PJ Pereira: Full Episode Transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Question Everything, a podcast all about learning from the successes and the failures of those who dare to, well, question everything. This podcast is part interview, part therapy, and part Price is Right. We even have our own game board stacked with questions that'll make the most successful CMOs totally sweat. I'm your host, Ashley Walters, CMO and partner at Curiosity. On today's episode, I sit down with ad industry legend PJ Pereira, co-founder of Silverside AI and his namesake Pereira Odell. Besides being the brain behind iconic campaigns for Coca-Cola, IHOP, and Adobe, PJ is passionate about mentoring creatives to embrace the rise of AI. On today's episode, you'll learn what really happened with that AI-generated Coke ad we all talked about, why the future of big ideas are actually just seeds, and why when it comes to AI, everyone is behind. So, embrace the wave and don't get caught with your shorts down. Fire up your AI note taker and get ready to spend an hour with one of advertising's top minds. Let's get started.

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PJ Pereira: PJ Introduction

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PJ Pereira is an industry veteran of over 20 years, best known for co-founding independent award-winning creative agency, Pereira Odell. He's also been named to Adweek's Creative 100, AdAge's Creative 50, and he was named Adweek's AI Champion of the Year for championing the ethical progression of AI in the ad industry. His passion for converging AI and creativity led him to co-found Silverside, an AI innovation and incubation lab, solving creative problems for the world's top brands. Whether you consider yourself an AI expert or if you haven't yet embraced it, this episode is your chance to learn from the best in the industry. PJ, welcome to the podcast. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Heck yeah, I am so excited. So I read a little news this week and I saw that you were just listed and named to AdAge's A-list.

Congratulations! Thank you very much-it's such an honor, and you know that a list that comes out every year and features everyone that is doing important work and making important moves, and we're very honored to be not only on the list but next to the people who are in the list as well. Speaking of the people next to you on the list, I woke up this morning and saw Megan Lawley post a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a handwritten note that looked like it was from you. Is this true? Yeah. Our industry, there's so much competitiveness and the day-by-day so grinding. Working on something that is such a personal expression of who we are, especially on the creative side.

It can be very grinding and we sometimes lose sense that we have more to gain when we work and we want to move as a herd, as a pack, as a group and an industry. And I think that when you learn to appreciate the others around you, everything gets much better. So when we saw the lesson, my feeling wasn't just pride for what we've been doing ourselves as service plan, as a network, because it's Pearl, there's Silver Side, but there's There's also a service plan, 7,000 people around the world. They're super excited, celebrating. But then we look and all those other companies should be having the same celebrations. And we’re happy for all of them. And, you know, let's send some flowers just so we can at least share these moments.

It’s good to have things we can share. I love that. Well, class act first. But I also agree with you. I think this industry can sometimes feel so big, but yet. sometimes really small. And I think when we are working together and we’re even collaborating together and sharing ideas, man, it can feel really, really inclusive and amazing. And I love that you did that. So congratulations. So having you on, man, I got to say, it's like a little bit of a pinch me moment. I have; I've heard of your agency. I have obviously followed you, seen a lot of the incredible work you guys have done. You've written how many, like six books, I think you've won every award ever possibly imagined. So putting these questions together was a real treat.

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PJ Pereira: How a CMO integrate AI into their operations tomorrow 

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I can't wait to dig in and learn a little bit of behind-the-scenes into some of these magical moments you've had. So are you ready? Let's do it. All right, here we go. So as you know, you've seen the show. We've got 12 spicy questions and the power is totally in your hands. Where do you want to go first? Let's go to number two now. Number two. So I want to talk about AI. So how can a CMO, in your opinion, integrate AI into their operations, like starting tomorrow? What are some of those first things brands can start doing? AI is such a big transformation in the way we think and do things that if we try to find, to begin with, no one knows what the AI budget should be, so they don't have any money.

