PJ Pereira: The Way I See It

PJ Pereira is CCO and co-founder of Pereira & O’Dell, which has offices in San Francisco, New York, São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. He has been winning Cyber Lions since their inception and his recent work for Intel and Toshiba won three Grands Prix at Cannes this year and was nominated for an Emmy. Here he talks to Joe Lancaster about fulfilment, martial arts, near-death muggings, walking out on McDonald’s and how a business grounding helps with clients.

I was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1973 and raised in a crazy religious cult. My grandfather was a senator and my parents both worked for the Senate. I didn’t know the cult was strange until I got to college age and realised, ‘that doesn’t make any sense, I’m out of here’.

When I was nine years old I started learning to program and when I was 13 years old, in 1986, I got a part-time job as a programmer for my uncle, who was a computer scientist. My version of the story is that I didn’t want to ask my parents for money to take my girlfriend to the movies, but my mum says I found the job so I had an excuse not to do any chores at home.

I became a good programmer and worked all day, then studied business at college at night. Having a business education helps me with clients because I can understand what they’re going through and that can help me think about a different solution [to their problems].

During college, when I was 19, I wrote a book in my spare time called The Lean Company about how small businesses run and how big businesses can benefit from the same model. I was the number-one bestselling business author in Brazil that year.

My college invited me to skip my Masters and go straight to PHD and become a researcher. I went to visit some of the PHDs who were researchers at the university and I saw their lives and saw their little offices – full of stacks of different books – and there’s dead work, compiling spreadsheets and counting and doing telemarketing. That wasn’t the life I wanted. It didn’t feel exciting.

I decided I wanted to go back to my childhood dream – working on advertising. At the time, the web had just happened. The first browsers came out, and there were still bulletin boards. Three agencies in Brazil launched their websites so I wrote to all of them saying, ‘Hey, I know that this digital thing is going to have something to do with advertising. I don’t know what, but I think I can help you figure that out’. The same day, one of them replied – DM9. They put me on a plane the next day and the following day I accepted their offer to move to São Paolo and start a new life.

My father had died six months before, which made it very complicated. In Brazil you stay at home with your parents until you get married, so it was a pretty big rupture for me to leave Rio and my family, but my mum was the first one to push me and say, ‘You’ve got to do it, just go’.

At DM9 I started working with the operations director. He suddenly realised that I didn’t belong there and kind of fired me to another department. Then I got pushed to media and I did media plans for a while. Then the guy there suddenly realised that they kind of liked me, but I didn’t belong there, so they took me to planning, then to accounts. The whole time I knew I wanted to be in creative.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given is to work harder than the people around you. I’ve never been scared of hard work.

At DM9, at 6pm every day I would say goodbye to everyone and go upstairs to the creative department and help them organise books, scan things, cut out images and write copy. Anything that anyone needed, I was there between 6pm and 2am every day for a whole year, including weekends. One day they gave me a brief and I said, ‘OK, I’ll search more at 6pm when I’m here’. They said, ‘What do you mean when you’re here? You’re going to move to creative’.

My first campaign was for São Paulo creative week. We put together a website for it. It was 1998, the first year of the Cyber Lions in Cannes and we won a gold.

The next year, Cannes invited me to be a judge and my boss said, ‘You’re going to be a judge at fricking Cannes. You cannot just go there as interactive supervisor, whatever it is, so I’m going to make you an interactive creative director’. I went and won another Cyber gold and, coincidentally, DM9 won Agency of the Year for the second year running.

The difference between us and second place was exactly seven points, the number for a Cyber gold, so that kind of put me in a huge spotlight because people said I made the difference. I didn’t – I got one out of 12 Lions, but it was the only category where the scores were different between the agencies. After that, every single agency in Brazil started creating a digital revolution, because everyone wanted to win Cyber Lions. That’s when Brazil started to get really good at digital work.

At that time, DM9 got sold to DDB and the previous owners decided to leave and make an investment in a big dotcom portfolio. They said to me, ‘We’re going to invest in the internet thing and you’re the only guy that we know who understands that shit. Do you want to come work with us?’ I said, ‘No, I’m an agency guy. I prefer to do only creative because I’m just too young to become a suit, so I’ll start my own agency, you become my investors and this thing you’re doing becomes my biggest client so I can still help you’. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I started AgenciaClick in 1999 with 15 people and in the first year we won a Cannes Cyber Grand Prix and about six more Lions – we were the most-awarded digital shop in the world. In a few years we went up to 300 people. Eventually, we had three different offices, we were making a lot of money, had the big account in each segment and I thought, ‘Ok, here I am, 31 years old with the biggest digital shop in the country and I don’t know what to do next’. I felt like I had peaked.

