High Five: Domenico Massareto

I heard early in my career that the best advertising campaigns were the ones that didn't look like advertising. Not because they tried to disguise their nature, but because they were useful or amusing or clever enough to leave us wondering. That's when I heard this story - to help Kraft Foods sell its processed cheese, JWT invented...the grilled cheese! That's right: they made an ad with a recipe for a sandwich that had two slices of bread stuffed with Kraft Cheese, golden grilled with butter on both sides. There is controversy surrounding this story. Some say people may have made this recipe before, but the fact is, there is no printed record of the recipe prior to the JWT campaign. In other words: if they weren't the ones who invented the sandwich, they formalised it and put it on the map. One way or another, I wish I had come up with an idea that is useful to people, clever as a marketing proposition...and delicious.

I could do an entire High Five with amazing CP+B ideas from the 2000s. The idea of using dog poop as media for Truth, for example. Or the best job Burger King has done in its history. Or the idea of selling a DVD with ways to identify if your Mini Cooper was counterfeit - because the price of $1.99 for the DVD qualified the brand to air it during the infomercials that had the lowest cost on the television time. However, out of all his campaigns, I must go with Hoopla. In addition to talking about these works and their backstage, the book, which is a promo ad for the agency, is a journey through the culture and minds of the people who worked there at the time. As if the fascinating content were not enough, the book is visually impeccable, capturing in rich detail the aesthetics of the era when digital communication flooded advertising. A wonderful detail: the first edition of the book came with a sleeve made of skate sandpaper. According to Alex Boguski, the sandpaper makes the book leave its mark on what is around it. I wish I had done a company with a culture capable of leaving its mark on people and on history. Who knows, maybe there's still time.

W+K created the fundamental tagline for Nike. 'Just Do It' is the simplest possible form of a brand statement. The archetypal 'Call to Action' if you will. In the same way, TBWA\Chiat\Day created the definitive manifesto for Apple. I always look closely at brand manifestos, but they all remind me of a stylised version of 'Think Different'. Well, Venables Bell & Partners, Edelman and Spark did the same with REI. It wasn't the first time in history that someone tried to create an anti-consumption campaign. But it was the final one. That’s it. Done. Nobody will be ever able to repeat the feat easily. And in the attempts, we will remember '#OptOutside' as the idea that gave rise to the series. I wish I had an idea that dominates an advertising format to the point of preventing them from creating something better later.

When my wife became pregnant with my daughter, a friend told me: "Not having children is the best thing in the world, until you have them. Then having children becomes the best thing in the world." This piece captures that exact feeling. Impeccable art direction. Perfect casting. Wonderful acting. A precise colour grading that creates an ethereal, timeless atmosphere and inserts the product's green throughout the entire narrative. And a sound edit that explosively breaks our expectation. As if the incredible execution were not enough, the piece provides an elegant, indirect but infallible way of connecting the product to the narrative. Unforgettable. I wish I had created a campaign that captures a human truth and executes it so perfectly down to the last detail that you never get tired of watching it.

This is the campaign I wish I had created. It was the beginning of my career and until then, I thought that creating was an exercise in logic. Finding elements and patterns based on the brand and the product, and logically filtering them based on a strategy. Pure reason. And then Juan Cabral, at the time at Fallon, showed me that it is possible to create something effective and powerful by articulating a feeling. Once, talking to a client of mine, we found out that this was also his favourite campaign. I asked why and he said: "Every time an agency presents me with an idea, someone from strategy shows me a chart with four quadrants. Three of the quadrants have what competitors are talking about and one of the quadrants is empty. 'That's where we need to be! No one is talking about X', says the agency. I like this Bravia campaign because it's the most basic thing in the category. It is a colour TV talking about colour. And Sony went there and dominated the theme with creativity." I started to like the campaign even more. I wish I had discussed more emotions and feelings in my career than formats, strategies, target audiences, category data, etc.