Brazil: F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi; Back of the Net

There’s something fearless about F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi founder, Fabio Fernandes. He’s tackled corruption in his fave football club, slams awards show projects, dull work and flabby philosophy and has been at the top of his game for almost three decades

You don’t get as far as Fabio Fernandes has without knowing your onions. In a career spanning almost three decades he’s established himself as – and remained – one of the top creative minds in a highly competitive market. In 1994, aged 31, he set up his own agency, F/Nazca in partnership with Saatchi & Saatchi in São Paolo, which has become one of the country’s most respected shops. From the second you shake hands with him, you know he’s a man who takes his business seriously.

While awards rankings might lead the outside world to believe Brazilians are treated to dazzling ads 24/7, it’s not the case according to Fernandes, who serves as F/Nazca’s CEO and CD. “I think 97 per cent of everything is just boring”, he says. “So these two or three per cent are the brilliant things that inspire you, that make you go forward with your philosophy of not conceding, not accepting easy solutions and fear from your clients.”

Every day is not carnival day

What Fernandes doesn’t like is the practice of scam ads, making work solely for awards shows, what some people in Brazil call ‘ghost projects’. “I don’t do it. I am very pissed off about it,” he says, going on to explain how it projects an inaccurate profile of the agencies that do and also a “distorted image of the Brazilian market”. Fernandes compares it to the time he was visited in Rio by a British friend. “I had to tell him that not every lady on the street is like the ladies that he sees in carnival with the naked breasts,” he remembers, though he concedes that the ‘ghost project’ problem isn’t limited to Brazil. “It happens almost everywhere.”

Ironically the slew of mediocre ‘real’ work in Brazil can be attributed to the country’s recent economic growth. “Every time you have money in creativity you can use it well or you can use it in a bad way,” he explains. “This is exactly the time that you are confronted with your philosophy about what are you doing in this industry – if you are making money or making good things.”

Fernandes and his colleagues aren’t strangers to making good things. Renowned for their work for Nike, F/Nazca has turned out a number of brilliant commercials for that client over the last year, as well as eye-catching spots for Pinacoteca Art Museum of São Paulo (directed by Jones+Tino, see page 88) SESC and Honda, to name a few.

Appreciating your audience

One of Fernandes’ ingredients for success is not to underestimate the audience, as some of his contemporaries do. “I feel today in Brazil we are too concerned about the new consumers and we are accepting too easily the theory that they are not prepared for the subtle ways [we are] talking to them. Or worse, [we believe that] they are not intelligent enough to understand the codes and the ways in which advertising talks to people, which I think is absurd.”

His belief that Brazilians shouldn’t be pigeonholed into groups that can and cannot understand different forms of media is reflected in the way F/Nazca approaches projects. Having originally founded a division of the company to handle digital projects called AdverSiting, several years ago Fernandes merged it with the main agency. “We hire and we keep people here if they are able to understand and [facilitate] the communication of our clients in the whole sense and [across] every platform that is available,” says Fernandes, also emphasising that this doesn’t mean technical skills are imperative. “It means they have to think of big ideas and [how] to implement them across different platforms – I don’t call it media or new media, I just see it as a way you can [achieve] better access.”

One big change in the Brazilian industry that Fernandes laments is the influence lawyers can have on creativity. Reminiscing about a Saatchi summit held in New York in around 2000, he recalls how the heads of the US and European offices shocked him with their stories of legal teams blocking ideas. “I was like, ‘wow, gosh, really? I couldn’t work in a market like that. That would be impossible’. Within about six years in Brazil, I would say, it became just the same.” 

When he’s not running one of Brazil’s biggest ad agencies he’s helping to run one of its biggest football clubs. Hailing from Rio, he’s a lifelong Vasco fan and, in 2009, when the club was in trouble (it had dropped into the second-flight league for the first time in its 110-year history) its new president, legendary former local footballer Roberto Dinamite, asked Fernandes to help repair the damage. He got stuck into not just the marketing of the club but helped restructure absolutely everything from the management down, renegotiating (and even ripping up) corrupt contracts with suppliers, among others. Within 12 months he’d helped increase revenue by 1,754 per cent. The club was promoted that year and at the time of going to press was sitting at second place in the top league. He’s clearly very passionate about Vasco, but does the commitment take up much of his time? “Not these days. It’s getting less because of these people we put there [to run the club], but I talk to them five times a day by phone and five or ten through emails.”

Getting 10 emails a day from Fabio Fernandes must be the business equivalent of Kaka whipping 10 crosses into the box for your strikers to score. He’s built one of the most respected shops in the country and while he’s in charge, F/Nazca is likely to remain as one of the agencies fuelling the healthy competition at the top of the Brazilian advertising league.