FEEL THE FEAR—AND DO IT ANYWAY :)
I was never meant to be in advertising.
Back in 2002, in my small Brazilian town, I was the only guy who could make the internet do more than regurgitate TV spots. Back then, “digital activation” meant lifting a print ad, pasting it on a website, and calling it a day. It felt lazy. Dead on arrival. I wanted to make things that belonged in this messy, flickering, slow-loading new world. Back then, you could hear the modem sing when you connected. You could feel the frustration of watching an image load line by line. If someone was going to give me that much of their time, I wanted to give them something worth it.
That curiosity got me labeled the digital guy. But it wasn’t the tech I cared about, it was the making the tech. A website, a film, a stunt, a product launch, a song — whatever it took to make the idea feel alive. Eventually, everything became digital, and my edge wasn’t being “the digital guy” anymore. It was being someone who could carry an idea across any medium without losing its pulse.
Brazil was my training ground. At RMG Connect, JWT, and Grey, we worked out of rooms that smelled like burnt coffee and hot printers. Budgets were thin, ambition wasn’t. We built things for Ford, HSBC, Coca-Cola, not as giant brand monoliths, but as stories that had to earn their way into people’s lives. At CUBOCC, now the Brazilian outpost of Droga5, we turned Unilever and PepsiCo briefs into ideas that slipped into pop culture sideways, the way the best ones do.
By 2008, I was at Geometry Global (OgilvyONE), leading digital for Renault and Nissan. It was the first time I understood the weight of global work, the way a single decision made in one room could ripple through dozens of markets. That set me up for the call from Beijing.
China hit me like a new language — because it was. At BBDO Beijing, I found myself in a city that moved faster than I could process, pitching The People’s Car Project for Volkswagen. We didn’t just make ads; we opened the doors and asked an entire country to help design the car of the future. I remember the first submission, a drawing from a kid in a rural province, sketched on notebook paper, scanned at a corner shop. Crooked. Pixelated. Perfect.
Then New York, where ambition comes wrapped in noise. During my time at Firstborn (Dentsu Creative), the walls were covered in pitch boards for Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and ANA Airlines. It was the first time I felt what it meant to scale without losing your edge. Then came HUGE in Brooklyn, an office that smelled like new tech, too much takeout, and way too many dogs. We were a digital product company stepping into ad land, doing work for Google, Hublot, Hulu, and Comcast.
VML was sneakers and street culture, dragging New Balance out of “dad shoe” purgatory and dropping it into the front row at Fashion Week. I still remember the first time a kid in SoHo walked past me in a pair we’d worked on — no idea I had anything to do with it, just moving like he owned the sidewalk. That’s when you know it worked: when the idea leaves your hands and becomes theirs.
Ogilvy was the opposite of this energy, marked by months of war rooms and red-eye flights, as I co-led the Ford “pitch of the century” alongside Cristiano Abrahao, my long-time creative partner and co-conspirator. My suitcase stayed half-packed on the floor, and Sharpies died mid-sentence in my hands. Every meeting felt like overtime. Every win, a stolen one.
Meta was its own kind of labyrinth. Billions of users, a dozen time zones, products no one could explain in one sentence. My job was to make technology human. I remember standing backstage at the AI launch at Connect, hearing the countdown in my headset, and thinking: If we get this wrong, it’ll be the headline tomorrow. We didn’t get it wrong.
By 2021, I’d had enough of the machinery—too many layers between the idea and the people making it. We started Rise New York & Partners with three people and a promise: small, senior teams, no fat, no safe bets. We scaled it like a touring band: 3 offices, 20 senior creatives, playing a different set every night. Cannes Lions, Ad Age Top 10, all nice to have, but the real win is that the work still feels like the stuff I wanted to make back in 2002 – alive, unpredictable, and built for people, not decks.
Looking back, it’s not the titles or the trophies that stick. It’s the rooms. The midnight brainstorms in windowless offices, the smell of whiteboard markers in the morning. The pitches you thought you lost until you didn’t—the campaigns that died and the ones that somehow lived.
Creativity isn’t a career. It’s a way of noticing. The crack in the sidewalk. The wrong word in a headline. The idea that shouldn’t work but might.
You feel the fear. And you do it anyway.