PDN - May 2012

The ads, which won silver and bronze awards at Cannes Lions last year, show people posing for what look like impromptu family snapshots, with one male family member unable to tear his attention away from a TV sports event happening just outside of the frame of the photo.

“We tried to show in the picture that there’s always an afficionado paying attention to the television,” says Eduardo Doss, who was the art director for the BandSports ad. “In this particular case, we [wanted] an [amateur] feel to the pictures, because that’s part of the humor of it.” Doss ended up shooting one of the images himself, and sourcing the other two from Getty Images.

But agencies don’t typically use stock photos for print campaigns, says Carlos Eduardo Lopes, an art director at the São Paulo agency DM9. Art directors prefer to hire photographers because “they add so much more to the idea. If I wanted my layout to be tightly photographed, I’d do it myself. But I’d rather have the input of the photographer,” he says.

Lopes hired photographer Ricardo Barcellos to shoot the latest campaign for a
Clean & Clear acne product. The ads play on the stereotype of pimply nerds, with
images that show very clear-skinned models striking nerdy poses. The copy says,
“Be smart. Use Clean & Clear anti-acne gel.”
“We tried to go for a more simple, clean image; we feel that is a growing trend
in advertising. We picked models with great skin and hair so there would be mini-
mal post production, and we got everything done in one week,” Barcellos says.
The campaign, though simple, won a silver Clio award.

Barcellos adds that Brazilian photographers are benefitting plenty from the country’s success in advertising. “Our agencies have been focusing on print ads, and it is now one of the best countries in the world for print advertising,” he says.

Cassio Moron, art director at São Paulo-based Loducca, which is one of Brazil’s

Brazilian advertising is marked by its subtle humor, and by simple, straightforward concepts
driven by tight budgets and production schedules. Shown here are ads from campaigns for
a TV sports network (opposite) and an acne medication (right). The pinhole camera images
above were included in a JW T-sponsored exhibition meant to encourage clients to take more
risks with photography.

largest agencies, attributes the country’s advertising success to its status as an emerging economic power, coupled with its lack of any entrenched advertising traditions. “While other countries are busy trying to reinvent their advertising language, we are still creating our advertising identity,” he says.

Moron is the art director behind the “Fetish” campaign for VMB, MTV’s Video Music Brazil awards. The message is that the music never stops, and people can’t resist watching it. So the ads feature PVC-clad people watching VMB in various states of sado-masochistic restraint, under the headline “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” The campaign was shot by Jair Lanes.

“We were very fortunate to have Jair with us because he fell in love with the campaign,” Moron says. “It doesn’t matter if you have the best photographer in the world. If he doesn’t connect to the story, it won’t look real.” Lanes adds: “The layouts were not final at all and the art director and I figured the campaign out together. I had worked with a guy who performs in a circus, so he helped prep the scenery and tied the models to the ceiling.” Lanes says he considers his creative input to be part of any job, along with production, casting and other logistics of the shoot.