Creative Profile: Anselmo Ramos

Mysterious forces have aided the career of Anselmo Ramos, CCO and co-founder of DAVID: the art of knitting for one, a boyhood craft that spurred his creativity; plus the writing of a prescient ‘future-cast’. He tells Iain Blair about propelling his agency on to further success

File it under ‘strange but true’: Anselmo Ramos, the chief creative officer and co-founder of hot international agency DAVID, and the creative leader behind Burger King’s Proud Whopper campaign – which won 12 Lions at this year’s Cannes festival, including golds in the Design, Promo and PR categories – can trace the origin of all his success back to a “weird” school, a list and a process of elimination. “I grew up in São Paulo and went to a Waldorf school, based on Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, which gave me access to a lot of arts – everything from drawing, theatre and acting to gardening and even knitting,” he reports. “I knitted a lot of things as a kid, so school was weird, but very helpful as it was so creative and inspired that side of me, and I remember one of the happiest days of my childhood was when I discovered a Mad magazine [satirical US title launched in 1952] under my parents’ bed. Most boys would have been thrilled to find a copy of Playboy, but I was so happy to find the Mad magazine, and I even submitted a few drawings and ideas. They never chose anything, but it didn’t matter.”

Writing the future with mystic Musa

When the time came for Ramos to choose a profession, he methodically made a list of every possibility – “lawyer, banker, doctor and so on” – and then crossed out the ones he didn’t like. The only profession left standing was advertising. “I thought, ‘I love to write and draw, so that’s it,’” he recalls. “I wanted to be successful in advertising. It was that simple, and I never looked back.” Armed with that goal, Ramos began at the bottom – “setting type in a studio for ads,” but always reminded himself that he wanted to write. He advanced to the position of junior writer at various local agencies, and at age 24 made another major decision: “I left Brazil to work for Y&R Lisbon. I saw an ad, saying they were looking for writers, and knew it’d be an interesting move for me – plus Portuguese was my native tongue.” In the event, it wasn’t such an easy transition. “Their Portuguese is completely different, and when I arrived I found I couldn’t understand anyone,” he explains. “Account people would give me briefs but I couldn’t understand a word for the first two weeks.”

Undaunted, he stayed with the company for a year, and now looks back on that time fondly. “I won my first Lion at Cannes, and the whole experience changed my life, as my original plan was to go back to Brazil after a year,” he notes. “Instead, I ended up staying abroad for 12 years.” He spent three years in Madrid with Y&R and then moved to the States for eight years – “four in Miami with Y&R, then four in New York with Lowe. And it was an amazing education for me, as I was a foreigner, writing in these foreign languages – Spanish, then English – which helped me become a better creative. It forced me to look for ideas that could ‘travel’, and that would work anywhere. And that made me a better writer overall.”

In 2007 he finally returned to Brazil, and was appointed VP and ECD of Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, after getting a call from Fernando Musa, the CEO of O&M São Paulo. “He asked me if I wanted to help him change O&M Brasil, which at that point was a very big agency with 600 staff, and 100 in the creative department,” he states. “And it was the first time in my career I’d be heading a department that big. I remember the feeling I had on the first day, looking at the 100 creatives, and trying to inspire everyone to be a greater agency, to be number one. Because at that time it was number 47 in the internal O&M creative ranking, although it was number four or five in revenue. So it was a really profitable agency, but not very creative – and we had huge clients, like Coca-Cola, Dove, Hellmann’s, and this great O&M legacy.”

Ramos admits that he and Musa “had no idea” how to start revamping the agency. “But then Miles Young, O&M’s CEO, and Tham Kai Meng, the worldwide CCO, decided to visit Brazil in 2008 – one year after I’d returned. We showed them some work and it was pretty terrible.” But the team also cobbled together a ‘future-cast’ newspaper story set in 2012: “We wrote eight pages that predicted we would be super-creative, win awards at Cannes and so on – it was basically eight pages of lies, and we presented that to them.” He recalls that Young and Meng studied the document and started laughing. “And then they told us, ‘Well, it’s funny and imaginative, but now you guys have to deliver.’ But here’s the interesting thing,” continues Ramos. “That ‘special edition’ from the future turned out to be a business plan in disguise, because four years later when Musa and I sat down to read it again, 95 per cent of what we’d jokingly predicted had actually happened. We’d become number one in the rankings, we’d won all the accounts we’d talked about – it was amazing! It was a big lesson to us, that if you believe things are truly possible and you work hard at it, it can become the reality.” 

In 2012, the agency won a record 16 Lions, and in 2013 they were crowned Agency of the Year in Cannes. While up on stage – “a very emotional moment, I even cried” – the seed for the next part of the adventure was sown. “Gaston Bigio, who then was the regional CD for O&M in Latin America, Fernando Musa and myself decided it was time to form our own agency,” recalls Ramos. “Clients loved us and wanted to work with us, we were getting global assignments with top companies, so it made sense.”

Baby DAVID grows and blossoms

The trio brainstormed a strategy and a name, and landed on DAVID – “because it was Ogilvy’s first name, we’d all been with the company for years and loved the company, and it had that feeling of an offshoot. So why not?” Despite feeling that it “probably wouldn’t happen”, the team discussed their idea with O&M and got their blessing and support for the new venture.

Although DAVID began as an offshoot, its goals and business model have gradually changed, Ramos notes. “The more we grow, the more separated we’re becoming. We have a totally different management, and we’ve expanded into the US. We share the same values and Ogilvy legacy, but now we’re our own agency. We opened our Miami office, where I’m now based, a year ago. That was always the plan, ever since the three of us got drunk in Cannes that night and decided to open our own agency. Now the challenge is to grow DAVID in the US and do great work.”

In the past three years, DAVID has expanded to a staff of 130 in three countries, and is working with top international brands like Burger King, Sony, Heinz and Coca-Cola. And Ramos – the calm centre in a fast-paced business – was the creative behind many of this year’s successful brand campaigns, such as Heinz’ Ketchup’s Got A New Mustard, and Coke’s interactive Mother’s Day campaign, Inseparable, in which the user could switch perspectives between the mother and daughter in the ad. He also created Burger King’s Chicken Fries campaign, a bizarre stunt that saw a chicken named Gloria embarking on the Random Gloria Tour, in which she travelled to six US cities and, by pecking at either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ feed bowl, would choose whether or not that city would be having Chicken Fries for a day. His inventive work has been recognised by the industry with 127 Cannes Lions, 21 Clios, and 23 One Show Pencils, among other awards.

Looking generally at the industry and its demands, Ramos notes that most clients “come to us for big ideas that’ll be talked about. Of course, it’s not that easy to generate those kinds of campaigns. You need the right brand positioning, execution and so on, and there’s so much stuff out there today. So, more than ever, we need clients who know what they want and know what their brand is very clearly. And we really value strong, lasting relationships with clients that completely trust us, because that’s when we do our best work. It’s like a marriage, and it’s always about that trust factor for us.”

No one’s planning a divorce any time soon, it seems. Ramos and his partners aim to grow DAVID as “a mini-network – and sometimes we even surprise ourselves with that term,” he admits. “Right now our focus is to consolidate our Brazilian and Argentine offices and grow Miami and the US market over the next couple of years. And if all that goes well, the next step is to take DAVID to Europe and Asia, and build a global network. That’s the dream. And why shouldn’t it be like the one we had for the new company in Cannes? I believe we can make it happen.”