1. BRAZIL |Places 49
A PERFECT
STORM
The World Cup was a wash-
out, there are political, fiscal
and water-based woes, plus
chaos caused by a shifting
social order and digital
demands. Yet, there’s still an
awful lot of buzz in Brazilian
advertising, with the country
ranking No. 2 in Cannes
2014 for the second year
running. Carol Cooper
heads to São Paulo to meet
industry folk bursting with
ideas and Latino resilience

2. BRAZIL |Places 49
A PERFECT
STORM
The World Cup was a wash-
out, there are political, fiscal
and water-based woes, plus
chaos caused by a shifting
social order and digital
demands. Yet, there’s still an
awful lot of buzz in Brazilian
advertising, with the country
ranking No. 2 in Cannes
2014 for the second year
running. Carol Cooper
heads to São Paulo to meet
industry folk bursting with
ideas and Latino resilience

3. BRAZIL|Places 5150 Places|BRAZIL
São Paulo’s streets sizzle in the 30 degree
heat of a rainy season without rain. In an air-
conditioned saloon Deny, my driver for the week,
first-gears along a swanky avenida known for its
luxury car showrooms. There’s traffic as usual, so
I’ve time to gaze at the Porsches, Lamborghinis
and Mercedes displayed in their gleaming temples
to excess. Suddenly an alternative mode of
transport clips along past the Rolls-Royce
showroom – a rickety two-wheel cart piled high
with bits of wood and cardboard. It’s being pulled,
not by a donkey, but a ‘favela man’, who zips along
despite the heat and his inadequate footwear. The
scene is a neat photo cliché of the urban economic
disparity that typifies a BRIC country, but also the
cardboard dealer is making good progress. Better
than us. It’s a metaphor for the rise of the lower
classes – one of the many huge changes facing
Brazil and its advertising industry.
“Things are shifting. We’re having so many
different crises happening at the same time,” says
Paulo Henrique Miranda, EP of production
company Produtora Associados. “We lack water,
the cost of power’s going up massively, there’s
corruption. I don’t even know what’s going to
happen in the next couple of months. It’s bad for
advertising agencies and it’s bad for production
companies, too.”
The corruption scandal – an estimated US$8.9
billion gone awol in deals involving the state-run
oil firm Petrobras – is the largest Brazil has seen.
President Dilma Rousseff, whose close-call
re-election for a second term in October 2014
divided the country, professes ignorance of the
affair but millions of Brazilians are calling for her
impeachment. A former Marxist guerilla, Rousseff
country’s power being 80 per cent hydroelectric,
there are now also power shortages looming. Add
to all this the changing demands of a shifting
social structure and the challenges presented by
digital, and Brazil and its ad industry looks set to
face a perfect storm of upheaval and uncertainty.
The steady rise in fortunes of the country’s
lower-middle class (known in Brazil as the C class)
has been affecting the ad industry in a range of
ways. As with the global market, increased use of
digital devices means Brazilian marketers must
employ new forms of visual language to use on
the new platforms. Fabio Fernandes, CEO and
creative director of F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi,
says: “I think the digita world is forcing clients to
think more globally in terms of aesthetics. This is
because the internet is bringing a greater range of
MAIN ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS EDE
cultural information to Brazilians. They are
understanding more codes now, not just codes
from their TV shows and soap operas etc.” This
broadening of cultural appreciation is altering
consumer behavior in a number of ways. “One
example of something that didn’t happen about
three years ago here is that you now see long
queues forming at museums and galleries,” says
Fernandes. “Inside exhibitions you hear comments
from people admiring art for the first time. It’s so
beautiful to hear. It doesn’t matter what it is, from
the best stuff to crap art, you have a crowd of
people hungry to see it and take part in it.” He
relates his astonishment last year at seeing a
crowd standing in the searing heat, queuing to see
a Salvador Dalí exhibition. “I mean, Dalí!” he
exclaims. “And in 2013, São Paulo’s Museum of
Image and Sound had an exhibition about Stanley
Kubrick. The curator probably thought 5,000
people might come over the month, they had
something like 10,000 people per weekend, people
who had never heard of Kubrick before.”
