How The Magnum Ice Cream Company's Head of Marketing gets people thinking about a seasonal product all year round

In the latest episode of CMO Playbook, Rapha Avellar hosted Carolina Mega Horaguti, Head of Marketing at The Magnum Ice Cream Company Brazil — responsible for Kibon, Magnum, and Ben & Jerry's — for a conversation about how to get people thinking about ice cream all year round, not just when it's hot.

From Sadia to leading an ice cream brand, by way of Mercado Livre

Carolina built nearly 20 years of brand experience before joining Magnum. She started at BRF, across Sadia and Perdigão, and spent nine years at Kimberly-Clark, working on brands like Huggies, Kleenex, Neve, and Plenitud — a period in which Neve became the most recalled brand in the toilet paper category in a Datafolha survey, after 18 years off the list, jumping from 8% to 28% of mentions.

From Kimberly-Clark she moved to Mercado Livre, where she led Mercado Ads — the company's media sales division — across Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, before becoming Head of Marketing Brazil for the company. Under her leadership, a Mercado Ads campaign won the Effie Award LATAM, and the operation received the 2024 Caboré Award as a Media Platform. In October 2025, she became Head of Marketing at Magnum Brazil.

Traditional brand meets data-driven decisions

One of the throughlines of the conversation is the gap between the two worlds Carolina has worked in: Kimberly-Clark, where purchase decisions are driven by habit and emotion, and Mercado Livre, a tech company that decides heavily anchored in data. She sums up that combination as what got her here: the blend of brand fundamentals with agility and the use of data.

Testing before investing

In March 2026, Carolina traveled to SXSW in Austin as part of a delegation of 12 CMOs brought by BrandLovers, and came back publicly arguing that the market needs to move from theory to action: put a percentage of the investment on the line, measure it well, and scale up whatever works. That logic of small tests before big bets shows up in how Magnum decides where to invest.

Creator curation and the Kibon case with Creator Ads

Carolina is firm about how the brand selects the creators who represent it — she doesn't hire just anyone. That curation was put into practice in the "Loucos por torcer. Loucos por Kibon" campaign, run by Creator Ads during Carnival and Brazil's matches at the 2026 World Cup, with coupons distributed as WhatsApp stickers redeemable on iFood. In the Carnival activation in São Paulo, 76 creators produced 90 pieces of content — 18.4% above plan — generating 161,000 views and 11.8% engagement, 96.7% above the market average, with a 30% more efficient CPV than projected.

Summer, winter, and the sponsorship calendar

Magnum sponsors the Rio Open, in the Rio summer, and the Taste Festival, in the depths of São Paulo's winter — two events in opposite seasons backing the same brand. On the Rio Open, Carolina has said the tournament "is a space where sport, culture, and lifestyle come together very naturally," and that being there is "a way of expressing a pleasure that never goes out of style" — the practical answer to the challenge that opens the episode: selling ice cream all year round.

Tolerance for error and the marketing cycle that pays for itself

Beyond the pressure of quarterly results, Carolina champions a culture of tolerance for error: "some things are non-negotiable, but there are other things where, if we get it wrong, that's fine. We launched the product, it didn't sell much, no problem, we put another innovation in its place." And she sums up her view of marketing as an investment: "marketing needs to make money to help make money to invest in marketing itself. It's a positive cycle."

Watch the full episode on Creator Ads' YouTube channel.