Flavio Pantigoso: The Escape Artist

Y&R Peru ECD Flavio Pantigoso dreamed of being a pilot and flirted with a career as a diplomat as a way to flee the crushing, grey reality of Eighties Lima, but in the end it was his Brazillian mother who exposed him to a parallel world of wit and creativity on the other side of the Andes, kick-starting a globetrotting career that now finds him riding high in his home city

A 2010 TV spot for mobile phone network Movistar copywritten by Flavio Pantigoso ends with the tagline ‘Connected, we can do more’. It’s a smart, emotive ad displaying images of human endeavour, struggle and triumph that ultimately celebrates the concept of solidarity. Watching it after listening to Pantigoso talk about his journey into advertising, one feels the weight of history behind it, and can almost ‘connect’ it via a chain stretching back through centuries of Latin American upheaval to the Battle of Cajamarca in 1532, the start of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

The ECD of Y&R Peru is a successful man. For three consecutive years (2010-2012) he was voted Best Creative Director in Peru at Latin America’s most prestigious awards, El Ojo de Iberoamérica, where Y&R Peru took Best Peruvian Agency. In Luerzer’s Archive worldwide rankings, he takes fourth and fifth spot as the most published copywriter and creative director, respectively, in the last five years. He also sat on the Press jury at Cannes 2013, a festival at which he led Y&R to victory, bagging five out of the ten Lions awarded to Peru, a record for a country that is enjoying something of an advertising uprising.

Pantigoso’s success is not solely down to his creative talent but also the extraordinary passion that has propelled him along a career path winding its way through Peruvian politics and history, multicultural family influences and invaluable experiences studying and working abroad.

He was born in Lima in 1965 before the military moved in when he was three, remaining in power until 1981. “It was welcomed at first by left-wing intellectuals who hoped it would redeem the vast social problems that dated back to the trauma of the Spanish conquests,” Pantigoso explains. But the regime crushed democracy and poverty worsened. “This was an atypical left-wing military dictatorship – a ‘soft’ tyranny by Latin American standards – but it still had catastrophic effects on the development of our country.” Peru’s economic growth stagnated and Western consumerist ideals were demonised. Pantigoso grew up under a regime “that censored rock ’n’ roll (speaking English was shameful), Donald Duck (he didn’t wear clothes) and Superman (imperialist).”

The media was tightly controlled, of course. There were three, samey TV channels, one owned by the state. “Concepts like competitiveness and free trade were unknown and creative advertising didn’t exist; it was merely boring hard-sell with censored scripts. Textbooks at our school (an elite private Swiss school in Lima where he learned German) had chapters dedicated to criticising advertising. A play I saw as a kid, The Televisions, consisted of mocking the (terrible) TV spots of that time. It was wrong to want to be in advertising or to like advertising. No young person saw it as a career option.”

Neither did Pantigoso. As a child he had considered becoming a writer or professor of literature, following in the footsteps of his father Manuel – a renowned poet, playwright, literary critic and university professor. But by the time he came to choose a career the state of the nation predicated against the arts. Peru in the Eighties, Pantigoso says, “saw the seven plagues of Egypt break out simultaneously – terrorism by the Shining Path, catastrophic hyperinflation, extreme poverty etc. It would have been impossible to make a living out of literature.” His next idea was to be a pilot, but his myopia scotched that. He then studied law, intending to become a diplomat, but quit after a year. “I got bored and the idea of having to diplomatically represent the government at that time disheartened me.” Joking that his vocational choices seem “schizophrenic”, he points out a link: “I think behind my interest in such opposing activities as aviation and diplomacy there was a common thread: the desire to escape, literally. Escape from the grey, mediocre, crushing reality Peru offered in those years.”

It was his mother who provided his escape into advertising. A Brazilian who taught at the Centre for Brazilian Studies in Lima, she would travel to Rio de Janeiro and bring back newspapers and magazines displaying ads that enthralled him.” I was astonished at how creative and smart the ads were. Brazilian advertising was like Hollywood, with its rock-star creatives and agencies. One could actually do something creative and make a good living. That was an epiphany. I became passionate about it and, aged 21, got a scholarship to study advertising at Fluminense Federal University in Rio.”

While there he prepared a book that won him an internship at the largest Brazilian agency, MPM, and for the next four years Brazil was his “great advertising school. I learned by soaking up its TV, exquisite graphic art, and its boldness.” Next stop: Chile, which was just emerging from Pinochet’s dictatorship. “The country was celebrating democracy’s return, so there was freshness and very good crafting.” After eight years there, at Prolam Y&R, Ogilvy and Leo Burnett, he began to find Chilean advertising too risk-averse. “I felt the country got boring and bourgeois so I went to the Mecca for any South American creative at that time: Spain.” Between 1999 and 2002, Pantigoso enjoyed stints at Delvico Bates, Cathedral and Tandem DDB. “In Madrid and Barcelona I worked with extraordinary creative directors. It was an incomparable learning experience in the most advanced art of creativity and of the utmost rigour.”  

