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Sergio was a member of the Titanium and Integrated Lions jury at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. His office, DDB Brazil has won 74 Lions and 2 Grand Prix, has been twice named the Festival’s Agency of the Year and was also awarded the Festival’s first Interactive Agency of the Year.
I have the feeling that, every year, we’re invited to go on a safari. And when you go on this safari, you enter a car, and the driver turns toward you and says, “ There’s a bunch of lions over there.”
So you ride in the car with your shotgun - some tranquilizing gas not to kill the lion because it’s not politically correct to kill lions. And then you go to the lions, and the lions go running. The younger lions run swiftly forward. They go faster than the car. And the older lions, which are tired and are going to die in 15, 20 days, they plod on tiredly.
And you, inside the car, all sure of yourself, pick up your gun and kill those old, tired lions, which would soon be dying soon anyway. And then you take those lions to a taxidermist, who will comb its mane, shine its teeth, add some more color to its eyes, and will make you a fantastically beautiful trophy out of it. And you will be enormously proud of that lion.
But the younger lions, folks, are running far ahead. And you are not even looking in which direction they’re going.
In short, what I’m trying to tell everybody here is, aim at the young lions. Aim at the young lions. Try to reinvent your profession. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t kill the old lions. But when aiming at the young lions, you won’t need to fire a single shot to kill the old lions. The speed at which your car is going will, by itself, throw the running lion off balance because it is so old. And when you fire a shot to kill the younger lion, the older lion will die of fright. All you have to do then is to pick up the young lion you have just killed and go back and collect the thousands of old lions you have killed along the way.
Sergio Valente, CEO & President, DDB Brazil
This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on October 16, 2008 4:55 PM.
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Comments (1)
Richard Egner
Not sure the lions analogy is PC (!!!!!) necessarily but good points! Especially now that the economy is in crisis I see a lot of fear in every aspect of decision making by my clients. As you suggest the lobby of the taxidermy shop is full and frankly that's fine with me and it leaves fewer of us chasing the youngun's! Thanks for the good entry!
Posted by Richard Egner | October 31, 2008 5:04 PM