Last night I finally put play on the AppleTV and started watching a movie I downloaded a few weeks ago – Art Copy, by Doug Pray. I thought I’d abandon it at minute 5 or 10, only to find that I couldn’t let go until the final subtitles. Because if you’re in advertising or branding, it’s in the mandatory category, as it’s mandatory to recognize that it’s fail hard. I’ll leave you here with a short prologue to encourage you to watch it:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KmZZtA8ttKc_USfeature%3Dplayer_embeddedversion%3D3

It has also served as the perfect platform for me to continue with the series of posts about the advertising industry that I have been including in this blog. Although I must clarify that I suspended it for strategic reasons, because of the need to lower the beep on the radars and fly low on key days for our business. Or did anyone think that I am not going to go hard on the pending issues?

For those who believe that advertising is a business, of exclusive service to clients’ results, Art Copy comes to remind us of its true purpose: influence. Not in vain, in Tribu DDB as in Grupo Tribu, we have decided to become the most influential network in Central America, because we are clear that ours is not only a matter of ads, but of making daily contributions to make the world a little better, through advertising.ublicity.

The documentary film delivers stories of Lee Clow, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Hal Riney and George Lois, among others. It walks us through Bill Bernbach’s extraordinary contribution, the B in our DDB name, and insists on the importance of “brutal simplicity”. He takes us through Apple and its 1984, as well as revisits us with “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”. He wraps us up with Braniff, Tommy Hillfiger, Got Milk?, Ronald Reagan and many more, to rescue the impressive way we shape the culture, touch the imagination of many and make our customers rich.

The most unexpected story comes with the origin of “Just Do It” by Nike, motivated by the expression of a death row convict minutes before his execution when he proposed a laconic, “Let’s do it!”. However, it touchingly relates how Just Do It has led many people to follow their dreams into reality.

However, nothing is more important than the people he introduces us to. The talent, their origins, their dreams and aspirations, because we advertisers are communication professionals who know our mission. This is why it bothers me so much to see a commercial like the one that is on the air right now for the iPhone 4 by Kolbi, and I don’t know which agency, where they even describe the type of lithium battery it has. They don’t even know how to copy what Apple does in the world?

Art Copy is a questionable, debatable and controversial proposal, where I can imagine the “ecologists” of business, art or culture raising arguments. However, for those of us in the advertising business, it moves us to ask ourselves: What will my legacy be? How will I be remembered? If I were invited to an Art Copy tico, what story will I be able to tell?

Hopefully we can continue to build in Costa Rica and Central America, clear about the way we influence our countries, our cultures and people’s imagination. We have a responsibility that transcends the numbers on the bottom line, so it will be our dreams and illusions that will have to prevail and triumph over the subjects of metrics, dollar signs and the past.

We keep dreaming and we keep doing. After all, we are with all the milk, thinking differently and just doing it.