Fernandes attributes this change partly to an
increase in the C class’ disposable income, but also
to the new way information is spread. “New media
means you get to see different images and pieces
of information, you swipe and see different things,
whereas the TV screen feeds you a fixed rectangle
of images. It’s a change in the state of mind.”
Brazil has long been producing highly creative
award-winning advertising – in the last Cannes
country rankings it held number two spot for the
second year running – and this expansion of
aesthetic appreciation among consumers can only
be a good thing for agencies and clients daring to
launch more sophisticated campaigns. For
example F/Nazca Saatchi’s recent spot for
Electrolux, Explosion, has a subtle, enigmatic style
that invites the consumer to make obscure
connections. Marketing a fridge that aids healthy
eating, it presents cinematic slo-mo images of
exploding unhealthy foods, such as desserts and
sodas, against the soundtrack of a woman singing
breathily in French. It’s a classy continental
cocktail that is oh-so-aspirational.
Produtora’s Miranda agrees that aspiration
could be the note to hit to reach Brazil’s
burgeoning middle class. “The lower classes are
earning more money, they’re becoming more
educated, so they desire to be on the next level
[culturally], we all do, we all want to be a step
forward. We still need to produce commercials to
sell beer to the masses but now those consumers
are more open to something more subtle, that is
more of a fantasy.” But in tough economic times
this can present a struggle for producers. “The
agencies come to us and they want to do
something good for that target audience, but they
want to do something with less of a budget. But
something good costs more money…” He cites
2014’s Skol spot Underwater Bar, which Produtora
Associados and partners PBA Cinema produced
out of F/Nazca Saatchi. Referencing the beer’s
blue bottle, the surreally beautiful ad interpreted
the tagline ‘Blue on the outside, mysterious on the
inside’ by staging an otherworldly underwater
party. It wasn’t a cheap ad, requiring four months
of pre-production, international specialists in
underwater lighting and effects – and sharks. “We
even had to find the right texture of fabric that
would work in the water, “ he recalls. And then
there were the extras and digital content,too.”
Bother with in-house media buying
This extra digital content that’s increasingly
obligatory can present a fresh challenge to
Brazilian agencies due to their traditional model
of in-house media buying, whereby the budget for
a campaign is a percentage of the agency’s spend
on media. When content is placed on free digital
platforms there is no finance generated. “The
percentage is usually 20 per cent here,” says
Miranda, “so what happens when you go to
YouTube or Facebook and don’t pay anything to
advertise? Twenty per cent of nothing is nothing.
So they have to rearrange that and find this money
from somewhere. And usually it’s not enough,
some clients even think that because digital
content is on a smaller screen it costs less to
produce, but of course it doesn’t.” Miranda says
shrinking production budgets have knock-on
effects. “We may ask a supplier to do us a favour
and charge less than normal on a job, so they do it
once, maybe twice, but the third time they’ll say,
‘I have to charge full rate’. Then you put the
correct amount to the client and they say, ‘You’re
too expensive, we’re going somewhere else’.”
This environment where larger production
companies with greater overheads are struggling,
is fertile ground for smaller, more nimble outfits.
The Kumite, for example, part of the Flag group of
companies, is a content production company
comprising four directors who have produced
content for clients such as Google, Samsung and
Axe. Meanwhile, production companies with
international offices are looking abroad to bolster
business. Karin Stuckenschmidt, executive
producer of Home Productions, which was
originally founded as Filmplanet, says: “They are
predicting a recession in Brazil for the next two
years. It’s going to be hard, but thank God we have
been busy and the international work we get in
means we’re not relying on just local business.”
Design and animation studio Lobo, which
created the brilliant D&AD 50th anniversary
“The digital world is
forcing clients to
think more globally
in terms of
aesthetics. This is
because the internet
is bringing a greater
range of cultural
information to
Brazilians. They are
understanding
more codes now”
“The percentage is usually 20 per cent here,
so what happens when you go to YouTube or
Facebook and don’t pay anything to advertise?
Twenty per cent of nothing is nothing...”
1/2/3/4/5 D&AD,
Wish You Were
Here? by Lobo
6/7/8/9/10
Johnnie Walker,
The Giant Awakes
next page
11/12/13/14 Skol,
Underwater
may have launched welfare reforms that have
lifted millions out of poverty, but she’s blamed by
many for the country’s slide into recession.