So when they start to think about it, everyone is struggling. And I'm telling you because every client, every CMO I talk to, they reveal the same thing in the corner. After we have a conversation, eventually they come, let me tell you this. I have a lot of pressure to do things, but I don't have a budget because I don't even know how much I should spend. And I don't know what I should be doing. Now I have the pressure, but I have no money. I have no goals. I have no direction. How do I start? What I'm telling you is telling everyone of them is it. Pick something, whatever it is, and do a little pilot start.

This first project is probably not going to be the important one in terms of impact, but it will give you a glimpse of what the future can be and what the possibilities are. And it will give you a hint of what the next big one is. And then you grow from there. The worst thing you can do now is get paralyzed by the possibilities and the weight and the responsibility. And wait for the chance to do it perfectly. Because you're not going to do it right. You just need to do something small and fast so you can learn from it and do better the next round. What are some typical first types of projects that you're seeing brands take on? Or is it just all over the board? It's all over the board.

I think that I have clients that we're helping them think about their design process. It's the quickest, easiest win for them as a way to experiment-let's reframe your design process so as you're designing a product, you can see it in different parts of the world in real-time and can accelerate your rollout. Okay, that's it. For some others, it's just finding ways to give scale to their social media or their e-commerce content. For others, it's creating ads that look better than what their budgets can afford to be. And so every situation, every culture, and every brand is slightly different. So that's why I'm saying that you should not look at others, your peers, as a reference to what you should be doing.

You should look inside and say, 'What is the quickest opportunity that I have to get something out in the world and learn from it?' Because it's so different, that is hard to produce. I'll give you one little example of the difference. I have a client that kind of explained, that came to me with a brief, this is what I want to do, because I don't know how much money I should do. I know that it's related to video, but I want to start with the low-profile portion of the videos that we do. We have these super expensive videos that we do, but we also have these low-production videos. And can you do the low-production videos for us? And it's like, yeah, we can, but.

check this out ai is actually better doing to to do the expensive things than the inexpensive things if you to do the inexpensive things you're going to be almost the same cost to do the expensive ones ai can do it in a much faster and cheaper way so we can try to do those or do the inexpensive but making them look expensive so having these conversations keeping an open mind helps a lot and but Just the fact that they started the conversation allowed them to understand that if they had just tried to find the perfect plan, they wouldn't even have realized that. Yeah, that's a great example. I don't know. From my perspective, I think we're probably a little far behind on the AI journey.

I'm like watching the industry evolve and like kind of rid some of that fear. And it's been really beautiful on how AI can be a tool for creatives and strategists, and really the entire creative supply chain. And so, yeah, I'm excited to learn from you and to learn from others who are doing it really well. I mean, everyone is behind. Thank you. That was a therapy session for me. And sometimes I have a sense that unless we collectively make a deal, like, let's move together again, kind of this constant theme. Unless we make a deal, let's chase this together. The technology is going to evolve faster than the industry. And that's a problem because then we may be replaced by other industries. So true. All right, let's go back to the board.

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PJ Pereira: Thoughts on in-house creative teams

Let's say seven. Lucky number seven. All right. So in-house creative agencies. I want your hot take on this. Do you love them or do you hate them? I would say that I used to hate them. No, I'm actually OK with that. And, you know, first part of that is because I have so many really brilliant friends that moved there. You know what? They're doing great work. They're making progress. They're pushing the industry. So I learned to love them. And, you know, I think that there's the. We're, as an industry, again, finding ways to settle and understand how we can all work together. Some of my favorite clients are actually working directly with their internal agency, not the regular path that we had before. So you know what?

I think we're going to be all right. We're going to be all right. We can do good stuff together. Now, do you partner with in-house creative agencies? Yeah, there's some clients that we work. On a project, on specific things, and the in-house agency worked with some other ones there's a new client that we are going to start to work soon um that we work under their in-house agency so I think the configurations are going to keep changing because the nature of the business and the nature of the process and the nature of marketing is changing so much that we can't um I don't think we can't, we can't afford to get stuck on any any opinion on anything. Yeah, yeah, we also work with a lot of in-house creative agencies.

