CCO and co-president of DM9 talks about the agency’s creative resurgence and good business performance
Gradually implementing a transparent, sensitive and super-respectful culture in the new DM9, which is less than a year and a half old, Icaro Doria states that generosity is the most important aspect in any type of relationship. He also talks about the importance he gives to his personal and family life, and his relationship with work.
I arrive at 9 am and leave at 6 pm, because I want to be present when my daughter is going to take a bath, my son is going to have dinner and I want to be with them. And I pass this message on a daily basis so that everyone values and uses my example to relate to work, says the CCO and co-president of DM9.
In this interview, he reflects on the creative resurgence of the agency (which won three Lions at Cannes this year) and its good business performance, with the achievement of four major accounts.
How do you define the current moment of DM9?
We are at an incredible moment, completing a full year of the DM9 calendar (relaunched in June 2022). Internally, the talk that DM9 actually started in January of this year. Because last year we were restructuring the merger of Tracylocke with Sunset and Track, we had a lot to learn about how the agency was actually going to work, with some changes in team and ambition as to what the new company would be like. We used the middle of last year a lot to organize ourselves and to actually function as DM9 from this year onwards. So, I consider this to be the first year of DM9 and it has been an incredible year.
It was a good year both in business and creatively, right?
It’s difficult to say that. I’m very systematic in the way I think things have to settle down. First, I think it’s super important to establish the culture or give indications of what the culture of the place will be like. Before wanting to shout to the universe, you have to create a culture in the environment, and this doesn’t happen overnight, where people trust each other, complement each other and learn to play together. At the same time, while we were working on this, I think we were lucky with works that caught attention. We created the idea for the Cost of Gold during the Oscars last year, which was a success far beyond what we thought it would be with the initiative and attention it received. After that, we won the iFood account, which gave an absurd injection of energy to the agency and we went about recruiting around 40 people. We also won the integrated Dasa and Whirpool account, and then part of the Petrpolis account. It was a sequence of achievements. In three months, these four accounts arrived. It just gave it a breath of fresh air with more than 115 new employees.
How many employees does the agency have in total today?
260 people. This all happened at the same time and even a little earlier than we thought it would happen.
And to what do you attribute this?
I think it has to do with luck. This is part of how things happen. Rarely, you determine that four selection processes occur at the same time and all four end up working. But also, the tidying up of the house we did last year allowed us to start this year with peace of mind, with self-confidence, with a capable and engaged team. As part of DDB global, we have one of the most engaged teams globally within the network. I also think that a successful campaign like the Cost of Gold did a lot of good for the team’s self-esteem. From then on, we started to trust a lot in what we were capable of doing.
For iFood, we also launched a major campaign. For Whirpool, we created the film with refrigerator doors, which was a huge success. With Dasa, we just did a Pink October campaign, bringing Sandy back on the cover of Capricho, which also made a big splash. During the year, we achieved a mix of engaging the team, establishing a culture, bringing in new clients, new talents and having four or five cases that the market noticed, clients and the Brazilian population commented on our work. So, as a first-year completer, I can only thank all the opportunities we had.
And how is DM9’s creative resurgence going, with the agency once again winning awards, like at Cannes?
I think that the moment you reopen an agency called DM9 is not a choice, you have to deliver creative work that is cutting-edge and also popular, that has this dual purpose of gaining visibility in awards and also in the conversation that these ideas generate. I think we did that very well. Invariably, we have talked very little about DM9 since we relaunched the agency, because of this focus on how to engage the team, pursue new business and develop a work culture. But every time we show what we did this year in new business processes and in conversations with prospects, the reaction is incredible, because we develop work that is very different from one another. With Cost of Gold, we hacked the Oscar, created a statue, which won Leo in Cannes, the front page in Folha de S.Paulo and a tweet from Lula. Afterwards, the agency makes a super emotional film for Brastemp, reconnecting Brazilians emotionally with the brand. Then we do an activation bringing Sandy and Capricho back. They are very different ideas. This pleases me very much. The agency is being able to create ideas with an immense result of attention that generate conversation.
And where does this ability to generate such different ideas come from?
First, as a culture of what is being created here. We have all these complementary disciplines, which was the initial thesis of bringing together Tracylocke (shopper experience agency) with Sunset (direct/digital marketing) and Track (specializing in data), and with DM9’s creative and craft background. In other words, having different starting points where the big idea could come from completely different areas. And that worked. The case of the Cost of Gold, for example, began with the logic of creating a news story, of creating this Yanomami statue, of Omama, and sending it to the Oscar nominees. It’s an idea that has a direct marketing aspect, of sending a targeted message to a small audience, but has a PR logic behind it. Then, there was the social aspect, of engagement, of engaging people who defend native peoples and how this overflowed and became popular culture. This idea is the Salgueiro theme in the Carnival parade this year. There is already a samba plot and the statue will be part of the parade. Jnior Yanomami, who is the leader of Urihi, was in Switzerland at a COP 5 meeting to talk about the idea and presented the UN president with a statue of Omama. This is how the event opened. This collage of all disciplines ended up working very well as an integrated campaign. Take the other extreme. The challenge of emotionally reconnecting Brazilians with Brastemp. We used a traditional format, a one-minute film during the Fantstico interval. But the commercial was entirely focused on activating a super true insight that we use the doors of our Brastemp refrigerators as a collage of memories, nostalgia and reflections that are fundamental in our daily lives. And we released the film with images from TikTok creators. In other words, the film was born social, because all these creators later promoted the film on TikTok. And this generated a fantastic number of views and engagement.
When you talk about the agency’s culture, what we realize is that you managed to give a new face to DM9, preserving the creative heritage. How was that?
I never worked at DM9 before I started as co-president of this new DM9. So, for me, the previous DM9 only means the agency’s work. I think generosity is the most important aspect in any type of relationship, in which you ask people to give themselves and in any work that involves creativity you are giving a little of yourself. To create an environment where this works well, I think it is essential that it is one of generosity of time with each other, of accepting different points of view, of understanding that your vision is not always the right one and you need to have open space for people to occupy your spaces. This is what I bring with me and how I behave. Today, DM9 pride has a lot to do with work.
How do you define the culture of this new DM9?
super complex. I always think that those who have to define culture are the people who are living the furthest away from leadership. But what can I say? It’s a transparent, completely sensitive, super-respectful DM9. I am a person who actively demonstrates the value I place on my family life. I arrive at 9 am and leave at 6 pm, because I want to be present when my daughter is going to take a bath, my son is going to have dinner and I want to be with them. And I pass this message on a daily basis so that everyone values and uses my example to relate to work. And see this generosity as an opening to point out things that aren’t working.
And why do you think it is so important for professionals to have this awareness of their personal lives?
I don’t know if it was fatherhood, or if it was fatherhood, the pandemic and returning to Brazil. In a 25-year career, what I value most today is a happy life. So, I really try to ensure that work makes me happy, but that other areas of my life are balanced so that my family life is happy. And that’s the kind of conversation I have with the people I work with. The advertising market is very dynamic. People often think: they stay here for two years and then go look for a better salary, another position somewhere else. The idea: how to build an environment where people don’t need to leave.
Read the full interview in the November 20, 2023 edition
