Javier Campopiano — Chief Creative Officer, Saatchi & Saatchi New York
Javier talks to TheNextGag about why people from Argentina are creative, how the industry is evolving and the recent campaigns he is the most jealous of.
Javier Campopiano is the Chief Creative Officer of Saatchi & Saatchi New York in the USA.
With over 20 years of global industry experience, Javier Campopiano is the Chief Creative Officer of Saatchi & Saatchi New York. He most recently served as CCO of Saatchi & Saatchi Latin America where he helped revive the creative reputation of the network by producing award winning work for clients such as Toyota, Tide, Crest and T-Mobile.
Javier began his career in advertising as part owner of a small design and communications boutique in Buenos Aires. He went on to work at some of the industry’s most well-known shops with stints at Ogilvy, JWT and Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Latin America.
In 2012 Javier was appointed Chief Creative Officer at FCB NY where he led the team that developed the “The Real Cost” brand for the FDA’s first anti-tobacco campaign aimed teens after having previously led FCB Buenos Aires to be named the most awarded Argentinian agency at Cannes. He then went on to rejoin Saatchi in 2014.
A globally recognized talent, Javier’s work has been awarded at the most prestigious festivals in the industry. He has been the proud recipient of over 30 Cannes Lions throughout the course of his career, including an Outdoor Grand Prix, and has served as a juror for numerous global & regional festivals.
Javier is married and has two daughters, Isabella and Helena. His wife, Julieta, is a Freudian psychoanalyst who jokingly claims that Javier is her own award show case study.
THENEXTGAG: HOW IS THE CREATIVITY IN LATIN AMERICA COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE WORLD ?
JAVIER CAMPOPIANO: What you experience as a person, obviously, has an impact and an influence on your work. I started my first meeting with the creative department at Saatchi NY with a slide containing the news about the Argentinian crisis in 2001, when we had five different presidents over a span of 10 days. One guy would be designated, then he’d quit overnight, and so on, five times in a row. The creatives were cracking up. They couldn’t believe it was actually true. My point was about what that kind of instability ignites in you as a creative, and how that’s one reason why a country like Argentina produces such a disproportionate amount of creative talent, and such an amazing body of work for a rather small market. It’s probably an extreme example, but some of that still happens in the region. It’s in the DNA, and it translates to the work: that sense of urgency, the distrust for authority, the joy we find in bucking the system without breaking the rules. When you do that within the limits of our job, with the vote of confidence of your clients, usually the result is pretty distinctive and unique. The Macma work that came out of David this year, “Manboobs,” is a good example of that.
TNG: WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A CREATIVE ?
JC: Purity. Diego Maradona, Argentina’s most prominent football player, said once that despite all the FIFA scandals, the football player remains pure, and the will to play stays untouched. He stated it with a beautiful line, “La pelota no se mancha” — “The ball remains clean.” I feel that despite all the changes and challenges in our industry over the last several years, creativity is still the purest element in an agency. That’s why I just can’t work with people who are cynical about what we do. Good creatives don’t do this for the money, or the awards, they do it because they have a desperate need for self-expression, which needs to be nurtured. From a more practical point of view, I expect them to be fully immersed in our clients’ businesses, while maintaining a strong sense of ingenuity and entrepreneurship, which I feel is utterly necessary these days.
TNG: DO YOU STILL BELIEVE IN THE COPYWRITER/ART DIRECTOR DUO FOR YOUR CREATIVE TEAMS ?
JC: I believe in whatever works. I’ve had great writer/art director teams. I’ve had great teams that are less traditional as well. What I know is that we desperately need great talent regardless of how it’s defined. We need writers perhaps now more than ever, because the language is going through a seismic shift, and we need superb design and visual skills that are unique and tailored to the multitude of channels we communicate in.
TNG: WHAT PROJECT ARE YOU THE MOST PROUD OF ?
JC: I am meeting a lot of people lately as I seek to evolve our creative department and they all come with a point of view on my past work. One spot in particular, which I created for ZonaJobs in Argentina called “Grandma,” tends to come up the most and seems to have had the largest impact on the creative community. I am very proud of that one. More recently, I am quite proud of “Toyota More Than Cars,” which taps into a beautiful insight and was executed at a scale that I had never experienced before in my career.
TNG: IS THERE A CAMPAIGN THAT YOU SAW THIS YEAR THAT YOU REALLY ENJOYED ?
