Founding partner, the executive says that the agency quadrupled the number of brands served and doubled the number of employees
Creating a new agency culture and transforming advertising are the main agendas of Pedro Cruz, chief strategy officer and fourth founding partner of the Galeria. Former FCB, Cruz was away from advertising when he joined executives Eduardo Simon, Rafael Urenha and Paulo Ilha, who, in September 2021, officially left DPZ&T to start the Gallery, taking with them the accounts of Ita, McDonalds and Natura. .
A year later, the agency quadrupled the number of brands served and practically doubled the number of employees, which went from 180 to 350. It was a phenomenal year, he says. In this interview, Cruz takes stock of the operation and talks about how the use of time has become the core of the business. The commitment to change for me on this project is a matter of life and death.
What is the balance you make of this one year of operation of the Gallery?
I think we had a first year that was practically heroic. And I would like to point out that I am the only one of the founding partners that did not belong to the DPZ&T structure before, I joined them after having withdrawn from advertising (I had been dedicating myself to an art gallery for about two years). So, I think this marks some things in my head that maybe doesn’t mark so much in the minds of Edu (Eduardo Simon), Rafa (Rafael Urenha) and Paulinho (Paulo Ilha). All in all, it was a phenomenal year, despite the agency’s membership structure being positively aggressive because we want to achieve great things. The first parallel with what was established as a rupture to do different. And this isn’t an easy topic, because it’s not just an agenda to show the number of clients we’ve won and how we’ve doubled the size of the agency. It is not only a quantitative guideline, it is qualitative. We have a founding group that is very concerned about the future of advertising, about the future of the business, which has been undergoing very radical transformations. a structural difference for the construction of a new culture.
And how are you building this new culture?
We are building the new culture on several fronts, because it can’t be different. She obviously has a business front; of technology; intelligence, but it also needs to have a human intelligence front. We are a human capital business and we can never forget that. When the Gallery is designed in this way and since its launch it has already incorporated new partners (with smaller stakes), a truth that is being lived on a daily basis. It’s a first sign that it’s not a boutique culture, just for the other to see. The culture that works, in my opinion, embraces those who are part of it and expels those who are not. Today the biggest challenge in our business is time management.
Why is time management the biggest challenge today?
I consider this topic to be central to our business, because it is a topic that is not only true for us, but an atrocious and fundamental truth for our customers as well. Everyone within the network of this market lives the same drama. The use of time ultimately has to do with the operational structure we create and nurture over time and the competence we have or have not had to equalize and produce bold creative work. And of course, the market is not all in one place. And we want to be in the best place possible. In our project, this history of the use of time has to do with the minutiae of work, because we are absolutely sure that there are many things we do that we shouldn’t be doing.
Is there a methodology behind this idea or something intuitive?
a mixture of the two. And I think it has to be that way. We have an operations director who makes a detailed mapping of how things happen here so the agency can understand what the nodes of the operation are and act to deconstruct these nodes. This may be the biggest challenge in our second year of operation, which is to reorganize that part of our culture that uses time. How do we want to use our time and not how we use our time as a result of the inertia of a market that should have completely reinvented itself more than a decade ago. I always get the feeling that we are late, that we should be ahead of where we are. At the Gallery, we seek courage and comfort. The agency’s first introductory chart says exactly the following: We are born out of discomfort.
How did the Gallery practically double in size and win over several clients in one year?
There is no formula, but what impresses me a lot about this operation is the level of transparency, not only between partners, but with employees and customers. To me, this has a level of novelty that is very off the curve. This issue of transparency and the open access that we, partners, have, to an increasing extent, to clients, reveals a lot about the growth of the agency. And we grow not only in the number of new accounts, but also in new businesses within our customers. There is another thing that we prepare to make a difference. The courage to take risks to take on new businesses is something very present in the Galeria’s DNA. Today, as a result of competition, we have 100% of the OOH of Ita and Vivo. This requires a creative and strategic data intelligence, and a dedicated structure and a completely separate, specific understanding that nevertheless speaks to everything else. a major challenge from an organizational and workflow point of view. The creation for the out of home has evolved and today has a much more exciting platform for achievements than before. No longer just a static panel, it has movement that challenges people on the streets. And we live a wonderful moment to be on the streets.
