Creative Profile: Beto Nahmad

Navigating the choppy waters of Spain’s recession to open up a new agency seemed like a crazy notion to some, but with Beto Nahmad at the helm, launching a slew of innovative, Cannes-winning campaigns and adopting an ‘ideas-first’ philosophy, it turned out to be plain sailing. David Knight chats to the ECD and co-founder of VCCP Madrid

Beto Nahmad says there have been a couple of occasions when friends and colleagues have questioned his sanity. Like in 2012, when he left a good job as ECD at DraftFCB in Madrid to start a new advertising agency, which is all well and good, except it was during the depths of Spain’s recession. Together with Javier Suso, then the general manager of Shackleton, he launched VCCP Madrid – with no clients and no work.

“Everyone told us: ‘You’re crazy,’” he recalls. But Nahmad and Suso went ahead – and a few months later they were scooping gold, silver and bronze Lions in Cannes. More Lions, in fact, than any other Spanish agency that year. “In six months we had become the best agency in Spain,” declares Nahmad. It’s an impish, slightly provocative comment from VCCP Madrid’s charismatic co-founder and executive creative director.

But then the 35 year old from Buenos Aires has been responsible for some of the most memorable, and stunningly effective Spanish advertising campaigns of recent years. He has produced work that challenges conventional wisdom, which takes the moving image beyond the parameters of traditional commercial production – and encapsulates the idea of viral advertising.

Cash in the bed wins at Cannes

VCCP Madrid’s groundbreaking first campaign is a case in point. DeS’S, a struggling mattress-making company from northern Spain, came to the agency looking to advertise on regional TV. As part of a pro-bono Christmas drive to support small Spanish businesses at risk of bankruptcy, the agency came to their aid. “We thought, we cannot change anything with a 20-second ad,” says Nahmad, mindful of recession-weary Spanish consumers. “At the time, people weren’t thinking about changing their mattresses, they were thinking about changing their lives.” So, inspired by the country’s prevailing mood, Nahmad came up with the idea of putting a small safe inside a DeS’S mattress, half-irreverently promoting it as the safest place to keep precious savings. When the My Mattress Savings Bank campaign launched, news media interest swiftly followed. “Press and TV called, wanting to interview the company owner,” he says. “Then it jumped to the US. Time, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN were all talking about our mattress campaign.”

After turning the DeS’S tiny marketing budget into a PR campaign that made sales soar, the agency repeated the trick for another no-budget campaign – promoting Spanish indie music from record label Discos Imprescindibles, tunes that couldn’t get any airplay on the country’s popular radio stations. The agency created Radio Underground, a station specifically for the Madrid subway, where other stations could not penetrate – again generating a wave of publicity. A few months later, this won a silver Lion at Cannes 2013, while the DeS’S mattress campaign won gold and silver. Much bigger clients started getting in touch, including global giants Google and Microsoft and local brands Bankia (Spain’s biggest bank), El Corte Inglés and Freixenet. What has followed is a stream of work that feels strikingly relevant to a modern, networked world.

For the insurance arm of Spanish retail giant El Corte Inglés, VCCP created The Value Of Experience, in which real employees undertake a variety of risky endeavours, such as a heart-stopping car crash, or being set on fire, to better understand the experiences of their customers. For banana brand Plátano de Canarias, the big idea was a magical alarm clock – one that only kids could hear, due to the high frequency of the alarm tone, so they could wake up first on Christmas morning.

For the Champions For Life charity football match – a joint venture between Spain’s Liga de Fútbol Profesional and UNICEF – Nahmad’s agency masterminded Inverse Goal Celebration, which won a bronze in Direct at this year’s Cannes. During the match, players copied goal celebrations sent in by football-loving kids.

In Broken Bones Records, their recent work for clothing and shoe brand Vans in Madrid, VCCP invited skateboarders who wear Vans gear to have X-rays of the various skating injuries they’d picked up over the years burned into vinyl records. As in previous campaigns, this follows the template of having media, both paid for and free, flowing from a cleverly devised promo event. “We created the promo, and then shot the short around it,” Nahmad explains. “It went viral, so we had free PR.”

VCCP have produced traditional commercial campaigns, for Bankia and others; they also do comedy. For food festival Madrid Fusión, Nahmad introduced the character WilliaM: The Man With Two Mouths, who has one for talking and one for eating. That film also went viral when some of the world’s biggest chefs started tweeting about it.

Certainly Nahmad oversees a great deal of visual content that eschews the slick, cinematic production values generally associated with commercials, but seems effortlessly attuned to the needs of the digital audience. He says it’s all about putting ideas first, rather than creating the idea to fit the chosen medium. But it’s also about how he thinks consumers should perceive brands – as their friends. “You like someone because they’re interesting, invite you for a beer, or over to their house for dinner, tell you a joke… But the friend who just talks about himself all the time is a shit friend! With a brand it’s the same. A brand that’s [talking] about themselves all the time – ‘We have the best chocolate,’ ‘We’re the best cookie,’ whatever – people don’t care about this! They want friends – the right kind of friends.” This insight is what drives him every time he starts working on a new campaign. It also perhaps helps to explain Nahmad’s outstanding progress through adland since arriving in Barcelona 15 years ago.