JC: We host what I call “Envy Mondays” (or Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, etc., depending on the day of the week we can actually meet) once a month. I have people submit pieces of work they wish they had done in the last two months and we get the whole agency together to review, discuss and fill ourselves with healthy envy. The top five from our last session included: “Sick Kids Vs.” for Fund the Fight; “Troll Trump” for hillaryclinton.com; “The Amazing Kenzo” by Spike Jonze; “Lucky Pennies” for AllyBank, a really cool promo idea; and “The 45º Andes Bar” from Saatchi Buenos Aires. Going back a bit to earlier this year, I also loved a lot of the Olympics work; the Unlimited Nike Campaign, Under Armour, the second round of Channel 4 Superhumans; also, the DNA challenge by Momondo, an amazing idea and one that feels very necessary right now.
TNG: CAN YOU TALK TO US ABOUT YOUR UPCOMING PROJECTS ?
JC: Not really, all I can say is that there are 4–5 projects across some of our biggest brands that have me very excited, because it’s work that challenges us and our clients. I’m proud to say that many of the ideas we have in the pipeline right now truly represent our belief that Nothing Is Impossible and I’m really looking forward to seeing them out in the world. But that’s all I can say for now…
TNG: WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL THAT MODERN AD AGENCIES SHOULD MASTER IN YOUR OPINION ?
JC: Decision making mostly. I think it’s critically important to create a sharper focus on what we do well and the value we create for our clients. The rapid rate of change and fierce competition from platforms, technology companies and consultancies has caused us as an industry to lose focus. I think it’s important not to get caught up in the latest trends, but rather to stick to what we do better than any other industry — create powerful connections between people and brands. When agencies do this well, and there are hundreds of examples, we don’t have to fear any sort of competition. After all, the Googles and Accentures of the world are trying to seduce our talent and replicate our skills.
TNG: IF YOU WERE 20 YEARS OLD AND STARTING OVER, WOULD YOU TRY TO JOIN AN AGENCY OR WOULD YOU RATHER START AT A STARTUP OR A MEDIA PLATFORM ?
JC: Me being me, I’d still choose an agency. I don’t have the guts to be an artist; I like a monthly paycheck. So I’d apply for a job at Saatchi or I’d try to start my own agency. But if I truly had the chance to be 20 again, I’d travel the world for several years. I am trying to do it now with two children, and it’s both fantastic and a nightmare all at once. So kids, do it now, before you have to take the “parents’ tour” of Machu Picchu.
TNG: HOW CAN AD AGENCIES COMPETE IN THE WAR OF TALENT AGAINST GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ?
JC: By creating an environment where risk-taking and innovation aren’t perceived as dangerous for your career. The conceptual thinking you find in agencies is a rare and powerful ingredient. When you add that to a true understanding of media and technology the result is exponentially more powerful than anything I’ve seen coming from any other source. An obsession with data has led our clients to stick to what has proven successful in the past and true talent is driven to experiment and push boundaries, not stay on the well-beaten path.
TNG: ARE YOU SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT THERE ARE NO CREATIVES AMONG THE 16 RICHEST PEOPLE IN ADVERTISING ?
JC: As I said earlier, good creatives are not in it for the money. So I am not surprised. But we need to change the industry mindset when it comes to ideas and innovation. I’ve seen some mind-blowing ideas whose value could be exponential if only we focused on developing them properly rather than pushing to have a case study ready for Cannes. We also need to rethink how we structure our client contracts in regard to IP. Sharing in the success we create for our clients through our transformative ideas and innovation would help motivate top talent to stay at agencies. I’ve gotta talk to my lawyer about it… good thing she’s my mom.
TNG: COMMERCIALS USED TO COMPETE WITH THE SHOWS THAT THEY WERE INTERRUPTING. BUT NOW THAT NETFLIX HAS NO ADS AND THAT COMMERCIALS LIVE ON YOUTUBE/FACEBOOK, WHAT DO WE COMPETE WITH ?
JC: I disagree. We never competed with the content we were interrupting. Advertising and brand communication occupy a pretty specific space in people’s minds: they know exactly what we are trying to do, and they like it when we do it well and hate it when we do it badly. In the recent past we competed with other ads; now we compete with all these other forms of narrative, news, user-generated content, beautiful DIY recipe videos, our friends’ babies and cats…soo many cats. We compete with a disadvantage — because of all of the different ways our messages can be blocked via technology. And as a huge competitor, I’d like to point to the giant mass of constant content and the undeniable pleasure that scrolling provokes. Scrolling is almost better than sex. If we manage to stop it, to create a small pause, we have succeeded, if we’re lucky, for about two minutes.
Javier Campopiano
Chief Creative Officer
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