What to do differently for you?
One of the first things we’re trying to do, and I’m going to come back to the subject of time use, is to break the paradigms of how we use time. Edu told me, early on, that he no longer believed in how the strategy area interacts within the agency and in what it produces for our clients, and asked me if it was possible to review this. The idea is not to do more of the same and to do it differently. The first core is the business look. The core of the strategic thinking that we are building at the Galeria has to do with being relevant to our clients’ businesses. It’s not about being relevant at the time of presentation or we’re going to make a ramp for creation to sell something we want. It has to do with a solidly built relevancy with the customer before all these things.
What is needed to carry out the necessary transformations?
We don’t believe we can build anything that is transformative in this market if we don’t have a foundation of trust. I think it’s hard for real transformations to come only on the basis of I had a cool idea and let’s go. When you have a foundation of trust, it opens up an avenue of continuous work that takes you into deeper discussions with other areas, and you start to have a deeper understanding of the business, because it’s not just the understanding of who asked you to do that project. . This has to do with changing the use of time. I want to do fewer things, which I still don’t know and I don’t even want to make fun of anything I’ve already done, because they can all be cool, but we have to choose. To transform, I’m going to have to not do something to do others. And creating a culture of people interested in this is very difficult, but we believe it’s possible, because I can’t do it alone. I need a team that believes that going into a client and reaching the vice presidents to have conversations about a project that we would have to do in 40 days, but that took four months and, however, will be very worthwhile and it does all the difference in the world. This inaugurates a completely different dynamic of interest in the customer’s business.
What do you mean that communication projects need to go deeper?
They have to be deeper and also multidisciplinary in nature, because when you try to solve just one part of the business, it will inevitably cause problems later on.
Does the strategy area speak to the entire agency?
This is our attempt. We want to be in a deeper and more relevant area because we know as much about the client as he does. A partnership like this valued very differently. We end up having access to sensitive data. In some clients we have already managed to break this barrier. The drama is not access to the numbers, but access to the heads that work with that data.
So is it a challenge to have access to clients’ C-Level executives?
Certainly. Agencies are experiencing a historical drama of loss of relevance. For the past 30 years, marketing has become more professional, more technical and with much more access to information in a much more complex market and we need to talk to them. If we don’t use our time to destroy the misinformation that is built naturally on a daily basis, we won’t get the best results, even creatively.
And what does the strategy area have to do with all this?
Strategy is first and foremost about broadening and deepening the quality of the conversations and information we work on to achieve quality. THE
The idea is to have a relationship with creation and other areas of the agency that is not hierarchically partial. How to optimize what we produce in less time, without so many refections, making our business more efficient because we use time well. much less about what insight the planning will pass to creation, but about a mature and deep exchange of information. The willingness of partners to do things together, to do things differently, is changing the scenario. We have a series of programs to review what we agreed on, to understand what we no longer want and what we still want to change and for how long. We’re trying to make a deal so we don’t spend the rest of our lives telling the same story.
Do you believe that the second year of the Gallery will be more challenging than the first?
I think it will bring new challenges. The first year was challenging due to the uncertainties that accompany the start of the operation. And the Galeria was born big, with three absolutely significant and important clients in the market. For me, especially, who didn’t come from the other operation, it was very difficult. The second year will bring more qualitative than quantitative challenges, in the sense that now, with things more established, we will tighten the screws deeper in relation to everything we want to build from a cultural point of view. For me, it only made sense to return to advertising if it was something truly transformative. The commitment to change in this project is a matter of life and death.
