A few weeks ago I had the opportunity for a one-on-one meeting with Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi Saatchi and creator of Lovemarks. It was 45 minutes of love and respect for the man who has most influenced my professional life, as well as for the man who has injected so much inspiration into our company and into the lives of so many people.
At this meeting in his office at Saatchi New York, on the 16th floor of the building on the corner of Hudson and Houston, in the seductive SoHo area, my purpose was to say thank you and goodbye. In that order. Because I don’t know if I would have had another opportunity to do so, and because the time had come to express it personally, open-heartedly.
When I met Kevin Roberts I did so at the beginning of our business relationship with Saatchi, to discover from his approach the determination to pull the company out of the quagmire in which it found itself. Kevin transformed Saatchi Saatchi, rescued it and put it in 15th position in the world today, made it the birthplace of the most powerful concept that has been created in several years and cemented it as a winning company.
I will never forget the message he sent me when my father died, when he wrote to me in a simple and powerful way: “Jorge, Keep making your father proud”. His message touched my soul, as I lived the pain of the departure of my most important mentor in life, Fernando Oller Zamora, my father of love and upbringing, my angel and special envoy. Thus, for an instant, two people that I admire and carry in my heart crossed paths.
KR, as we affectionately call him, wrote two books on Lovemarks, launched Sisomo as an advanced concept and opened websites and blogs like a hurricane. He proposed a revolution of love and business, ignited the imagination of thousands and among all of them, in Tribu we went one step at a time injecting his influence in our system. Perhaps because of this, it was easy for us to appropriate his ideas, then adapt them to our environment and add our own. We armed ourselves with the most daring literature in the world, we added and multiplied and built and grew in parallel to the Saatchi story for a decade of many emotions.
The stories, anecdotes and changes inspired by the modern gladiator in Kevin Roberts are countless, but in that one Friday afternoon moment, I was able to tell him several important ones as he watched me intently with his gaze fixed on my sincerely grateful eyes. They have been years rich in ideas and experiences, a time of evolution and learning, of paradigms changed by new convictions, values and proposals.
At the same time, that meeting allowed me to share my reasons and personally explain our change to DDB, focused as we are on future and growth, to conclude the meeting with a warm, affectionate and friendly hug for the rest of our lives. Kevin Roberts and his Saatchi Saatchi have been very important in my life and in the life of Tribu, and for that, I am and will be forever grateful.
Kevin visited us in Costa Rica in 2006, as I visited him in New Zealand when I started Lovemarks in 2001. Kevin has been through our lives and has been for nothing more than making a wonderful difference, despite how much we wanted to do at Saatchi and couldn’t for one reason or another. In his approach to Latin America, Kevin has his absolute priority in Brazil. Meanwhile, the network in our Central American region is not a business priority in his overall strategy. As it is, I can never thank him enough for his friendship and personal affection.
As we begin our journey with DDB, officially as of December 25, 2009, but operationally as of the first of 2010, we move forward adding legacies, adding history and eager to protect our memories. Tribu is a modest Costa Rican company with a beautiful past, a great present and an exciting future, inspired by the idea of making a deep mark as we walk.