Icaro Doria, CCO and co-president of DM9, analyzes the agency’s return and talks about winning 16 Lions at this year’s Cannes Lions
About to turn 45, Icaro Doria, CCO and co-president of DM9, began his career at the age of 18 with an internship at DPZ, in São Paulo. After working at agencies in Europe and the United States, such as Hill Holliday, Havas Health and You, Arnold, DDB, Saatchi & Saatchi NY and Y&R (now VML), Doria returned to Brazil with the mission of reopening DM9 in 2022. Two years later, he won the title of most awarded Brazilian agency at Cannes Lions, and continues his tireless search for creativity.
In the following interview, Doria analyzes the return of one of the most iconic agencies in Brazilian advertising, and the impact of this movement, driven by ideas that are “impossible to ignore” and that generate conversation and conversion. He also talks about winning 16 Lions at this year’s Cannes Lions.
How do you assess these two years since DM9 returned?
While it’s crazy to say ‘wow, it’s been two years’, I also say ‘it’s only been two years’. I had a life change when I returned to Brazil and I had to learn to work with a new team that was already here. I listen a lot, so I was prepared to do everything very calmly. We were able to take the first six months to learn, balance and work together. I believe that the agency really started in January 2023, when we really focused on establishing a vision of what we wanted to present to the market and then, with this vision decided internally, create the culture around this vision and develop work that proved that it is applicable and functional. What I’ve always said and always say is that, for an agency, the most important thing is for the market and the clients to know when to look for you. People know when to look for a plumber, a locksmith or an electrician and with an agency, in a way, it’s the same thing. If you are facing a specific challenge or a moment of consumer change, you need to know who to call and who is qualified to solve that problem. And you don’t call an agency like you would a mall, where all the stores are there. There are agencies that are better at certain subjects, that specialize in different things. So, I had a big question about what this new DM9 is, beyond the logo and the name. For me, it was essential that we establish why we came and develop work that would make it clear to people when they should look for us. We arrived at a position that is: we create ideas that are impossible to ignore, that generate conversation and conversion. Now, we need to work on this and be able to have 10, 15, 20 cases of work that deliver this vision in practice. That’s what we have done in the last 15 months.
What is the current situation of DM9? How do you evaluate it?
Since we reopened our doors, things have only gotten better and we are still on the rise. I see how the team started to get along and then started to reach the same goal by following our methodology. As a result, Brazilians were able to see our work and understand what we are doing. We did not create an agency that has lived through peaks and valleys since it started. We were paying attention internally, but we started to hear the buzz from friends at the agency outside. We still had to break through one more barrier, which was to go from colleagues to potential clients. We continued on this path, gaining more clients, launching cases that had a lot of repercussion and culminated in Cannes. We came back with 16 Lions, being the Brazilian agency with the most awards this year. Where are we now? We have some clients that we will soon tell the market about, and we have some campaigns about to be launched. I look back and am happy to know that the agency did better than the previous month. This makes me very happy because I always tell everyone how we manage to prepare ourselves and have a culture where we are always looking to learn, improve and instantly apply these lessons to others, and so on.
How was this rescue of DM9’s creativity?
This is very insular. The rescue, in fact, was when Pipo Calazans called me and asked: ‘shall we reopen DM9?’. Even though people or the market might have several question marks, the plan was already established by the name. No one would open DM9 to be a performance agency or to be an agency focused on research; DM9 was opened to be a leading agency. And how do you achieve leading role? With ideas that catch the attention of Brazilians, and that’s what DM9 has always done. In my mind, DM9 has always been an agency that sought to be leading role for its clients and built many brands that are now some of the largest in Brazil, always with the vision that size doesn’t matter today. Working together, we want you to be the biggest and the best. This ambition comes with the name and the work we’ve set out to do, to seek leading role through work for our clients. Creativity is a very ephemeral idea. What creativity means to you may be different to me, but I often use this logic of protagonism. DM9 has created or participated in the development of the best-known brands in Brazil for many generations. That is what we seek to do.
You have received many awards, such as at Cannes Lions 2024, where DM9 was the most awarded agency in Brazil. What does this mean for DM9?
It means everything and it means nothing. It means everything, because I have always believed, and continue to believe, that the main job within an agency, within a company that creates and sells ideas, is to develop people’s self-esteem so that everyone feels good about having ideas and thinking. Self-esteem is the most important element that exists in my conception for a company that needs to have ideas. If the purpose of DM9 were about research, technology or performance, perhaps it wouldn’t be creative self-esteem that we needed to establish, but since that is the purpose, to win 16 Lions, I understand that what we are doing has caught the attention of the world, not just Brazil. The ideas we had here were recognized worldwide at the most important festival. A lot of people from other generations, in the world, who had never heard of DM9, now know that the agency exists. Advertising is about the now and, since the Monday after Cannes arrived, the conversation I had with the team is that I want to seek
a sense of belonging to DM9, I want DM9 to belong to a group of agencies that will always be protagonists with the ideas they have, and not to have peaks in Cannes, because it’s not just about Cannes, it’s not about how many trophies we’ll win next year. What I want is for us to never stop seeking belonging. I want what we create here to put us in people’s minds alongside other agencies that are always seeking and delivering results for their clients.
Read the full interview in the August 19th edition of propmark