I'm curious and like any red flags for you when you're talking to a brand and they're like 'I see it a lot in RFPS now like we have our own in-house team, we want somebody who can partner with them and be collaborative.' Have you had any issues or seen any red flags in those relationships? I've been fired in the past by the creative agency. And I think that that's a big lesson that if you start to compete with them, you lose. They are the client. They're part of the system. If you try to compete with that, there's no way you can win. So eventually you learn to, let's come to peace. I think that now we have a legitimately good relationship with the in-house agencies of our clients because ultimately they have the same challenges that we do.

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PJ Pereira: The key to winning a Cannes Lion

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They want to do the same things that we do. It's like, let's make things work here, do brilliant work that is moving the business here. So let's do it. Got it. All right. Good advice. All right. Let's go back to the game board. Let's go eight, my birthday. Your birthday. Okay. Number eight. All right. So wanting a lion and winning a lion are two different things. What advice can you give CMOs early on in the creative process if they want to win? The first advice is wanting to win and trying to win. Which sounds like, oh, that's silly. But trying to win is actually the trick between wanting and winning. There's trying. And it's the trying that makes you better. Because trying, you have to try every year.

One thing you want in the beginning, when it feels like it's over. But trying is a constant. Trying is a path. You know, I have won many Lions in my life. And I haven't won many Lions multiple times. But every year, I'm back to trying. And it's a reset year. It's a zero year like everyone else. And the act of trying to be good enough to win on a few things makes you good at everything else. The discipline of really wanting to win makes everything around you and the work much, much better because it kind of forces you to have to compare against best in class in the idea level, in the craft level, in the process level, in the thinking level. So it elevates your entire game.

Trying is the really trying, really going after it. So you're going to go, you're going to try, and you're going to fail, and you're going to just pet the dust off and try again next year. And you're going to win, and then you pet the dust off and you try again. The trying is the secret. That's good. And I love the repetition of that. Like, you know, it might not be year one, but maybe it's going to come year two. Is there anything like, because I know you've been a Lion jury member too. Any advice for somebody who hasn't won one and like we have a client right now and in the briefing at the top of the brief, you know, is like, all right, can lie.

Like that's the level of creativity we're thinking for this. So, so if that's step one, like what are some things that we could do as their agency partner to help navigate the CMO and the brand team through some of those decisions? I think it's the way to frame it and the way you look at it that is what's going to help more than any action that you do on the particular idea. Because it's hard, this is a competition, right? When you go there, when you're in the room judging, there's no trend that wins. There's no particular thing that will win. If you're in an incredible year where everyone did an incredible job, the work that's going to win is the work that did an incredible job plus one.

If it's a horrible year that everyone did a horrible job, the work that is going to win will be horrible plus one will win. It's literally a competition. Let's see what stands out. It's not an absolute criteria. If you are a client or an agency that is trying to win, is trying to play at that highest level, the trick is giving yourself that commitment. I'm going to do it. And it's a long-term one. I'm going to try this one, and I'm going to enter. And if it doesn't win, I'm going to look at the other things that won in that same space and try to understand why a jury of incredibly smart people thought that that thing was better than mine. All those things were better than mine, and then you learn from it.

And then next year, you may not win again, but maybe put a short list. And then the next year, you go, and win, and then the next year, you're gonna go expecting to win even bigger. And then you go, don't even put a short list, and and... But understanding, learning from it is the most important thing. I still remember the day that my when I opened my First agency in Brazil. We were seven months old when we entered Cannes for the first time. Even a year old. And we went there, and won a Grand Prix. It was like five golds, five silvers, three silvers, and a bunch of bronzes, and a Grand Prix. We, as an agency, won more awards than Germany. And it was the third.

