CEO Larissa Andrade seeks to expand the agency’s knowledge and defends a more transparent remuneration in the advertising market
Carioca with stints at Agência3, GiovanniFCB, AlmapBBDO and Grey, Larissa Andrade became CEO of Maria São Paulo in February 2020, a month before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. Although she has been at the agency since day 1 of the company, where she started as a media, she went through the director of customer service, operations, and soon after became a partner, the challenge of running Maria came at an atypical moment. Despite the reduction in the number of employees and customers in the period, the executive considers that the worst is over. Last year, she won the accounts of Melora (FQM), Topz (Cremer) and Estée Lauder (owner of brands like Clinique, Jo Malone and MAC).
For this year, Larissa says her biggest challenge is to increase Maria’s awareness and be recognized by the market to bring in new accounts. “There is a huge business challenge due to the fact that I am a woman, that the agency is independent. I want the business to grow, but keeping our human side. In addition to taking care of client management, there is the challenge of how to make Maria grow, be a more recognized agency, be in the ranking of the most promising agencies in the market in the coming years, of the market seeing Maria as a brand. The same work I have with clients I need to have with the agency. It’s the old story: a blacksmith’s house on a stick”, she emphasizes.
A market flag that the CEO of Maria São Paulo raises is that of transparency in remuneration. The agency does not charge media commission from clients, it works with a monthly fee. “My client knows where my profit is going, what are the indirect costs and the investment in people. We gave up charging media commissions, because I think the commission is a way of prostituting the market. I believe that agencies have to start being paid for the intelligence services provided to the client and not for the amount of media they buy. At Maria, we charge a monthly fee from customers, with a simple calculation: 50% of the money goes to people; 30% for overhead costs and 20% for profit,” she explains.
In his view, it is necessary to change the perception of the value of services provided in advertising. “I think there’s a lot of work to be done in repositioning the advertising market as a whole, in valuing the professionals who work there more. Nowadays, people work in two or three places”, observes Larissa.
digital vision
For the executive, 2022 will be a year that will make a difference for agencies with a digital profile. “I think that the digital vision will make us reinvent ourselves more and more and keep an eye on new formats, mainly related to the universe of cookies. This is a new communication guideline crossing the customers’ launch timeline with the content rule and the strategy of proprietary cookies. And in this case the sky is the limit. You can be very creative,” she analyzes.
Larissa says that the agency is working on a digital project focused on data with a view to ending cookies for the FQM client (Melora), for example. “Companies that are preparing for this future, which was the proposal we took to FQM, will be able to organize themselves to work with their own cookies in their favor in the future”.
Another strong point of Maria São Paulo, which has a lean structure of 25 permanent employees, is having 100% female leaders and 70% of the creative department made up of female professionals. “The agency was born diverse, it is Brazilian, formed mostly by women. I think that the fact of being a Brazilian, independent agency, already brings diversity together, with the most Brazilian name that exists, which is Maria”, reflects Larissa, adding that the year started fast, has participated in several competitions and, to her, “the worst is over”.