Washington Olivetto was a gift in my life.

I was working at McCann when W/Brasil joined the agency and we became WMcCann. It was a process that had the potential to be very confusing, because there were two very different cultures.

McCann was an agency focused on results, planning, long-term campaigns, and W/Brasil brought that vibrant, popular culture. Washington was able to merge both cultures.

Brazil was almost a surname for Washington Olivetto. He was W Brasil himself. A very Brazilian guy, who loved things from our country: music, food, culture, literature, and arts. One of the things he did early on, when the merger happened, was to bring Gaviões da Fiel (a samba school) into the agency to play samba, have feijoada. He liked to bring people together through Brazil.

Washington Olivetto was Oliveira.

He was not a person who, despite who he was, stayed among the stars. And we didn’t call him Washington, or Olivetto. For us, he was Oliveira. Washington is a very American name for a person who is so Brazilian. That’s why we called him Oliveira, and he would play along; he liked it, he joked.

Washington Olivetto was a leader.

I’m a copywriter, just like him. When he arrived, he asked to sit in the middle of the team. And he sat at the table next to mine. I would arrive in the morning and he would be there. He would look at my computer, I would ask him for an idea. He liked to be accessible.

Leadership is teaching how to do things. And that’s what he did. He wasn’t the type to say, “This work is wrong.” He didn’t come to you and say, “Put this here, it will be good,” or “remove this character.” No! He made you find the way. He brought questions and challenges to your idea and you would think, “Ah…”

He knew how to do that, he would guide you there. Without you even realizing it. He was a master. He didn’t grab the spotlight to make everything clear; he would go there and teach you, “Here, this. What is the path you need to take? Let’s find your way here.”

He already had the answer in his head, but he made it seem like it was you who got there! Sometimes, he would discover it together.

It wasn’t leadership based on rules or dogmas. It was based on relationships, conversations, friendships, passion for what we were doing.

Another important thing about Washington is that he often said, “First of all, your life and your family. This here is just work.” He knew that the raw material of ideas was a calm, refreshed mind, a mind that read books.

Washington Olivetto was simple.

And he said that the most important thing in advertising, after the idea, obviously, was synthesis. It was about simplifying the idea to the maximum so that it became popular. If you think about it, that’s what the Bombril Boy was all about. It’s a product, a spokesperson, and an endless background. There’s nothing else! So, everything about the Bombril Boy was very simple, and that’s why it resonated. It was easy to repeat.

He often said that you had to spend time making ideas simple.

After choosing the idea to execute, everything had to be the best. Who is the best actor possible for this commercial? What is the best possible text? Who is the best director we can get?

There was never a shortage of resources for the idea to be the best possible. We would invest all we could in terms of time and budget to make it the best. And we would use all our relationships to get the people we wanted to work on this idea with us.

Once we had an idea, but didn’t have the budget to hire a famous person. He would call someone like Seu Jorge: “I have this really cool idea because of this, this, and this. Man, I want you to do it!” Seu Jorge wouldn’t even ask how much and would say, “Of course, let’s do it!” So, that was it. He was cherished in the artistic and advertising world for who he was.

Washington invented us.

I had never experienced going to a pitch where the leader of my agency was a celebrity. It was like having a soap opera personality, a TV star, a football player there. A singer. Everyone knew him, everyone wanted to take a photo, everyone remembered the campaigns.

My friend Antônio Mega Rodriguez, who as far as I remember didn’t work directly with Washington, said the perfect phrase: “The man who invented us has passed away.”

Man, the guy who invented us has passed away. That’s it! Brazilian advertising can be divided into before and after Washington Olivetto. Even though we had several greats, it was with him that the advertising profession started gaining attention from society. People started to understand, be interested, and discuss, based on Washington Olivetto’s campaigns.

With W/Brasil, products stopped talking about themselves and started talking about Brazilian culture. He created a new style of advertising that inspired.

Washington Olivetto didn’t give presentations, he put on shows.

He used to say that no matter how important a meeting is, people are not focused right at the beginning. They want to check their emails, see a message on their phones, do whatever. So he would say, “This here is a show. What is the first act? What is the song that opens the show? If Jorge Ben Jor were to perform, what song would open his show? It’s a song that will get everyone moving, right? So you need to get people jumping and going crazy. An agency presentation should be like that. The first thing you say should get everyone moving in their seats and thinking, ‘Hmm, what’s coming up?'”

He always had a fun, sometimes made-up, story that would grab people’s attention right from the start. And of course, we had to think about the grand finale. “What are you going to leave them with that will make people talk afterward? It could be anything: a hat, a joke, a video, a celebrity entering the room. It could be a million things, but what I want is for people to leave and, at dinner time, say, ‘Guys, you won’t believe what happened at work today.'”

Because he said, “It’s about the agency staying in the client’s mind; not just the campaigns! The agency has to stay in the client’s mind.”

And I can say that WMcCann’s self-promotion was as good as the advertising it did for brands.

Every time we were preparing for a meeting, he would say, “I’m sure your idea is good. I don’t even need to see it, because you are good. My concern is with the script of the show, the presentation script.”

He was very particular about making every second count in a meeting, every person present was important. He wouldn’t bring someone who wouldn’t contribute. If you had more people in the room than necessary, it would only distract from the important people in the presentation.

“Nothing that the client won’t absorb should be in the presentation. Show only what the person will remember.”

Washington Olivetto was like a postgraduate degree in advertising for me.

Because, truly, these are things I still carry with me. The way I like to present, the way I like to create, and how I work with my team, all of it stems from that period of my career. I use a lot of what I learned, because if there was a successful agency case in Brazil, it was W. The Oliveira agency.


Source