Interview with Francisco Samper, CEO of MullenLowe LATAM

—How does a good idea turn into a good business?

“Good ideas should overcome all barriers. But to generate results, the only way to do it is by proving them.”

Samper says that an idea is not valuable on its own, but for what it achieves. “Every time we face a new creative challenge, we do it under the pressure of living up to it, and something new always emerges because that adrenaline drives you to it,” he reflects.

—Why do many ideas not make it to the air exactly as they were conceived?

“In the day-to-day of our clients, ideas often get diluted and, in the end, what goes on air is not exactly what you had originally planned. But there are also cases where you manage to keep the fidelity to the idea and achieve results — and that is wonderful.”

—What challenges does the agency model face today?

“The great tragedy we have now is that the agency renewal model is very vulnerable.”

Cost pressures, competition for talent, and declining fees paint a critical scenario. “They lower our compensation, we have to work on the edge, and on top of that they demand talent,” he laments. Although he recognizes that there are clients who understand the value of paying well to sustain good teams, he admits they are not the majority.

“We have always believed that part of the compensation is having a good work environment, having people believe in the agency’s culture, having agency people see what we have done before and say, ‘I want to be part of that.’ But of course people have to eat, people have to live, and clients need to understand that agencies need to survive,” he points out.

And he adds: “It cannot be that, always for clients to obtain better rates, the one who gets sacrificed is the agency.”

—What role does transparency play in professional client relationships?

“When you can come with facts and say, ‘here are the hours, this is what we worked on,’ the conversation changes.”

Samper highlights the value of operational transparency as a tool for defending the work: “I’m not telling a story, I’m showing data.” He believes that this allows agencies to back up what is often discussed subjectively. “Sometimes we accept reductions that are then not recovered, and you enter a spiral. It would be better to say: if you can’t pay what we’re worth, let’s talk again when you can,” he asserts.

—How do you see the evolution of agencies with artificial intelligence?

“AI is not a technology — it’s already part of life. And it’s going to totally change roles. Transformation is already happening. Two years ago we said it wouldn’t go that far. Well, it has arrived, and it will continue,” Samper says.

He notes that MullenLowe went from having more than 500 people to 340 in just two years — not due to massive layoffs, but because of operational adaptation. “It’s not going to replace all jobs, but there are tasks it does better,” he states.

And he adds that the big challenge is to preserve the differential: “People can create a prompt, but that’s not the same as someone’s judgment reading that text and saying: this yes, this no, or let’s turn this around like this.” He concludes: “The key is that we don’t let the added value we give as an agency get lost.”

—What value should agencies not lose?

“The focus we all have is to maintain that added value.”

For Samper, what makes an agency strong is not the ability to produce faster, but to think better. “We must not lose the value of being able to get to the heart of it,” he concludes.