It’s all a far cry from the vibe that greeted shots
on our last visit to Brazil in the spring of 2013,
when the mot du jour was ‘boom’ and the
upcoming World Cup seemed set to further boost
Brazil’s business and status on the world’s stage.
But, like the smog that often hovers over São
Paulo, the events of 2014 have cast a shadow. In
the words of Ciro Cesar Silva, EP and partner of
production company Rebolucion, last year was a
“wet blanket”. Though 2015 has started well for
Rebolucion, with its co-founder, filmmaker and
former shots cover star Armando Bo, winning an
Oscar for co-writing Birdman, Silva is saddened
by the country’s dashed hopes: “The World Cup
should have been a celebration and good for the
country, but the wind blew in a different direction.”
Following 2013’s mass protests, which were in part
fuelled by lavish state spending on the
tournament, the country faced a further buzzkill at
the Brazil team’s 7-1 semi-final loss against
Germany, then the ad industry faced jittery clients
who were holding back waiting to see what the
elections would bring. Clients are still holding
back thanks to the election results and other woes
including the falling currency and, now, a severe
water shortage. When Brazil started to boom in
1994, infrastructure was never put in place to cope
with the expansion. Thus you have the irony of
water rationing in a country blessed with 12 per
cent of the world’s freshwater – much of São Paulo,
a city of an estimated 20 million, relies on just one
main reservoir, which, during the recent dry rainy
season, dropped to six per cent capacity. With the
1
2 3
4
5 6 7
8 9
10

4. BRAZIL|Places 5150 Places|BRAZIL
São Paulo’s streets sizzle in the 30 degree
heat of a rainy season without rain. In an air-
conditioned saloon Deny, my driver for the week,
first-gears along a swanky avenida known for its
luxury car showrooms. There’s traffic as usual, so
I’ve time to gaze at the Porsches, Lamborghinis
and Mercedes displayed in their gleaming temples
to excess. Suddenly an alternative mode of
transport clips along past the Rolls-Royce
showroom – a rickety two-wheel cart piled high
with bits of wood and cardboard. It’s being pulled,
not by a donkey, but a ‘favela man’, who zips along
despite the heat and his inadequate footwear. The
scene is a neat photo cliché of the urban economic
disparity that typifies a BRIC country, but also the
cardboard dealer is making good progress. Better
than us. It’s a metaphor for the rise of the lower
classes – one of the many huge changes facing
Brazil and its advertising industry.
“Things are shifting. We’re having so many
different crises happening at the same time,” says
Paulo Henrique Miranda, EP of production
company Produtora Associados. “We lack water,
the cost of power’s going up massively, there’s
corruption. I don’t even know what’s going to
happen in the next couple of months. It’s bad for
advertising agencies and it’s bad for production
companies, too.”
The corruption scandal – an estimated US$8.9
billion gone awol in deals involving the state-run
oil firm Petrobras – is the largest Brazil has seen.
President Dilma Rousseff, whose close-call
re-election for a second term in October 2014
divided the country, professes ignorance of the
affair but millions of Brazilians are calling for her
impeachment. A former Marxist guerilla, Rousseff
country’s power being 80 per cent hydroelectric,
there are now also power shortages looming. Add
to all this the changing demands of a shifting
social structure and the challenges presented by
digital, and Brazil and its ad industry looks set to
face a perfect storm of upheaval and uncertainty.
The steady rise in fortunes of the country’s
lower-middle class (known in Brazil as the C class)
has been affecting the ad industry in a range of
ways. As with the global market, increased use of
digital devices means Brazilian marketers must
employ new forms of visual language to use on
the new platforms. Fabio Fernandes, CEO and
creative director of F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi,
says: “I think the digita world is forcing clients to
think more globally in terms of aesthetics. This is
because the internet is bringing a greater range of
MAIN ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS EDE
cultural information to Brazilians. They are
understanding more codes now, not just codes
from their TV shows and soap operas etc.” This
broadening of cultural appreciation is altering
consumer behavior in a number of ways. “One
example of something that didn’t happen about
three years ago here is that you now see long
queues forming at museums and galleries,” says
Fernandes. “Inside exhibitions you hear comments
from people admiring art for the first time. It’s so
beautiful to hear. It doesn’t matter what it is, from
the best stuff to crap art, you have a crowd of
people hungry to see it and take part in it.” He
relates his astonishment last year at seeing a
crowd standing in the searing heat, queuing to see
a Salvador Dalí exhibition. “I mean, Dalí!” he
exclaims. “And in 2013, São Paulo’s Museum of
Image and Sound had an exhibition about Stanley
Kubrick. The curator probably thought 5,000
people might come over the month, they had
something like 10,000 people per weekend, people
who had never heard of Kubrick before.”