It was the US, UK, and Germany. And we won more awards than Germany. Wow. No, actually US, UK, Brazil, and Germany. So we, and Brazil was us. So, and, and I remember kind of like, that's awesome. We did it. We are incredible. The next year I decided like, I'm not going to Canada this year. You know, last year was too big. I'm going to do something else. So I went to Paris, which I didn't say anything, but it's like, it's close enough. So when we went, I would take a train and I'll go there to go on stage. You know what we won that year? Zero. And that was the biggest lesson in my life. Whatever happened in one year has no influence whatsoever on the next one, other than your culture and your drive and your craft.

If you have a culture that is competitive and is looking at things right, and if you have your process, that passion for craft and your clients, if you have that collective ambition, you are on track, but that's no guarantee that you will win because it's a new season. Everything goes back to zero. You're like right next to everyone else. Oh, that is such good perspective. I really like that. And it does kind of. Create a bit of a rat race for the next year, doesn't it is! It is incredible when you're when you're winning, but yeah, when you win and then you lose, that's a horrible person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a client, they uh, they hit a billion, they hit the billion-dollar mark, and I remember we went out for a beer and celebrated, and their boss was like, 'All right, so when are we gonna hit the next billion?' And I'm like, 'Oh my god, okay.' We had like 30 minutes to celebrate, but here we go.

It kind of feels like the same thing, right? Grand Prix one year, yeah it's it's it's like that. It's like sports, yeah it is. You win, you win the Super Bowl next year, and then you have zero points just like everyone else.

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PJ Pereira: How agency owners know when they’ve arrived

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Yes, that's great. Alright, thanks for sharing that, I appreciate that. Let's go back to the board; I think that sometimes being predictable is very unpredictable in this world. I would go for nine. Number nine. Well, that's my favorite number. So let's see. Okay, so I've read this about you. So at Pereira O’delle, you have said that we want to be the most creative agency on the planet. So I'm curious, as a founder, how do you know when you've arrived? This is the most painful lesson.

In my career, that is when you feel that you know that you've arrived, then you're behind, oh god, okay. So, that story that I told you about going to Paris instead of going to Cannes, because you know I don't want to be there again, but I want to be close enough; that was that day, that like, oh we arrived and then we didn't, so I one of my biggest panics, the biggest, my biggest fear is having the feeling that we've arrived. Because it makes having a good year, having a good moment mean nothing on the the next brief, that you take, other than being kind of a little bit of a reputation, that's like, oh you did some creative work, so let's I want you to do something again, look something like that again.

It gives you a little bit of a head start, but not much. So I would rather feel that we, if the world thinks that you've arrived, I would rather feel that they they they are wrong i don't like to think that i arrive i think like i'm i'm still in motion All right. That's a good framework. I mean, as me, as an as an owner, I I'm constantly asking, OK, so like, when do we when do we know we've hit this or like, what is it? And it does just kind of feel like you get to the top of one mountain and then you look over and you're like, oh, wait, there's there's so much more and so many more people to impact and so many more things to do.

And I guess that's what makes this fun, right? It's terrifying. It's exhausting. But it also makes it allows you to. celebrate it a little bit more if all right there was a good day and doesn't mean that you know now it's going to be everything up or down it's okay now just in the beginning we still had to prove ourselves and accomplish you don't take anything for granted anymore yeah so true all right. 

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PJ Pereira: Where the industry is headed in the next 5 years

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Let's go back to the board let's go with 12 number 12 all right so let's just pretend like we have a crystal ball here what would you say where is our industry headed in the next five years i'll tell you

what i'm chasing and i hope that by in five years that we're that's going to be when we finally have realized the answer found the answer to a question i think that if you look back our industry had multiple Leaps in terms of of understanding what we had in our hands, but because once you have a new completely new thing to play with, you don't understand what you have until there's enough experience playing with it by multiple places, multiple ages, and multiple brands. So there was a certain point in the 60s and towards the 70s, the industry realized that moving from print to TV was a different thing. We had to not only put a photo and make it move and write long copy. There's a different way of telling a story for moving ads.