A Young Lion pouncing on prizes

Nahmad’s advertising education started early. His mother, Patricia – whose influence was both personal and professional – made promos for Buenos Aires ad agencies. From the age of 11 Nahmad would often be taken along to her agency meetings. “I was looking at all the creatives, and thinking ‘Wow, I want to be like them!’” he says.

Opting for film school at 18, he went on to study advertising and began making an impression on his tutors – some of whom were creatives at the renowned Argentinian agency Agulla & Baccetti. This led to his first trainee job, but by the end of the 90s, the Argentinian economy was in meltdown. Aged 21, and following the advice of his family, Nahmad voted with his feet. “I decided to escape to Spain.” He moved to Barcelona and in 2002 secured a position at Publicis on the back of his portfolio of ad school-produced campaigns. He then won his first prestigious award from Cannes, becoming the Spanish winner of The Young Lions competition in 2004, for a provocative print campaign to encourage tourists to go to destinations in the Middle East, at a time when numbers were falling due to terrorism.

There followed a period of circulating around various Barcelona shops, including DDB and JWT, making commercials and collecting awards. And then came the first time his decision-making was seriously questioned, when he left JWT to join DraftFCB – then known just for below-the-line work – as creative director. “People told me I was crazy, that they don’t do television. I said ‘I don’t care about that.’ At FCB I was sure I would learn a lot – about events, promos, direct marketing.” And he knew he would be making films too. DraftFCB had just won the Kraft Foods account, and needed to start making films for Oreo and Chips Ahoy, at the time when YouTube was starting to change the dynamic of video. “It was really attractive for me because when I make films I try to tell stories, and that’s impossible to do in 20 seconds.”

He also got to work on a project close to his heart. In Barcelona, Nahmad watched his favourite football team – River Plate – with fellow like-minded Argentinian emigrés in a late-night bar. He describes them as “my family”. But Nahmad knew there were many more Argentinians in the city wanting to show support for their favourite team, so he came up with an idea to help River Plate promote and grow their fan base there.

Working with the team, DraftFCB created a fan site, RiverPlateBarcelona.com, and an integrated campaign, We’re Far Away, We Need To Shout Louder, which involved Barcelona’s River Plate fans screaming their cries of support into plastic bottles which were then sent by plane to Buenos Aires. “By this point we had 12 TV crews waiting at the airport,” he recalls. “We opened the bottles at the stadium at a real match – all the media were there – the announcer at the stadium saying, ‘This is from Barcelona,’ and the crowd cheering. Everybody was talking about our fucking bottles!”

Nahmad also got to direct a short film, his first, about the bottles’ journey from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, describing it as “the best campaign of my life. I couldn’t believe it was real. Opening the bottles, the TV crews there – it was amazing, unbelievable. And it was the beginning of the new way to see how things could go.”

The fact that he also attended courses on digital communication at Hyper Island in Sweden emphasises how Nahmad was well ahead of the game in the late 90s. “Not a lot of people in Spain knew about digital and I learned a lot. Then I applied all my learning about film, promo, events and video content to digital.”

He moved to DraftFCB in Madrid in 2010, assuming the role of executive creative director, and overseeing campaigns for top clients such as Reebok and Nivea. “We created a lot of content and promotional campaigns, and also won a lot of awards.” Then came the VCCP opportunity. When Nahmad and Suso went to London to discuss the formation of the agency in Madrid, they requested sufficient investment and time – three years – to make it succeed. “VCCP said to us, ‘Ok you have time, and you have money – let’s rock and roll.’ For us it was a ‘wow’ moment.”

About three years later VCCP Madrid have certainly rocked and rolled. They are a real force in Spanish advertising – now with 40 employees – and Nahmad and Suso dovetail smoothly in their creative and business roles. “We share everything, and he mentors me in a lot of things,” says Nahmad of Suso, explaining that they have the same values. “He worries about the creativity, and I worry about the business also.”

Where concept is king

Nahmad says his staff very quickly embraced the agency’s ‘ideas-first’ culture. “Perhaps in the first three months of the agency I had to say to them ‘I want more ideas, more ideas.’ But now I don’t need to tell them not to come up with a 20-second commercial, but to come up with a big idea instead.”

Those ads, he points out, often come out of the longer video content, as with The Value Of Experience campaign for El Corte Inglés. “We cast it with real employees, and we created the crashes, and then this idea went viral. Then we created 20-second ads from this idea.”

That campaign has been a big award winner in Spain and beyond, as has Inverse Goal Celebration for Champions For Life. As with much of Nahmad’s work, the case study video shows its scope and level of ambition – getting kids to send their goal celebrations on video, together with a donation, from around the world, and have real players perform some of them in a match. “It’s the kind of idea that’s very difficult to sell, because it’s very big. It was something really difficult to create – yet we did it.”

With the Spanish economy finally showing signs of recovery, Nahmad says that the next year will be a good one for VCCP Madrid, even with the uncertainty of an upcoming general election. But will his advertising philosophy (his emphasis on the prime importance of the big idea) and his methods (his focus on events and non-product-based films with more documentary-led production values) become adopted more widely, at the expense of the high-production-value artifact known as the TV commercial?

“The most important thing, first of all, is to understand the target – the person you are talking to,” he says. “We have to think about that before creating a message. Then we think, how do we create something interesting for their lives?

“This is the sort of advertising that I imagine for the future and I think the agencies that are only doing TV commercials will die off in two or three years.”