Fernandes attributes this change partly to an
increase in the C class’ disposable income, but also
to the new way information is spread. “New media
means you get to see different images and pieces
of information, you swipe and see different things,
whereas the TV screen feeds you a fixed rectangle
of images. It’s a change in the state of mind.”
Brazil has long been producing highly creative
award-winning advertising – in the last Cannes
country rankings it held number two spot for the
second year running – and this expansion of
aesthetic appreciation among consumers can only
be a good thing for agencies and clients daring to
launch more sophisticated campaigns. For
example F/Nazca Saatchi’s recent spot for
Electrolux, Explosion, has a subtle, enigmatic style
that invites the consumer to make obscure
connections. Marketing a fridge that aids healthy
eating, it presents cinematic slo-mo images of
exploding unhealthy foods, such as desserts and
sodas, against the soundtrack of a woman singing
breathily in French. It’s a classy continental
cocktail that is oh-so-aspirational.
Produtora’s Miranda agrees that aspiration
could be the note to hit to reach Brazil’s
burgeoning middle class. “The lower classes are
earning more money, they’re becoming more
educated, so they desire to be on the next level
[culturally], we all do, we all want to be a step
forward. We still need to produce commercials to
sell beer to the masses but now those consumers
are more open to something more subtle, that is
more of a fantasy.” But in tough economic times
this can present a struggle for producers. “The
agencies come to us and they want to do
something good for that target audience, but they
want to do something with less of a budget. But
something good costs more money…” He cites
2014’s Skol spot Underwater Bar, which Produtora
Associados and partners PBA Cinema produced
out of F/Nazca Saatchi. Referencing the beer’s
blue bottle, the surreally beautiful ad interpreted
the tagline ‘Blue on the outside, mysterious on the
inside’ by staging an otherworldly underwater
party. It wasn’t a cheap ad, requiring four months
of pre-production, international specialists in
underwater lighting and effects – and sharks. “We
even had to find the right texture of fabric that
would work in the water, “ he recalls. And then
there were the extras and digital content,too.”
Bother with in-house media buying
This extra digital content that’s increasingly
obligatory can present a fresh challenge to
Brazilian agencies due to their traditional model
of in-house media buying, whereby the budget for
a campaign is a percentage of the agency’s spend
on media. When content is placed on free digital
platforms there is no finance generated. “The
percentage is usually 20 per cent here,” says
Miranda, “so what happens when you go to
YouTube or Facebook and don’t pay anything to
advertise? Twenty per cent of nothing is nothing.
So they have to rearrange that and find this money
from somewhere. And usually it’s not enough,
some clients even think that because digital
content is on a smaller screen it costs less to
produce, but of course it doesn’t.” Miranda says
shrinking production budgets have knock-on
effects. “We may ask a supplier to do us a favour
and charge less than normal on a job, so they do it
once, maybe twice, but the third time they’ll say,
‘I have to charge full rate’. Then you put the
correct amount to the client and they say, ‘You’re
too expensive, we’re going somewhere else’.”
This environment where larger production
companies with greater overheads are struggling,
is fertile ground for smaller, more nimble outfits.
The Kumite, for example, part of the Flag group of
companies, is a content production company
comprising four directors who have produced
content for clients such as Google, Samsung and
Axe. Meanwhile, production companies with
international offices are looking abroad to bolster
business. Karin Stuckenschmidt, executive
producer of Home Productions, which was
originally founded as Filmplanet, says: “They are
predicting a recession in Brazil for the next two
years. It’s going to be hard, but thank God we have
been busy and the international work we get in
means we’re not relying on just local business.”