And the way of writing a script for TV was very different. Later, years later, decades later, when I started in the business, the biggest question that we had was, okay, we have these interactive, the internet was born, the web was born, and we had to figure what is an interactive, what is interactive advertising? And I have incredible stories from that time, and on how we collectively tried to answer that question later, and found we had to discover and and figure what is social advertising, what is advertising when the world is actually when the buzz is part of what the idea is not only the result of the idea, that's a fundamental change that we had to to figure out right.

I think that now the question that I have in the back of my head that I would expect to answer that in the next year, maybe three, maybe five, I think is what is an intelligent idea? What is an idea that is going to have its own ideas? You know, and like in video games, that is happening right now. Video game creators are, for the first time, they're faced with the challenge of creating non-playing characters, they don't write scripts for them anymore. They have to give them a backstory and hope that the characters are going to behave the way that they want. They're not going to change the direction of the story altogether. I think this is somewhere where we're going to land.

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PJ Pereira: Small ideas are the new big ideas

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It's like our ideas are going to have their own ideas and we have to be creating a DNA of an idea, I think you know, you know. Another way of putting this is that you know how we're obsessed with big ideas – the big idea – that's how I've been raised in this business. I think we need to stop thinking about big ideas and we need to stop thinking about small ideas; seeds not trees. How can we create an idea that is a seed of an idea, this small thing that we are going to put out in the world that is going to blossom in a completely unpredictable shape. But we kind of know the direction, but we cannot determine every branch and the height of the tree and the cut.

We don't know exactly how it's going to happen because the world is going to influence it. But we know that it's a tree. But a seed is much easier to carry around and easier to bring to places than carrying a giant tree behind you. That is really good. I think in our next statements of work, we should have like seed idea planning, not big idea planning. I've had people look at me. It's like, what kind of witchcraft are you talking about? It's like, well, you mean you don't want a big idea anymore? No, I want a small idea. And then people look at me. It's like, are you dumb? Are you crazy? Or, or you're just trying to make a silly point. I actually mean it.

I think there’s a different way of thinking about ideas that we haven’t figured yet. Yeah. And we will. Yeah. And that parent-child relationship to an idea is really fascinating, too. And I think there are likely some campaigns out in culture that are kind of at the beginning of what you’re talking about now. All right. So we’ll set a calendar. We’re going to check in with you in about three years. And I want to know if you have an answer to this question or if we’ve started to answer it. And yeah, I can guarantee that it’s not going to be my answer. This needs to be a collective answer. Yeah, yeah. I'll tell us a story behind this.

When I was president of the jury at Cannes at Cyber Lions ages ago, there was a discussion in the beginning of like the Cyber Lions about interactive ideas. So if the idea is not interactive, it shouldn't belong here. So that's what we established that it needs to be interactive somewhere. So we would judge everything. And then in the end, there were two ideas running for the Grand Prix. One was a very attractive idea: you write stuff and there was a video that reacted to it. And the other one was an idea that was just a series of videos. And the jury was pretty unanimous. You have to have two thirds of the jury to win it, to give it a Grand Prix.

The jury was unanimous in terms of saying that the idea that was just a series of videos was our favorite. But that wasn't an interactive idea. It classically so. So the jury was split in the middle and we spent three hours trying to convince each other of which one should win. In the end, we ended up giving it to what we call the interactive and made a statement. By doing that, we made a statement that just because you press play on a video, that's not interactive enough. That's not the future. Six months later, YouTube was born. And we missed the opportunity because we were so stuck on our definition of what the future would be from a point of view of what the past was.

And we missed the opportunity of seeing the biggest transformation in media that influenced everything from that point on. So I think that this definition is going to, if it happens, if we know. On that, that crystal ball is right or wrong and what is in there we're not gonna have to, you're not gonna have to ask me it's, we all know, we'll feel it, yeah, yeah, that's great, I feel like I was just a fly on the wall in that jury discussion so that was really cool, thanks for that. Alright let's go back to the game board let's go with five alright number five. 

