Live marketing company founded by Denise Garrido and Quércia Andrade from Bahia bets on platforms for brand building
An agency that has two Bahian women as partners at the head of the entire operation. Want more diversity? 65% of the workforce is made up of female leaders and goes further. “We try to be as plural and diverse as possible so that communication can be true. That look makes the difference. The agency just won the Seal of Ethnic-Racial Diversity, from the Salvador Reparation Department, has a large number of black employees and a majority made up of women”, says Denise Garrido, who founded the Athens live marketing agency in 2007, alongside Quércia Andrade.
Created in Salvador, Atenas moved its headquarters to São Paulo a few years ago, “which gave it more visibility”, but the regional look at the Northeast continues to be one of the differentials of the agency that attracts clients interested in communicating with the region. “Because the agency was born in the Northeast, there is a great demand from clients for this diverse and regional look. We are an Athens for each client”, emphasizes Denise.
But they guarantee that the company has a global mindset, so much so that last year it won Heineken’s music and sustainability platform, Green Your City. The agency was responsible for launching the action that lit up iconic buildings such as Copan and Terraço Itália, in São Paulo.
“We have created many platforms for brand building, with the objective of creating permanent territories and actions”, highlights Denise. She advocates building relationships that go beyond job to job. “The worst thing we experience in our market is job-to-job, because you don’t build a relationship with brands. We have a vision of building the brand together with the client, getting into the strategy itself. We work 360º for the brand”.
brand building
In his view, the future of the live marketing market is starting to build a brand. “It is not just the ATL that determines this. Many campaigns, experiences created by Athens derived from the advertising approach”, says Denise. One of Athens’ success stories is the music platform Devassa Tropical Transforma.
“Devassa has always been seen as a sexist brand and the objective of the platform created for Carnival was to associate itself with Brazilian music and that became the core of the brand. The idea was to end the brand’s sexist past and connect to the music. Devassa started to sponsor several independent music cultural festivals. We promoted several unique events, such as the first meeting between Gilberto Gil and Baianasystem”, she quotes.
With the pandemic and the ban on in-person events, Quércia points out that the agency had to reinvent itself and, despite market difficulties, recorded growth in the last two years. The focus was to create digital projects for clients. “Instead of standing still and afraid, we went ahead with several projects. Athens promoted more than 40 lives”, points out the publicist.
And when the lives started to fall, the way out was to find another format. “Devassa was the first brand to do a sponsored live on pay TV, with a show at Multishow in the month of Black Consciousness, with Iza, Carlinhos Brown and Criolo, among others, to honor black culture. It was the third largest audience for pay TV in Brazil”, says Denise.
The publicists say that the year is heated with several projects forwarded, in addition to the agency being participating in several competitions. “We have events in production for Devassa, Amstel and a convention for JBS, for example”, indicates Quércia, emphasizing that the close relationship with customers makes Athens have a high level of account retention. Among the main brands currently served are Heineken, Devassa, Eisenbahn, Baden Baden, Amstel, JBS (Seara), Vivo, Suvinil, Accor and Beefeater.