A friend of mine, Lars Bastholm, was about to open the New York office of AKQA and I knew James Hilton, AKQA co-founder and CCO, from the jury at Cannes. I told Lars to let me know of any opportunities because I had nothing else to do in Brazil and needed to go to a bigger market, even if it meant taking a step back. A few months later I moved to San Francisco to be ECD at AKQA.

I had a very successful time at AKQA but I decided to leave after working on two projects; one was a mockumentary feature film for Red Bull, Unflinching Triumph, which was the most fun I’d ever had in my life and I wanted more of that, and the other was for McDonald’s. We were doing a huge alternative reality game for them called The Lost Ring and because of the structure of the business relationship, most of the money went to producing the website and the program and the technology side, when I thought that most of the money should be spent on the content, because that’s where the magic was. It worked, it was great, a lot of fun, but a few weeks before the project launched I left.

The client called me. He was pissed: ‘This was the biggest thing you and I have ever done in our lives; how dare you just leave me alone right now?’ I said, ‘Sorry, I had to do this, it’s a big opportunity to open my agency’. I set up Pereira & O’Dell with Andrew O’Dell – backed by my original boss at DM9 who invested in AgenciaClick – and a few years later the same client called me. He’d moved to retail and wanted me to pitch to make a project for Intel and Toshiba.

During the first two years of Pereira & O’Dell there wasn’t a single week that I didn’t ask myself if I was in the wrong business because there were moments when I was absolutely miserable. When you’re small, the risk is too big and you have to pay the salaries of everyone around you. Clients tell you to do something crappy and they bully you and you have no alternative than to just take it because you have a responsibility to feed your employees. But as the agency grew and we got more weight and more accounts, we got more leverage on that conversation and built more trust with the clients, so the entire relationship changed. Now, I’m having the time of my life. I’m glad I did it.

Our mantra at Pereira & O’Dell is ‘to work as if advertising was invented today’ but it’s way less proverbial than it sounds. We hired people from traditional backgrounds and digital agencies but it’s hard to get them to work together because they don’t think the same way, so I had to play a trick to make them all leave behind the way they would do things [previously] and pull ahead. To imagine advertising was invented today means you know how all the elements work – TV, press releases, print etc – but you have no idea of how advertising happened in the past 30 years and you’re going to need to make that up, right now. I prefer [the agency] to be about a question rather than an answer because that keeps us sharp and wondering if we’re done and if we need to find the next thing that will keep us at the edge.

My relationship with [CEO] Andrew O’Dell is very simple because we divided our territories clearly when we started out. So even when we disagree – and we disagree about 60 per cent of the time – if it’s anything related to the business, he makes the final call, even if I hate it. Anything related to the work, the final call is mine.

Our agency doesn’t have offices. Everyone works in an open space, so these fights happen in front of everyone. People get freaked out.

Bill Clinton introduced me onto the stage at Cannes last year. We were waiting backstage and he asked me how to pronounce Pereira properly. I told him and he attempted it and asked me if it was correct. I said yes but he said, ‘No, I know it wasn’t’ and practiced for five minutes until he got it perfect. It’s the best I’ve ever heard an American pronounce my name.

My best works in advertising have been Red Bull, McDonald’s, The Beauty Inside and The Power Inside for Intel and Toshiba and our recent campaign for Skype, Stick Together.

The client was worried about doing a thriller for the Intel and Toshiba Inside Experience but we convinced them they needed that shock to make consumers understand how serious they were. It was probably the biggest gamble of my life because if it didn’t work it would have killed the most important thing in the history of this agency.

It’s hard to pick a favourite ad of all time but there are two old Coca-Cola spots that are always on my mind, Video Game and It’s Mine. Those and Honda Grrr [all by Wieden+Kennedy offices] are the things I wish I had done.

I don’t see too much difference between artistic fulfilment and making money. I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t feel artistically fulfilled. Sometimes, I know I have to suck it up, get the work done and keep moving, so I can keep the opportunities happening. During the first two years of this agency I wasn’t happy, but I had a vision. I knew I was going to be happier later and it happened.