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PJ Pereira: PJ’s reaction to the Coca-Cola AI-generated campaign backlash

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So I want to talk Coca-Cola, your Coca-Cola AI generated holiday ad made mainstream news which I'm sure you could tell us all about. What I'm curious about is if you were writing the headline the next day what would it have said? What did you really want people to know about that? I would have loved if the conversation there had been about how advertising just started to figure out AI's, its AI muscles. I think that would have been the positive headline for everyone and I think there was enough conversation. It's kind of like; there was a lot of AI hatred because people are afraid of losing their jobs. And I understand and appreciate it. And in private, I had a lot of some of the people that were complaining, they were writing to me, oh my God, it's so big what you have done.

And I hope that it works well because it can be a way for all of us to still have a job in the future. So can you tell us what we do? So the conversations in private were way better than the conversations in public. And I think that if we had done that more publicly, had the positive side of it, it's like, okay. This is an important day because it marks the start of something. Now let's make sure that that something is going to be positive for everyone. I think we would have wasted less time. Yeah, I wonder, like, had that ad come out just a little bit later, if that headline would have been different, if the conversation around it would have been different.

I think the first one to get the shot out would be, 'We'll get the shots no matter what.' And the fact that it was Coca-Cola and holidays is so much pressure. That is, that makes it, it was more, it was bigger than anyone was expecting, but someone had to do it. And, you know, I don't regret anything there. What people don't know of the backstory that I think is kind of very ironic is that, what that, I heard people say, oh, that wasn't, you didn't, where's the idea there? What is, you know, what is the crack? It's like, let me make this very clear here. The idea here was the caravan. The idea is, let's take these trucks that people are used to seeing, let's make them shiny and beautiful, and let's put them on the street.

It's an idea that someone had ages ago, and it became a part of how I see the holidays. And if you're wondering what, that is the idea. There's nothing artificial or virtual about it. It's the most physical. Real idea in this business has been there forever, we just did a spot that celebrates the caravan and so let's tell people that the caravan is going, it's coming to their town. It was honestly very unpretentious, I thought, you know what? Let's do this! You save money here to put them having more trucks for more cities. I'm happy as a lover, as a, as a fan and advertising nerd. I think that making more people see more of those caravans is more important than any story we could have put on TV, on film, or online, or cinemas, or anywhere.

I wanted more people to see the caravan for real. And I think we made our part. And how did the client take all of it? It was one of the best performing holiday campaigns of all time for Coca-Cola. Wow. You know, if you ask the CEO, the Coca-Cola CEO was giving interviews in Davos about, you know, it was performing incredibly well. We were super proud of it. Of course, it's controversial because every time you try something new, some people are going to make comments. They're negative and we're ready for that. Honestly, we're prepared that we knew it was going to happen, especially knowing that there's so much anxiety towards AI because people are afraid of losing their jobs. And I appreciate it again. I really care about that.

And I think that that keeps me awake at night is that our ability as an industry to move fast enough and teach people fast enough to reuse their skills and readjust their skills to this new scenario instead of just trying to resist and fight this wave, that it's not you can't hold that wave. I was raised in Rio de Janeiro right by the beach; I was i lived three three blocks from the beach when you when you're a five-year-old living at the beach, you learn that if the wave comes, you have two choices: you either jump in and end up on the other side. Or you run away and run back to the sand and go back to safety. The worst thing you can do is stay there in the middle, trying to hold the wave.

The wave is not going to be, it's not holdable. It's going to just go right straight through you and you're going to be fumbling and tumbling. And luckily, you're lucky if you still have your shorts when the whole thing is over, right? I think that it's fair for people to say, you know, I see these waves. I'm going to lean in and I'm going to jump and I'm going to be on the other side. Or I'm going to surf it. Yeah. Or I'm going to go back to the sand and be safe from it. And I'm going to retire. And I don't want to have to do with anything to do with that. But if you want to stay in the water, you need to either go past the wave or surf it.

