By Massimo Martinotti

In the last few years a growing number of projects have been produced in Latin America. This is due to two basic reasons: the production costs in several countries such as Argentina and Brazil have dropped significantly because of a chain of devaluations of Latin American currencies and simultaneously the industries in the region became more and more sophisticated. Commercials produced for very little amount of money in some Latin American countries consistently win prestigious awards, therefore making Latin America evolve from a cheap location to a source of powerful creative resources.
    When 15 years ago, sitting in my office in Miami, I decided to assemble a network of production companies in Latin America, I knew that the real challenge was to find the right persons in every one of the countries where I wanted to operate.
    I needed not only talented, experienced and reliable professionals but first and foremost people with the right mind set: the ability to work as a team with other people based thousand of miles away, with a different culture and speaking different languages. International operations require adequate organizations; even if it is possible for every production company, no matter how small it is, to go and shoot anywhere in the world, an internationally organized one will be able to find a wider spectrum of options, get better deals and manage the project more safely.
    Having the headquarters of our company in Miami and operating internationally in Latin America yield several advantages. First of all, we have access to the best agencies in several countries and therefore we are exposed to a very wide spectrum of brilliant creative ideas with a variety of cultural flavors. In second place, the multinational aspect of our operation engenders a very powerful energy that stretches well beyond the countries where our offices are located. A network puts together the knowledge, the experiences and the relationships of people working in different countries and this has a strong multiplier effect.
    Our office in Argentina, for instance, has the experience shooting in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil while our producers in Costa Rica are very good in handling productions in Panama, Nicaragua, Belize or Guatemala.
    Finally the fact that we consistently work in many countries helped us to develop a global way of thinking, which consists of approaching every project we undertake with an open mind and reinventing the process every single time.
    This is especially important at a time when the production companies are becoming more and more multidisciplinary and need to work with a wider spectrum of creators to produce, design, invent and conceptualize multiple forms of content and develop new media.
    In this field, once more, Latin America offers enormous advantages: we are hiring programmers in Costa Rica (one of the leading software developing countries in the world), designers and directors in Argentina or Brazil, musicians and scriptwriters in Mexico and, by doing so, we are expanding our horizons and taking advantage of the creative resources available in the hemisphere.

Massimo Martinotti is the president of MIA Films, a production company based in Miami with offices throughout Latin America and associate offices in Europe. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers as well as president of the AICP’s Florida chapter and chair of the AICP.next committee. The latter was launched in 2006 to help develop new business models that production houses and the industry in general will be working under in what is an evolving era of advertising and marketing communications.

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