Maroš Gonda

HEY!
I'M MAROŠ.

Execution. Product innovation. Performance marketing. Brand Strategy. Worked every station on the line at some point, which either means real range or a short attention span. Either way, it shows up on clients' dashboards, and occasionally on an awards shelf.

brand strategy | communications planning | advertising effectiveness | evidence based marketing | food | surfing | dogs | motorcycles…
↓ Work
Tipsport - f*ck luck

How do you win over the next generation of sports bettors when they can't even sit through a full match?

Ninety minutes of football is replaced by fifteen-second highlights, shitposts, and reaction memes. Instead of fighting for their attention on the pitch, we moved the bet off it.

The strategic idea: stop betting on the sport, start betting on your opinion. For Gen Z, the most opinionated, most confident generation yet, it doesn't matter where that opinion comes from: football IQ, hard stats, niche community, or preferred jersey aesthetics. What matters is that it's theirs. So while competitors still talk about luck, we tap into a Gen Z attitude and cheekily poke the competition while doing it.

Fuck Luck logo

Máš to ve svých rukou.

Built for the 2026 World Cup, the campaign runs social-first across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, OOH, and Spotify, backed by a tribe-test microsite, limited drops, an influencer content house, and a festival partnership.

Results

The campaign earned well-above-average scores on attention, recall, and entertainment, the metrics that matter most with younger audiences. Strong enough for Tipsport to keep investing in it.

McDonald's - Cheese Saga

How do you use a yearly reoccurring product promo to deepen fan love?

A cheese LTO is barely something new in the IEO category. We turned it into a large-scale platform that lifted a product feature into an emotional layer, driving brand affinity and sales at once.

Instead of selling melt and stretch, we sold a feeling: relief from adulting. People are exhausted by grown-up life and longing for simpler times, the same way they start craving this burger months before it even arrives. We turned that anticipation into a happy moment: a carefree, kidhearted burst of joy. With Cheese Saga again in the menu: "Je čas radovat se jak malí. Sýrovka je tady." And jumping into a giant ball pit said it best.

Result

Brand affinity up, and cheese-driven burger sales up roughly 15% year-over-year across Czechia and Slovakia (14.7% and 15.3% respectively), beating campaign targets by about 10 percentage points in both markets. Strong enough to run the concept again in the years that followed.

McDonald's - chicken

Czechia loves KFC. That's not only an opinion, it's already a formed habit. 62% of McDonald's own most loyal customers went there monthly for chicken, and 18% didn't even know McDonald's sold chicken at all.

So, how do you make McDonald's known for its chicken when the only thing we'd ever raved about is the burgers?

We didn't ship one campaign to fix that. We hit it from multiple angles: McChicken for every group lunch, McCrispy as the next big thing, McNuggets sold on friendship, because there are things you can only say with the last nugget, Chicken Fest a full-on chicken celebration, Chicken Junior for the quickest occasions, and Chicken: Routine Breakers to interrupt the KFC habit loop directly.

Result

The perception gap with KFC on "great for chicken" closed, and McDonald's became the QSR chain selling the most chicken in the market.

McDonald's - planning beyond the campaigns

How do you win over a nation that always roots for the underdog, when you're McDonald's?

My job was bigger than good ads: rebuild trust from the ground up, and make sure every layer of marketing across Czechia, Slovakia, and Ukraine actually delivered on the Feel-Good promise, in a way that felt native to each market's own culture.

Localized positioning: we found the local shape of "feel-good" in pohoda. The way the Danish have hygge, we have pohoda. Not huge, not loud, just that little bubble of happy on a Friday drive to the chata, or a five-minute break with colleagues. My job was to earn McDonald's a place inside that moment, not to interrupt it.

Comms architecture: the business runs on dayparts, proteins, LTOs, franchisees, and a dozen other things nobody outside the building cares about. People care about TikToks to shoot, shows to binge, relationships to navigate. I built the bridge between the two and turned long-term ambition into comms pillars that meet their daily reality.

