El Ojo de Iberoamérica Opens Festival with Keynote from Dentsu Creative's AI Character

Today, the festival of creativity, El Ojo de Iberoamérica, opened its doors with a talk unlike any other in its history. A character created with artificial intelligence, called Joao Totus, took centre stage to address hundreds of creatives and executives from Latin America and Spain. 

But who is Joao Totus and why was he given such prominence? To answer this question, it is first important to give context to how Joao was born and what his role is in the creative industry. 

Santiago Keller, founder and CEO of El Ojo de Iberoamérica explains, "This year the festival celebrates 25 years of recognising the best talent, the best companies and the most creative work in Ibero-America. We wanted to mark this first quarter of a century with an iconic message that really highlights the humanity of our work and the people behind it, inclusive of all of us who contribute to this industry. El Ojo has built over 25 years by among all of us who take part: jury presidents, jurors, speakers, award winners and assistants. Together, we have built the most important international festival with a Latin perspective on the planet. So we sat down with DENTSU CREATIVE and challenged them to come up with an insight and campaign for this year’s festival without any restrictions. We naturally also wanted to see where we should go in the future.” With this goal in mind, we sat down with Dentsu Creative and challenged them to find the most suitable insight for this challenge, without giving them any restrictions. We naturally also wanted to see where we should go in the future.”

With the help of Artificial Intelligence, the DENTSU CREATIVE team decided to combine the faces of all 362 winners from the last 25 years, to see what the most awarded creative director of El Ojo of all time would look like.  The result, made up of 294 creative men and 68 creative women, has the face and voice of a man. And the insight? The clear need to close the gender gap in the creative industry with concrete actions, especially in creative leadership positions, so that modern creativity reflects the needs and desires of our audiences. 

Marisa González, managing director of DENTSU CREATIVE Spain, stated, “This creative process has been one of our favourites to date. We have loved being part of this journey with Santiago and his team, to celebrate the high-quality creativity that we have in Ibero-America, while helping advance this purpose with creative work that helps change society for the better, and more accurately reflects what audiences want.” 

Santiago added, “With the organic result the process produced, an issue that had been discussed for some time and that El Ojo has worked on for years, became irrefutable. In line with the aims of the festival, we wanted to make a clear statement this year, with a strong call to action to help change things faster for the future of our industry. That is why Joao gave the opening Keynote, highlighting the situation and reaffirming El Ojo’s commitments in this area, expressed in four concrete actions: 45% of jury presidents are women, now getting close to partity; encouraging more female creative leaders and filmmakers with the +Mujere (+Women) award; a very strong representation of women and the diversity theme in the conference and workshops; and so that more women have the opportunity to win awards and have access to the brightest minds in the industry at El Ojo, a 35% discount on entries and on conference tickets for independent agencies led by women with less than 50 employees. This 35% reflects the average global pay gap between men and women.” 

El Ojo de Ibero-America takes place from November 9 to 11 in Buenos Aires, with 16 Jury Presidents, 350 jurors, more than 40 international, regional and local conferences and thousands attending in person and many more following on the festival's streaming platform. In addition, this year El Ojo has launched a new award to honour those who in the last 25 years have made significant contribution to the transformation of the industry and helped Latin talent achieve global visibility and relevance. This year the first honourees to enter the Latin Talent Hall of Honour are Marcelo Serpa from Brazil and Ramio Agulla and Carlos Bacceti from Argentina.