Going for it

I believe that life comes in cycles. A little bit like the “circle of life” from the Lion King and another bit like Engels’ Business Cycles and Depression.

In my career I have found these cycles to last about 10 years. The third such cycle is wrapping up and that made me think about what the next one will bring. To figure that out, nothing better than understanding what the previous cycles were all about and the teachings they left me. Thinking about each one, I managed to define the theme and learning that each cycle left me.

The first cycle of my career was from 1988 to 1998. It started by chance with an internship in the art room at an agency, Lautrec Advertising in Buenos Aires and ended with a move to Saatchi & Saatchi NY. They were years where I went from having no idea what advertising was to rub shoulders with the best of Argentina’s golden advertising generation. These were years of hard work, of thinking you know everything and believing that there is only one way of doing things (yours) with only one goal: recognition for your ideas at any price.

It was the most social cycle of the three that I have lived so far. Everyone I shared those years with was starting off, fresh out of a university or design school… completely unbridled. We didn't have any of the responsibilities of adulthood, but we had the means awarded to us by being a part of the advertising boom in Argentina and we enjoyed them together. It wasn’t only the guys from our agency, all the industry juniors at that time communed and competed at the same time.

The theme of this cycle was take off, do whatever you want and risk everything for an idea. From executing an ad or a TV spot before presenting it to the client to appearing yourself in the photo as a police officer.

The cops in this ad are now a film director, a creative director and the branding director of a dotcom. The thief, an ex excecutive producer now in the real estate business.

El segundo ciclo empezó en NY, terminó en París en el 2007, me llevó por todo el The teaching this cycle left me with was to trust my creative judgment. This was not so clear immediately, it was something that over the years and cycles ended up solidifying. Creatives generally question everything, but we question the quality of the ideas we create more than anything. That is why we often look for someone to reassure us that what we do is good. Despite being necessary, that can go against our ability to discern whether an idea is good or not.

The second cycle began in NY, ended in Paris in 2007, took me around the world and brought me back home.

It was a nuclear cycle. Nuclear in the sense of the small group that it revolves around: ma petite famille, the small family we formed with my wife during those years and that went wherever Saatchi would suggest: NY, Toronto, Sydney, Paris. If they said: “how about going there?" and there I went with my little family. Or rather, the family grew along the way, with a son born in NY and another in Toronto.

As for my work family, it was also a small group compared to the crowd at Lautrec. A much more heterogeneous: different nationalities, ages, experience, approaches, professions... I moved from the creative club and entered the world of the business of advertising. Learning from local and worldwide CEOs, from creatives that had more decades of experience than me, from film directors who won Oscars and that's why I think the theme of this decade was openness. It contrasts a lot with the closed family nucleus and the two or three relationships that we generated in each city, but it was an open time. It is what happens when one jumps from culture to culture, from country to country: one learns to be more permeable, adding other ways of seeing and doing things. All of this tested what I had learned during my first cycle: trusting in my creative judgment. Because what one believes to be right many times is not shared with those in the culture which you are living in… sometimes it may even clash with what they believe. That conflict helped me find what makes advertising ideas truly great: the universal human truths, those truths that are understood here and in China, those that being correctly connected to a product or brand give relevance, sustenance, reliability.

What I learned from this cycle, is to not do things just because, because I like it or because they tell me, I learned that ideas work best when they make sense and give meaning to a message. I learned what understanding the client and their clients is as useful as trusting my judgment and when these two things are synchronized, true communication is born.

This commercial, like many in the US, took about a year from brief to airing. It had to survive three different pre-testing stages, a bumpy street casting process and an Oscar winning documentary filmmaker. 
But after all that it achieved the highest post-test scores the brand had ever seen.

This is how I arrived at the third cycle that began when I returned from Paris to Buenos Aires, the city we chose for our family to grow. The small family grew in age and the extended family expanded. This work cycle also begins by chance. A friend introduces me to my business partner of these last 10 years. He had this idea and that nobody had ever done before, to export Argentine creativity to France. Argentine advertising had exported creatives, ideas, campaigns, agencies... but almost always within the traditional channels of the Holding Company in the same way that I had traveled the world with Saatchi & Saatchi.

Ideas from Argentine creatives had never been exported to independent agencies or from different networks, unless they were not managed within the same network. Maybe this is a better way to put it: for years Argentina's advertising creativity had won awards and fame in creative festivals and if an agency wanted Argentine ideas like those it saw at Cannes Lions, they had to import a team or a creative director, teach them to speak the language and adapt their ideas to what was culturally acceptable without losing the Argentine edge they were looking for. We changed that and gave agencies, mainly in France, access to Argentine freelance talent curated by a creative director and an account manager who understood both the language and the codes.

Everyone loved the business model. It gave me the opportunity to work with all kinds of people in all types of agencies and for all types of clients. It also gave me a creative training like few others: always thinking up a new idea, in a new medium, for a new client, in a new region or country and for a new agency. Learning all the time: languages, categories, trends, media, regulations and more importantly learning about myself, about what I know how to do well and what I don't, what I like to do and what I can do, but I don't enjoy as much.

A bunny that needs help to multiply. The client had a limited budget and no awareness. They needed something to shock the market. For the next 4 years, every brief we recieved from competing veterinary labs said: we want something like the Reproquinol bunny.

This cycle ended this year and even though it is difficult to define the theme and learning when everything is so fresh, I would say that this cycle’s theme was choosing. Choosing where to live, what to work on. Choosing is difficult because it means doing one thing and sacrificing another. Many of times I have been asked why we came back to Argentina after 10 years abroad, that grass which is always greener. I chose creative independence without a safety net versus a multinational network. Choosing to do what I like to do helped me define what I do better than others and recognize it’s worth.

So now I start a new cycle. And for the first time I will try to define what I want to learn in the next ten years.

A few months ago I started the Yatchman’s course; I'm learning to sail. One of the first things you learn is how a sailboat actually moves. The idea that we all have is that the sail is pushed by the wind, that this is what propels the boat and that is why having the wind behind your sails is ideal, but reality this is unstable and dangerous. A sailboat sails better when it’s almost against the wind. Sails function like the wings of an airplane and propel the sailboat forward, using the wind as a lift and defining the direction regardless the direction of the wind.

That is what I want to learn in this new cycle, to move in the direction I set even if it is against the prevailing wind. And I think that in order to do that the theme of this cycle will be similar to that of my first cycle in this beautiful profession: go for it.

Going for it is not the same as taking off. When you take off, you start from nowhere and try to see how far you can go. Going for it is choosing your direction and going there without fear or doubt but with an insane desire to go.