You cannot stay there just looking at it. Longing over you and hoping that it's not going to crash. It will crash and you're going to get hurt and you're going to lose your shorts. That's right. And that concerns me. I've been spending a big chunk of my time trying to educate and recruit people to want to learn how to re-skill themselves and re-adjust their thinking so they can play a role in this new world on the other side of the waves instead of just being paralyzed by fear and and angry and trying to say, 'We don't want waves anymore.' Can't say waves stop; there doesn't that's not how waves work. Yeah, I mean... Headline here is: Don't lose your shorts. So, I love that. I love that.

And, and kudos to you for, um, for like the education and the coaching and the mentoring you're doing with, with creatives right now. I think that's incredible. I think there's a lot of power and knowledge and some of the fear just stems from the unknown. And I think the more that we know, the more that we get our hands on it and experience it, like you said, the better we will all be. So. I was raised, I started my career. right when digital was coming and i remember some people saying oh this is not creative this is not good it's not it's kind of they're all sort of the same exact same conversation and i remember someone in kind of an older uh a much older creative in the creative in my agency saying listen i remember when max arrived in the in the creative department they said the same thing so don't listen to that and and that advice from that

person who was there in the beginning not the person who had been there for just a little bit saved my career and i'm trying to do that for others move that to to the next generations don't listen to the naysayers because there's no we have no control over that that is coming all we need to do all we can do is understand what's on the other side and and be prepared and prepare ourselves For that and if I can help a few people like that one person help me, I'll; I can be ready to retire in the next 20 years from now. 20 more years. I love it. All right, let's go back to the game board. Okay, let's go to one then. Number one.

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PJ Pereira: How ad professionals can overcome AI anxiety

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Well, you just kind of touched on this one a little bit. So you mentioned AI anxiety. So we know it's real. I know we feel it here in Cincinnati. So I want to talk about it. Why are these fears justified? And why are some of them not justified? I'll say that they're absolutely justified, right? Things will change enough for me to say that no job is safe and there's nothing we can do about it, right? And I think that there are serious concerns. In my head, the way I look at this is that I separate, I allow myself to be for and against it at the same time. So I have separated, like I can see it as a citizen, as an advertising professional, as an entrepreneur, and as a creative.

I look at those things and some of them I decide to, like, as a creative, I'm surfing that wave. As an agency owner, I'm surfing that wave even more. As an advertising professional, I'm concerned. I'm going for the wave, but I'm concerned with the ones that are not going. As a citizen, I wish we could just go for the sand because I think there's serious societal problems they're going to need to solve. I don't know if the society is ready for what's coming. But all I can do right now and all I can help is by helping people understand what is their back path forward. Because, again, the wave is coming one way or another. And I think that the way to do it is not allow yourself to get paralyzed, getting there, try so you can see how it is.

Because what I'm seeing, the reality is that it's not that people are just losing their jobs and losing perspective, period. I think that every single person that tried to experiment with it saw a different possibility for what their future will be. So I've seen people who are colorists. they're just do color adjustments on on spots in in the regular process now they're directing entire spots using using they're using their culture now they feel like i don't know enough about camera but i know about filmmaking and i know about color that i can direct the entire spot and they're doing beautiful things all by themselves with their computers i've seen uh illustrators they're now suddenly they're animating i've seen Writers, they're composing music without any music knowledge.

Is a writer writing music using AI as good as a musician writing music? No. But in most cases, when you don't have a chance to hire a writer and a musician, that is going to be infinitely better than just having the writer to compose a song with a guitar that he doesn't play. And I think that is the thing. What I see as the way to depict this moment for me is kind of like this. The advertising gods and the technology gods got together. It's like, yeah, people keep complaining about us, and we need to make a deal here. Here's what we see. Have technology people saying, 'The technology guys like they complain that everything is too complicated and needs too much training. Can we make some of the people just tell what we want to do it?

Oh yeah, okay let's do it.' The advertising gods on the other hand, for instance, used to be in a world that where agencies could do three four things per year. And my budget was enough to do it. And now we have to do 400 things per year. And I have the same budget, if not less. Now my agency is angry at me because I'm not spending enough money. The production company is complaining that I don't have money for all the crap that I demand. But the world expects me to deliver that quality. The world is consuming content in hundreds of times more. Moments and I have to deliver; it's not that the CFO is mean or the CMO is weak; it's just that the context changed, and the advertising gods were like, 'Yeah, they keep complaining about that.' I'm gonna say so one day.