I have been fighting since I was 12 years old. I currently do four hours of kung fu and three hours of Brazilian ju-jitsu per week. One of the main things that the Eastern culture teaches you is the idea of yin and yang, the balance between opposites. In the Western world, and especially in advertising, you’re trained to be single-minded – it’s this or that, you cannot be successful and happy, you have to make these choices. Well, what the fuck? You can’t be both? That’s the stupidest idea ever. Why would you think that?

I’ve never had to use my fighting skills in self-defence but I have come close. The moment the person stands up and comes at your face and you don’t back down, you close your fists and they see your body change, they change their mind.

My wife saved my life when we were robbed at gunpoint in São Paulo in 2003. At the time, the fashionable crime there was ‘flash kidnapping’. When you pulled up at a traffic light they would hold a gun to your head, get in the car and make you drive to a dark alley. Someone took your credit cards to an ATM, checked your account and then they decided what to do; kill you, let you go or ask for a ransom. I had a lot of money in my account because I had just got a bonus so I knew it was going to be really ugly.

They got us out of the car and one guy took me in one direction, another took my wife, who was then my girlfriend, a different way. I was trying to figure out the best way to do something so that if he shot me I wouldn’t die or be in so much pain that I couldn’t go and find her. While I was thinking that, my wife was walking in the other direction with the guy and he started to cough. She’s one of those people who connects to any single person on the planet and they love her. She asked why he was coughing and he told her he had pneumonia and needed money to go the doctor. She looked at him and said, ‘You shouldn’t be out in the cold without a jacket’. So she took her jacket and gave it to the guy.

He brought her back to me and told his accomplice, ‘These guys are good people, let’s not harm them’ and, at the end, when the other guy called to say he had the money, he told us, ‘I’m so sorry that we took you guys, if we knew that you were so cool we’d have taken the guy from the car right in front of you. When I’m on the corner I’m going to shoot three times into the air and then you know that it’s safe to go back to your car.’

I had been avoiding the marriage subject for as long as I could in the relationship, but after we went to the police station we went home and we were lying in bed in silence, staring at the ceiling. I realised I could have died without having the pleasure of marrying her. So what the fuck was I doing and why was I waiting? So I just kind of, without even looking at her, said, ‘Let’s get married’, and she didn’t look at me, but said, ‘Yes’, and that was it. It doesn’t sound very romantic but it was incredible, in my head it was an incredibly romantic moment.

I have spent six months of the last six years on airplanes and I have a seven-year-old son, so it’s difficult. I try to make the trips as short as I can.

My plan was to move to San Francisco then New York, Shanghai, London – all the major markets – but I landed in the wrong place. San Francisco is beautiful and has an obsession with innovation and changing the world that I love. I’m stuck here for no fucking reason. This is where I want to be. This is home.

I recently released the first of my trilogy of novels, Gods of Both Worlds: The Book of Silence. It’s set in modern-day Brazil and ancient Africa and it explores mythology heavily. It was originally a single 800-page story that I wrote and rewrote for three years and tried to publish, but no one was interested. This year, we got nominated for an Emmy [for The Beauty Inside] so I reached out to some publishers and a lot were interested. I have also sold the option for a movie to a Hollywood company. They are working on a script and are confident it will happen.

If I could time travel just once I would go back to the 1960s to meet my parents when they were young.

The worst human invention is firearms. The greatest human invention is the internet.

I am scared of heights. That’s about all.

If I could change one thing about myself I would be thinner, not for looks, just health. Trust me, I’ve been trying and kung fu keeps my cardio working OK and my strength up, but every time I train I feel I relax on the eating so I never lose weight.

I care what people think, more about the work than me. I’m always monitoring what people are saying about the work.

I don’t think I have achieved anything yet. I now feel confident that I may be able to achieve something, but I haven’t had too much time to think about what that something is, because I don’t make too many long-term plans.

I look more at how I can perform better right now and I do have a blurry vision of what the future can be. I try not to define it because I know that I change my mind quite often, so if I establish a plan that is too crisp, I’m going to need to re-establish that a few months later.

I’m going to work for a very long time hopefully, unless I die before. I have no intention of retiring, ever.

At the end of the day what really matters is when I go back home and I look at my family. Going back to the yin-yang thing, some people say you have to choose between your family and your work, but when I go home and I give them a hug and I play with my son I realise how much of a better father I am because I’m happy doing my job and I’m pretty sure that he appreciates it.