Design and animation studio Lobo, which
created the brilliant D&AD 50th anniversary
“The digital world is
forcing clients to
think more globally
in terms of
aesthetics. This is
because the internet
is bringing a greater
range of cultural
information to
Brazilians. They are
understanding
more codes now”
“The percentage is usually 20 per cent here,
so what happens when you go to YouTube or
Facebook and don’t pay anything to advertise?
Twenty per cent of nothing is nothing...”
1/2/3/4/5 D&AD,
Wish You Were
Here? by Lobo
6/7/8/9/10
Johnnie Walker,
The Giant Awakes
next page
11/12/13/14 Skol,
Underwater
may have launched welfare reforms that have
lifted millions out of poverty, but she’s blamed by
many for the country’s slide into recession.
It’s all a far cry from the vibe that greeted shots
on our last visit to Brazil in the spring of 2013,
when the mot du jour was ‘boom’ and the
upcoming World Cup seemed set to further boost
Brazil’s business and status on the world’s stage.
But, like the smog that often hovers over São
Paulo, the events of 2014 have cast a shadow. In
the words of Ciro Cesar Silva, EP and partner of
production company Rebolucion, last year was a
“wet blanket”. Though 2015 has started well for
Rebolucion, with its co-founder, filmmaker and
former shots cover star Armando Bo, winning an
Oscar for co-writing Birdman, Silva is saddened
by the country’s dashed hopes: “The World Cup
should have been a celebration and good for the
country, but the wind blew in a different direction.”
Following 2013’s mass protests, which were in part
fuelled by lavish state spending on the
tournament, the country faced a further buzzkill at
the Brazil team’s 7-1 semi-final loss against
Germany, then the ad industry faced jittery clients
who were holding back waiting to see what the
elections would bring. Clients are still holding
back thanks to the election results and other woes
including the falling currency and, now, a severe
water shortage. When Brazil started to boom in
1994, infrastructure was never put in place to cope
with the expansion. Thus you have the irony of
water rationing in a country blessed with 12 per
cent of the world’s freshwater – much of São Paulo,
a city of an estimated 20 million, relies on just one
main reservoir, which, during the recent dry rainy
season, dropped to six per cent capacity. With the
1
2 3
4
5 6 7
8 9
10

5. 52 Places|BRAZIL
film Wish You Were Here?, is also focusing efforts
on its international business and is about to open
a new office in New York. Executive producer Loic
Francois Marie Dubois reveals they’ve been
feeling the squeeze on the local economy. “We’re
doing more content production now for Brazil’s C
class and for way lower budgets.” Paris-born
Dubois has been in São Paulo since 2002 and
displays plenty of Brazilian buoyancy: “It’s a big
creative boom for us, it pushes us to the limits,
with smaller budgets we have to think of more
inventive ways of doing things.” However, the
changes are not just fiscal. He also recognizes that
Brazilian marketers must address a new type of
consciousness now. “The consumers are more
savvy, the way they interact with information is
completely different so we have to adapt to that.
On a political level it’s brilliant, it means that the
country is waking up again,” he enthuses. “I never
thought there would be protests here. I thought it’s
Brazil; it’s about football and carnival! Sure people
have voted, [which is mandatory in Brazil, you
don’t vote, you don’t have a passport] but they
haven’t been feeling it of late. But in the last two
years I’ve seen real changes. The steep increase in
internet usage has brought about this revolution.”
The country-wide protests that began in force
in June 2013 indeed indicate a reawakening of
mass political activism since the protests at the
end of the dictatorship in 1985. But an aspect of
them also revealed an interesting facet of the
Brazilian attitude to advertising when Johnnie
Walker’s The Giant Awakes spot and Fiat’s Vem
Pra Rua (Come To The Streets) campaign were
repurposed by protestors. Where else in the world
would images from a whisky ad and a car brand
jingle be employed as a viral video and an anthem
of anti-government revolt? (To read more about
this, see the interviews with Marcelo Reis on page
62 and Alexandra Gama on page 68). Some have
attributed this phenomenon to the shallowness of
a consumer society but it says more about the
Brazilian’s non-cynical, affectionate relationship
with advertising. In Brazil there’s less of the divide
between entertainment and advertising that you
see in other markets and stars from the hugely
popular soap operas, with whom viewers have an
intense emotional attachment, also appear in ads.
