was in it and his teacher gave me an assignment of tell us what you want to be when you open his answer was I want to be happy and

[00:29:14] his teacher said no you didn't understand the assignment and his response was no you don't understand life and the key to life is happiness and so I look at that and by the way the internet has told me that John Lana didn't say that but I was

[00:29:28] talking to it you should just go with it at this point go with it but when I look at again why I like to work on brands that consumers choose to have in their lives and why I look at my team it's really around everyone with

[00:29:42] one that I have or having any of your reviews I'm looking at is how can we unlock happiness with this person this important how to clean up happiness with our franchise these have unlocked happiness with our consumers and I look at it and sometimes it's

[00:29:56] hey the person's not in the right role or the person's not being challenged or hey we're actually not thinking about ultimately why people come to Burger King and how do we actually drive a result that will make them happy whether it's giving them a crown whether it's

[00:30:10] helping with friendliness whether it's having innovation that really makes them a hero at home all of those underlying are like hey are we actually making people have a better experience and so when I look at every touch point I have whether it's at work in life or

[00:30:26] as we do marketing and even you look at $9 Whopper like I love reading the comments of like this was fun this was a fun 15 minutes that I had with my daughter and it brought a little moment enjoy the people's lives and when you look at the

[00:30:40] world today I would use a lot more of that so being able to impact that scale is super cool yeah awesome well this interview is super cool and I cannot wait for our audience to hear and congrats on the role that we

[00:30:52] knew role at Burger King and can't wait to see what you're going to do to build the brand so really appreciate you taking the time thank you Matt it was great chatting with you yeah absolutely on behalf of Susan thanks again the Patrick O'Toole CMO

[00:31:04] Burger King USA and Canada for joining us today be sure to subscribe right and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform until next time see you soon everyone take care thanks for listening