Coworking with Pedro Porto Alegre

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Pedro Porto Alegre is director of business development and marketing at Kluane Partners, a boutique corporate finance advisory firm. He started his career at PepsiCo, working in sales, business development, and analytics before pivoting to marketing.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I tap into the minds of the financial experts in my company, translate it into common language, and communicate it to the world through engaging and compelling campaigns to spark interest in those looking for capital or advisory to grow their businesses!

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Architecting the big brand idea for Ruffles Canada and working through the first-ever TV campaign for the brand in Canada. I worked with cross-border agencies in the US to strategize the opportunity after having identified the key brand-equity KPIs that we needed to grow, stirred the creative team to come up with a killer campaign that would resonate with the Canadian audience and meet the brief goals, and eventually recorded the 30-second commercial in Montreal, all during the pandemic lockdowns.

It was a lot of Zoom calls and remote production direction, but the end result was a fun ad that was launched on TV and digital and helped us turn the corner on the communications journey as the brand became the third largest in Frito-Lay Canada!

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Havaianas “Manifesto” (2012). This one hits close to home, as this is a brand that I grew up with in Brazil and always had on my feet. The simple yet powerful connection they made between the product and the “territory” you enter when you slip them on, was something that Brazilians could be extremely proud of, and non-Brazilians wanted to be a part of.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? What’s Working in Marketing by RightMetric. They’re a Vancouver-based marketing research company that puts out a lot of high-quality content for marketers to learn from and engage with.