“Brazilians feel very close to their celebrities and
every agency uses celebrities in their ads,” says
Leo Burnett Tailor Made’s Marcelo Reis. “Often
Brazilian stars are more expensive than American
stars. We used Dustin Hoffman once and he was
cheaper than Ronaldo, the Brazilian footballer. It’s
significant in terms of people’s engagement. And
there will be protests for sure. There’s much to
complain about and an international media event
such as this is a perfect opportunity to express
dissatisfaction. The Giant will take to the streets
again, I think.”
En route to the airport, Deny speeds me though
a quiet Sunday-afternoon São Paulo and I think of
Marlene Dietrich’s words: “Rio is a beauty, but São
Paulo? São Paulo is a city.” I have to disagree;
there is much beauty here. The architecture is
stunning – futuristic, modernist, with structures by
celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer
that seem to have been beamed down from outer
space. I was expecting a concrete jungle, but here
is actual jungle – São Paulo is dripping with lush
foliage, as if the rainforest is trying to reclaim the
streets. Along with bright blossom and glossy
green leaves, world-class graffiti washes the city in
eye-popping colour that’s louder than the traffic.
Some of it is by professional street artists and
ends up in galleries. As Latin America’s visual arts
hub, São Paulo has outstanding galleries, one of
which, MASP, boasts the southern hemisphere’s
greatest collection of European masters.
So, sorry Marlene, to my mind São Paulo makes
Paris look like Basingstoke and reminds me that
Brazil is a country that values aesthetics and oozes
creativity. It’s also a dynamic, culturally-diverse
country full of people who’ve endured ups and
downs before, from dictatorships to hyper-
inflation. At São Paolo’s swish international
airport, something odd happens at passport
control. Instead of the usual deadened glance from
a face-weary official determined not to interact, I
get a warm Brazilian smile and a brief chat, I’d
noticed that on the way in, too. Communication is
in their blood! They are good at it and I hope their
natural flair for advertising will see the industry
weather whatever perfect storms come their way.
crazy.” This receptive attitude towards advertising
can only help the industry and amid the fears of
further fiscal woes, there are still reasons to be
cheerful in Brazil. Due to it being a multi-cultural,
multi-lingual nation, plus its linguistic isolation as
the only Portuguese-speaking Latin American
nation, Brazil has well-developed visual
communications and a strong reputation in print.
Now its filmmaking is on the up too, with a new
breed of Brazilian directors like Vellas (see profile
on page 58) producing cinematic spots – such as
the five-Lion-winning Soul for Leica – that are
catching global attention.
FilmBrazil, the government-sponsored film
promotion body within APRO, the local
association of production companies, is
organising a roadshow taking 10 production
companies, each with two directors, to New York
and Chicago to showcase the country’s
filmmakers. Marianna Souza FilmBrazil’s
executive manager says: “We have talent here that
can compete with Argentina, Chile and Mexico.
We want to sell Brazil not as a production services
country, as it has been before, but as a talent hub,
where you can come and shoot anything. And now,
with the Real falling against the US dollar, it’s
cheaper to shoot here, so it’s competitive as well.”
Nick Story, a British/Austrian/French
filmmaker who moved his London-based Story
Productions to São Paulo in 2006, is able to
capitalise on running a Brazilian company with
European connections and is also optimistic that
international business will increasingly boost his
adopted country’s film production. “It’s been so
expensive to shoot here for a long time, but the
Real’s fall means it’s getting much cheaper for the
foreign market. We have the talent here and the
time difference helps, too – it’s only one hour
behind New York and three hours behind London.”
The rock giant could rise again
Next year’s Olympics in Rio could also boost the
country’s fortunes, and Home Productions’
Stuckenschmidt predicts the Olympics will be
bring more production work to Brazil, “Rio is so
iconic,” she says, “I mean, it’s Rio! So the Olympics
will help, I think there will be a lot of work being
shot in the city this year for 2016.”
However Alexandra Gama, founding partner of
NEOGAMA/BBH, predicts the Games may cause
unrest and be used as another springboard to
protests, “Brazilians don’t have the same
emotional connection with the Olympic Games as
they did with the World Cup so it will be less
“Often Brazilian stars are more expensive than
American stars. We used Dustin Hoffman
once and he was cheaper than Ronaldo, the
Brazilian football player. It’s crazy.”
11
12
13