Immersion Road & Fan Truths: I traveled the region asking, observing, and writing down what fans actually love and do: their words, their behaviour, their rituals, their laughs. It became a Fan Truths book: a living library of customer insights that now feeds every campaign that follows.

Result

I helped make CZ · SK · UA one of the few European markets to successfully localize the global positioning, build the comms architecture around it, and grow a homegrown Fan Truths library to prove it.

České Dráhy - what if…

To understand why Czechs secretly love trains, I got on one and didn't get off for three days.

Designed a fully immersive research safari with production crew included: 72 hours living Czech rail reality alongside commuters, weekend travelers, and occasional passengers. One insight rose above the rest: there are a hundred reasons to hate trains, and everyone has exactly one reason that beats them all.

That single line became a reason to write a book, České Dráhy: What If…, a collection of research artifacts and small, specific appreciations of train travel. It also became the backbone of the pitch-winning campaign "Milujeme vlaky, zamilujte si je taky.", which retired the celebrity spokesperson in favor of real passengers with real stories.

The takeaway

The best way to empathize is to become one with the audience (even if it means train food for three days). Research doesn't have to be slow, obvious, or boring. The best insights live in places a work desk can't reach.

Creative Dock - Můj Albert

Czechs love a discount more than they love butter (butter on sale might beat that).

So how do you get a nation of bargain hunters to choose the healthier option anyway?

My role: build, test, break, repeat. As part of Creative Dock's Můj Albert team, I ran the propositions through multiple live test groups with different hooks, different benefit structures, different creative framings to see which version of "Oplátí se jíst lépe" actually gained attention, before Albert bet the full rollout on it. Every MVP variant was a live experiment.

Result

1 million users choosing healthier options within six months of launch, roughly one in ten Czechs. The program hit 650,000+ downloads in its first month alone and knocked the market leader off the top of the charts.

KINOKO - Signs of Life

How does a Karlín-based athleisure brand compete with the Kardashians?

It can't. And that's exactly the point. Most brands only get popular thanks to influencer budgets no local challenger could ever match. Athleisure sells one fantasy: flawless bodies in flawless light. Alo and Lululemon built empires on sex appeal, body perfection, and yoga princesses who never sweat wrong. Real women doing real things don't feel like that. They feel imperfect, and nobody in the category will admit it. So instead of chasing the performative clean girls, we picked a side: the women already on the mat, the real yoga gremlins.

Feels opportunity: women want to feel comfortable in their leggings yet feel imperfect the moment they step onto the yoga mat.

Feels proposition: KINOKO makes women feel unapologetically comfortable by celebrating the effort that life leaves on them.

Feels idea: "Signs of Life."

🧩 facilitation

Strategy should bring clarity to everyone who needs it.

(or doesn’t know they do.)

Workshop Facilitation

The goal is to give all stakeholders the time and space to make sure what we build applies across the business, not just one campaign. That's why the workshops I facilitate pull in the whole company: HR, business, product, marketing, whoever actually has to live with the work afterwards, because a strategy that only survives inside the marketing team was never going to survive at all.

🧘 Agency repositioning

Death of DDB, Birth of about95: "Human Feel, Human Do."

Comic strip: WPP's John Wren and DDB founder Bill Bernbach

WPP's John Wren killed Bernbach's DDB... Hello, DDB.about95, the independent creative agency built on his legacy, with one mission: make emotion and feeling a persuasion lever anyone can act on.

The bet: emotion is the most underused lever in business. People rarely act on rational information alone. Most of the times they act on how something makes them feel. "Human Feel, Human Do." is about95's belief, the philosophy behind everything that follows:

01

Feels Method

Because emotion-evoking work needs an emotion-centered planning process.

02

Research Method

If emotion is the effect we're after, how do we measure it? By answering two questions: did they feel it, and did they do it?

03

Productization

Packaging creative services into defined product tiers, so good thinking isn't measured by the hour.

04

AI adoption

Using AI to automate more of the process, so people spend more time on the part it can't do.

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