The man should be delirious. The Brazilian hotshop, DM9DDB, was
awarded agency of the year at the Cannes advertising festival last month
- for the second year in a row. But Nizan Guanaes, the agency’s
president, sounds uncertain.
’I am very concerned,’ he explains in his impeccable English accent.
’When you become an award-winning agency, it’s a dangerous thing. You
can easily get into the award-winning business. But we work in the
advertising business.’
Over the past decade, Guanaes’ agency has built a worldwide reputation
for ground-breaking work. It remains the only Brazilian shop to have won
a Grand Prix at Cannes, an accolade gained in 1993 for a series of press
ads for the soft drink, Antarctica Diet Guarana.
This year, the Sao Paulo-based agency surpassed itself, scooping 11
lions - ten for print executions and one cyber lion for its interactive
work. Clients represented in the award-winning work include the dairy
company, Parmalat, the drinks giant, Budweiser, and the Iguatemi
shopping centre.
Rivals sneer that DM9 won agency of the year (calculated by the overall
number of shortlisted film, print and cyber lion contenders) only
because it entered so many categories. But Guanaes, who is regarded as a
deft copywriter himself, has a simple response. ’If your work is lousy,
you can enter every category but you’re still going to lose. We enter
awards and we win,’ he says.
Despite its cutting-edge reputation, DM9 emphasises the importance of
creating solid campaigns that won’t necessarily please a jury. ’Fish and
chips is a good dish,’ Guanaes says, ’but it’s not an award-winning
dish.
Hamburgers and hotdogs don’t win awards. Yet some things have to be
simple.’
Guanaes spent his early years in London, where his father worked briefly
as a doctor and an English nanny taught him nursery rhymes. Indeed, he’s
so entranced by this recollection that he can’t help breaking off
serious conversation for a brisk rendition of ’The Grand Old Duke of
York’.
And it was in England, aged nine, that Guanaes won his first award for
creative writing - a somewhat precocious poem about the plight of
children in Biafra. Returning to Brazil at 11, he saw the country with
an outsider’s eye. ’That’s helpful in our business. Advertising is about
being able to understand the soul of people,’ he says.
Elaborating on his theories, Guanaes says: ’Advertising is about being
able to entertain people and to enchant. It’s hard to sell a shirt to
someone who has come in for some trousers. You have to be interesting,
and to follow the changes of time. It’s wonderful to think as a boy, a
housewife, a lover - to have so many different personalities.’
The agency is chaotic but passionate. ’We are in tune with our own
country,’ Guanaes asserts. Indeed, he has co-ordinated two electoral
campaigns for Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Over the years, Guanaes had turned down numerous offers from global
networks.
In June 1997, he succumbed. Together with his partners, he sold a
majority stake to DDB International.
’DDB is crucial,’ Guanaes says. ’I don’t want to grow around the world
and have an agency in Argentina or England. If you have a network, you
have the hardware to spread your clients without stopping doing the
thing you love - for me, that’s creating work for clients. DDB gives us
total freedom.’
As a result of the merger, Guanaes has picked up global clients such as
Telefonica, the Spanish telephone giant. For DDB, the merger offered a
strong creative presence in South America’s largest market - not to
mention a cracking client list, which includes Texaco, Honda and
Budweiser.
With billings of dollars 300 million, DM9 is now the third-largest
agency in Brazil. But, again, Guanaes is not entirely satisfied. Rather
eccentrically, he wants to be smaller: ’We would be better if we were
number five. We need to control our growth.’
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