He was then lured to Holland, to 180 Amsterdam, where he worked extensively with adidas. On his first day he noted a marked contrast between Dutch and Latin American work styles: “At 6pm everyone started putting down their pencils and leaving – just the time when many Spanish agencies are beginning to really work.” He feels the different approaches each have their merits: “Many northern European markets inspire with their discipline and respect for process,” though sometimes the “intense critical assessment of an idea can lead to ‘paralysis by analysis’”. The Latin American approach, however, can be more chaotic, “but can offer spontaneity and wrong ideas that end up becoming right”.

In 2004 he popped back to Peru just long enough to turn around the fortunes of Leo Burnett Lima, leading it to become the network’s Agency of the Year in 2005. He has a habit of rapidly catapulting agencies into the big league, and during his next posting in Mexico (2006 to 2008) he helped Lowe Mexico win Agency of the Year 2006 in the country’s Golden Circle awards. Despite relishing Mexican culture he found both clients’ and consumers’ conservatism restrictive. “Mexico is a powerhouse of creativity in the arts, but its advertising does no justice to that DNA. There are Mexican creatives of great talent, but there is also fear of new ideas – particularly from the public. At focus groups I’d see uneasiness with ads that were different from what they were used to.”

He then returned to Lima, where he has worked ever since, garnering major industry awards and contributing to Peru achieving third place in the Cannes ranking of Latin American agencies. Among Y&R Peru’s bronze Lion winners are the print ads Night & Day, deftly highlighting the increased skin cancer risk daylight brings and, for the Britanico English Institute, English lessons are promoted via the witty spot Barely Legal Media Space, with its badly translated subtitles on illegally downloaded US TV and the print ads Say What You Mean, which drolly display the perils of bad pronounciation as words get lost in translation between thought and speech.

The 2011 web and TV campaign for Peru’s national tourist board, titled From Peru to Peru is one of the most awarded campaigns in Latin America (including two lions, a Grand Effie and seven prizes at FIAP). “Our starting point for the campaign was that Peru has so many wonderful things to offer that it would be a shame if there were a Peruvian on Earth who didn’t know about them,” he reveals. “We discovered a small town in Nebraska called Peru and sent over 12 Peruvian representatives from the fields of culture, gastronomy, arts and sports. For a week we ‘Peruvianised’ them through a sort of reverse colonisation.” The result was a 15-minute documentary depicting Nebraskans learning about and embracing ‘the motherland’ – and in two days it became the world’s most watched YouTube video (film category). Justifiably proud of the piece, Pantigoso says it reflects “the recovered self-esteem of many Peruvians in a country that not long ago was at rock bottom, but is now booming: in its economy and its creativity”.

For a country with no tradition of advertising to have done so well at Cannes 2013 is, says Pantigoso, an astonishing feat and is due in part to the democratisation of technology: “When I was a student, you had to wait for three months to get the Cannes reel to watch on a video recorder. Today, everything is in real time, in the palm of your hand or on your desktop. You can even watch advance premieres of ads online, so everyone learns from everyone else very quickly.”

So how is Peruvian advertising exploiting new technology? “Though smartphone and Facebook use has soared, the conditions for digital marketing to really boom are lagging behind other countries in the region like Brazil, Chile or Colombia. The challenge is not only to achieve greater broadband access (internet penetration is still low – around 40%) but also to find great ideas that utilise new platforms. Y&R Peru, however, has seemed short of such ideas. Another Movistar campaign, Connected to Peru, celebrated the country’s Independence Day by changing the carrier’s name as it appeared on handsets to Peru, neatly linking the brand to national pride. That won a Gold for Mobile at the El Ojo de Iberoamérica. A recent Toyota road safety print campaign used augmented reality with the ingenious QR Road app to highlight the dangers of using smartphones while driving.

I ask Pantigoso if innovating with new technology excites him as much as the simple hunt for a strong concept: “It’s not a question of ideas versus technology, of substance versus form. The new technologies expand our toolbox. The drive is to trigger new dialogues and experiences, but these days you don’t necessarily accomplish that with just an ad, but with innovating a product or service. Behind it all though, the question remains: is there a powerful, relevant idea that connects with people and mobilises them?”

Musing on the future for Peruvian advertising, he sees it going from strength to strength. “In 2009 I foretold – in shots 114, actually – that something big was coming for Peru. And it has. Finally, I am in a country where the unexpected is happening.” So, what goals does he have for Y&R Lima? “The work isn’t finished. This is just the beginning. It is the young, my outstanding team at Y&R Lima, who will continue to raise global awareness of Peruvian culture and creative communications. And this time they’ll do it without having to leave the country!”

Thinking about how Pantigoso’s own globetrotting, two things strike me. First, he says on his website that despite his passion for advertising, his love for his wife and two daughters (aged seven and nine) comes first. I wonder how he’s mixed working abroad with family life: “I’ve been blessed with a wife [a Spanish market research analyst] who has always responded to proposals of moving with ‘this’ll be fun’, or ‘great, the girls can learn another language’. I sometimes wish she’d say ‘no way’ and break some plates while having a breakdown. But no, she’s followed me everywhere.”

My second thought is that here is a man who truly loves to communicate, not only with his countrymen but with the world. He speaks five languages, but while arranging this interview modestly claimed his English wasn’t up to much – he joked that he’d try and answer my questions in Cockney. Pantigoso is living proof of the veracity of his own tagline: “Connected, we can do more.”