Shots 133 – Feb. 2012
Take one look at the young, handsome executive team at Wieden+Kennedy São Paulo and you might mistake them for an agency boy band taking the baby steps of their careers. As soon as the trio open their mouths though, it’s obvious that they’re wiser than their years.
It’s just 12 months since the agency – W+K’s eighth office – launched. “It was the only continent where we didn’t have a presence and clients like Nike and Levi’s are getting pretty strong in the region so it was kind of the last link in the chains for Wieden to be global,” says MD André Gustavo Soares, formerly account services director at F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi. “You can’t deny the power of Argentina and Brazil creatively in the last 20 years, so it was a combination of a commercial point of view and getting the creative power of the region for Wieden. ”Gustavo Soares was recruited to open the office along with fellow Brazilian, Icaro Doria, and Argentinian Guillermo Vega, both ECDs who previously worked together at Y&R New York before parting ways temporarily when Doria moved to Goodby Silverstein & Partners San Francisco.
As soon as the new office was announced the question on many lips was whether it would reflect the sensibilities of the HQ in Portland. Doria explains that there’s a mix, rather than a rule. “They always do it with a third W+K DNA, a third of the management’s DNA and a third of the place where the office is.” But with so many renowned local creative agencies to compete with, is there room in the market for W+K? “Last year just before we opened someone asked us, ‘do you think SP needs another agency?’ We said, ‘do you think SP needs another pizza place? Probably not, but if the pizza’s fucking good, people will go there’,” says Gustavo Soares, who is also keen to point out that “we don’t want to be a Brazilian agency. We cannot compete with the Brazilian market that is driven by the Brazilian way of thinking,” a thinking that embraces fast turnaround times, sometimes at the expense of quality.
Working across a broad front
Doria elaborates on this. “We’re based in São Paulo but our goal has never been to be a Brazilian agency. W+K is an agency from Portland. Our goal from day one has been to produce global work that’s relevant to the region and also to produce local work. We’re working on three fronts.”
The trio bring a wealth of domestic and international experience to cater for those three fronts. Vega has a broad knowledge of the region from Argentina to Mexico and everywhere in between, Gustavo Soares has lived and worked in Bangkok and Doria has spent more than five year in the US, including two as creative director under Tony Granger at Saatchi NY, winning big at Cannes in 2007. The agency has already completed global work for Nike and Old Spice in partnership with the Portland HQ, several regional projects for Coca-Cola and P&G, and local work for sports channel PFC and the 20th anniversary of Marie Claire Brazil to name a few.
It’s clear then that the mantra is to incorporate international ideas into the Brazilian space and vice versa, but how does an American agency known for, among other things, dazzling digital campaigns, fit into a territory where in-house media buying forces a high importance to be placed on traditional channels? “We’ve gained space to approach every brief the way we think it should be approached, not based on a media buy. We’ve been working on a lot of initiatives that aren’t based on TV, print and outdoor,” says Doria. “We never present work without it being super integrated. Every meeting we have, the clients say ‘you guys really think about everything’,” adds Vega. “TV is very relevant and very effective,” he continues, “All clients have to be on the ad breaks during the soap opera to reach the whole market, but if a client says they want to access, say, the premium 10 per cent of the population, this is when we really get to crack online, activation events etc. That’s where we make a difference because maybe other agencies aren’t doing that.”
In the past 12 months employees from several of Wieden’s offices around the world have expressed an interest in relocating to the São Paulo camp, and assembling a team of mixed nationalities is key to the trio’s plan. Already Argentinian, European, and American (including a producer and planner from the Portland and NY branches respectively) accents can be heard among the chatter in the buzzing office, where everybody pretty much works in the same room.
Finding the sweet spot in between
“I find it very important to make Brazil a little bit more global and the global a little bit more Brazilian. I’ve seen the good sides from both ends, the energy and fast pace that you see here and the craft and production level and the time you spend with the idea in the US and Europe. I think now is the time to find the sweet spot and the place to do it is in Brazil”, says Doria, who also points to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics and the cash they will generate as opportunities to attract foreign creative talent to the country and create a “diverse, unique place to work with all the energy of Brazil but also the knowledge from abroad. We’re going to have some amazing work coming from this part of the world.”
Rather than a boy band, these three are more like veteran rock stars who’ve toured the world and seen the best of what’s out there. They think there’s no place like Brazil for W+K to grow its thriving business and tap into the Latin creative energy. Not many would dare to disagree.
