The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival last month bestowed the Agency of the Year honor on DDB Brazil in Sao Paulo. This marks the second Cannes worldwide title earned by DDB Brazil under its president/CEO/creative director Sergio Valente. The first came in ’05 with DDB Brazil earning Cyber Agency of the Year distinction.
DDB Brazil is no stranger to the winners’ circle at Cannes. Back when the shop was known as DM9DDB, it was twice named Agency of the Year under the leadership of noted ad man Nizan Guanaes who seven years ago launched Grupo ABC, which is now among the top 20 marketing communications groups in the world, boasting such agencies as DDB Brazil.
Guanaes has been a longstanding mentor to Valente, who is now also a partner in Grupo ABC while serving as the chief exec at DDB Brazil. Valente started out at DM9DDB as a copywriter and after six years became its creative director. In ’01, he moved over to Publicis as creative VP but would soon return to DM9DDB in ’02 as creative VP. In January ’05, Valente was named president/CEO of the agency.
Over the last 18 months, DDB Brazil has won 10 new accounts including Intel, Unilever/Kibon, Whirlpool, fashion retailer C&A, soft drink company Guarana Antarctica and frozen food client Sadia.
SHOOT connected with Valente to discuss his recent Cannes experience. We also delved into what brought him into the advertising business to begin with, as well as his take on the Brazilian culture and the nurturing influence it has on creativity.
SHOOT: What led you to a career in advertising?
Valente: Three things have led me into becoming an ad man. The first was a desire to do creative work. At the beginning of my career, I was a civil engineer in Bahia, a very poor state in Brazil, but I had a lot more fun selling apartments than building them. In selling them, I exercised my creative side in a very strong way. I then perceived that it was the way of creativity that I wanted to pursue in the future.
The second motive arose from sharing my youthful years with a special person. From the time I was 14, I had the pleasure and the honor to enjoy the friendship of one of the greatest leaders in world advertising, Nizan Guanaes. We have been friends for a very long time. He has always been an influential person and a strong presence in my life, being as he is a renowned genius of world advertising. The fact of my having had close contact with Nizan from an early age, awakened in me the desire to be an ad man. It is like a boy who has long enjoyed the company of famed soccer player Ronaldo, and then decides to be a player like him.
The third reason is that I like dough, I like money and I like to make money. I believe that advertising is a great booster of the economy. Advertising succeeds in making the brands sell more. And the more the brands sell, the more visibility they gain and, as a result, they become more valuable and invest more in marketing.
SHOOT: What did the latest Cannes Agency of the Year honor mean to you and to DDB Brazil?
Valente: I’m so happy with the honor because it was a very tough year in terms of the economy yet we showed what we could do creatively in different areas with nine Lions across the Film, Cyber, Media, Outdoor and Press categories.
SHOOT: What did you come away with from Cannes other than the Lions and the Agency of the Year mantle?
Valente: I saw great work from many countries and one theme I noticed in a lot of that work was “power to the people.” The Oasis campaign [from BBH New York in which songs from Oasis’ new CD were given to New York street musicians for their interpretations and then performed by them in Manhattan public venues prior to the release of the CD] is a great example. The music was shared with the public. It was given to the people whose word of mouth helped to build the brand, in this case the band Oasis and its music.
To adopt the “power to the people” idea is to take advantage of the benefits that technology and the convergence of the two-way-street that technology affords today, and then use the preferences of the consumers to build the values of your brand. There are three other campaigns that I consider good examples of the “power-to-the-people” idea. The first of them is Obama’s political campaign which, through MYBO (a type of Facebook that they set up), made it possible to add the voters’ own goals to the campaign. Like, for example, what would you do to convert people, to captivate people and to raise money for the campaign? In fact, the campaign was simply a receptacle for people’s wishes. The ones wielding the power of convergence and the power of persuasion were the people.
Another example is “NIKE +”–a marvelous project I saw in Cannes–where people were depicted running, creating and indicating the routes they would like to run, where they usually run and, besides, showing what they come across and see on the way. That is an excellent manner of encouraging people to run, i.e., of encouraging them to buy the product. Although Nike was sponsoring this action, “NIKE +” did not say where you should run. What was meant was: set up your own marathon race, show your own marathon race. That’s ‘power to the people’.
Another campaign is Nokia’s “Vine,” which won a Gold Lion for design. This is a very beautiful project. To promote the launch of their new cell phone–which is equipped with a camera, GPS and is capable of full-time interaction with the blog environment–they developed a mobile blog, that is, one showed the unit’s GPS characteristics by downloading a map, while on tour in New York, for example. It also went on to post the things one was seeing. In addition, if one wanted to include an oral comment, one simply had to open the pertinent application and start recording. If one saw a band playing at a subway entrance and was pleased by it, one could film it and immediately post it. At every moment, a new benefit of the product was demonstrated. And the nicest thing about it is that all that is made available via connection of the unit with the Internet. In fact, the promotion and advertising of the product, of its attributes and its uniqueness, was being undertaken by the consumers themselves. Once again, a case of “power to the people.”
Today, the brands’ power of persuasion, power of seduction and power to convince are in the hands of the population. If you are able to properly conduct and facilitate things, and influence people so that they will use all the available tools for speaking well of the brand, that is a wonderful thing.
One important detail–people are already talking, and consequently, if you are not careful, they will speak ill of your brand. Therefore, you’d better find a way to steer that networking and that “power to the people” in the right direction, so that people will talk favorably about your brand.
SHOOT: You alluded to the tough global economy. How have you dealt with it? What advice would you give to others regarding how to deal with the economy?
Valente: In Brazil we are used to dealing with crisis. Since I was a little kid, you get used to crises here. I always thought that advertising and marketing are medicines for the economy–and creativity is the real essential ingredient in advertising. If advertising is the medicine for crisis, creativity is the most important ingredient.
I saw many creative things at Cannes, and they weren’t expensive. That’s the real answer during an economic crisis. You also have to be very focused and attain strong positioning. You cannot be silly or weak during a crisis. The best way to spend less money is to spend money the right way.
SHOOT: Finishing second this year in the Cannes Agency of the Year voting was another Brazilian agency, AlmapBBDO, Sao Paulo. What makes Brazil such a nurturing place for creativity? It sounds like you credit the country and its culture to some extent for your success.
Valente: Brazil is a very diverse country. We are a continental-sized country with a great variety of aspects ranging from third-world ills to centers of excellence and niches of total sophistication. In other words, parts of Brazil are like India and China, and they need to communicate as a mass, so one must possess an enormous ability for seduction.
But this country also has another side, with special niches showing preferences that are as sophisticated as those found in the richest places in the world. Perhaps Brazilian creativity is the result of two different factors. First, it is a country where budgets are smaller, so ideas have to be much better than elsewhere. With less money, you must make up for it with greater creativity, and that is why creativity is almost like second nature to us. Secondly, Brazil being a very diverse country, you must address totally different types of public, and deploy, for that purpose, from the most popular forms of advertising to the most sophisticated of communication modes. Of course, that forces you to exercise your creativity to the fullest. I believe that Brazilian creativity has gained special recognition all over the world because there is not a particular style of Brazilian advertising. Here, we have all styles.