They're like, 'You know what? How about this? Let's give them a technology that allows them to finally instead of having 100 people or 200 people doing four spots per year; we can have 400 spots or 400 videos being done by groups of two people.' We still have work for the 200, but they're splitting blocks of two instead of blocks of 200. And they're going to do more things instead of less. And technology is going to allow you to do something that is not going to be the difference between the 200 and two like you expect. It's not going to be like the 200 people. So eventually, Sometimes you can do the big production, but most times you're going to need to do the small ones. But now we have flexibility.

And then those gods give us that gift and we complain. Sounds like my four-year-old, my six-year-old, my nine-year-old. I'm like, it's the answer to what you've been asking for. How is this a bad thing? We have been begging for this. I've been complaining. Every person in advertising and marketing that I've known for the last 10 years have been complaining about not having money to do, not having enough money to do all the new things that they have to do. Now technology allows you to do your complaining. Oh, man, it's so true. It's so true. Well, I do. I mean, I think it does go back to just like that comfort level and some education and some experience. And sometimes we're just. Deeply afraid of the unknown, you know, and it's like it's actually not as scary as it looks.

That wave that five-year-old can crush through that wave exactly, exactly I was when I was five-I was surfing that wave just like they're the grown-ups, and it's fine. I think we can all do it. The scary part is that for an 18-year-old, if you're an intern, and you're a CMO, the gap between those two has never been so small, yeah right? And that could be exciting. If you're in the top level and you allow yourself to get excited by learning new things, that's exciting. If you're just worried about your ego and how much you know more than the others, that's a scary part. If you're at the beginning and all you care about is if someone can feed you the information, you're in trouble because no one knows anything to teach you.

You're going to need to figure it out by yourself. But if you're an ambitious person who wants to have a chance a shot at doing things that have been done, has never been there, has never been a better opportunity, your generation is the the lucky one, you know, so I think that I, I like to see these with excitement and I'm trying to get this excitement on as many people as I can because that's good; these are my friends we're talking about right, yeah, and I want them to see it so they can have a positive motion forward instead of hiding under the under a rock and getting swept by the wave. Yes. All right. Let's go back to the game board. I think we have time for one more.

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PJ Pereira: How PJ navigated his first six months in America

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One more. Yes. Where are we going? Let's go 10. Number 10. Okay. So that you mentioned that your first six months in America were the worst six months of your life. I'd love to talk about that a little bit. How did those struggles prepare you for the man you are today and all the success that came your way? Hard-earned, I might add, but talk a little bit about that. This is an incredible question. I practice martial arts. I know you do. The one thing it gave me was resilience. I think that saved my life on those first six months. The ability to live in discomfort and, and take that as a lesson on being uncomfortable and dealing with that is kind of how I had to do every day.

I had to remind myself like, okay, I got punched in the face by choice. So you need to, this is not that hard. You can go back there and get punched again and survive. And for me, what happened, imagine, so I, I moved. To the US thinking that I could speak English and I arrived here and and I couldn't it wasn't not even close to I wasn't even close already to make things even worse, I am half-dead I read lips to have conversations right so and reading lips in another language is impossible, so I arrived home every day with a headache right I avoided having American friends for at least a year because in

my personal time I needed to speak Portuguese because I couldn't stand speaking English anymore but then the flip side of that is that when I had to sell an idea it was impossible I didn't have the flow I didn't have the jokes I didn't have the rhythm I didn't have, couldn't read the people on the other side, so uh my my boss at Akqa was kind enough to recommend hey how about this do you want me to hire a a presentation coach. And my first reaction was, no, I've been doing this forever. I know how to present. But then I thought, you know what? I need help here. And my first class with her, she said, okay, bring me your next presentation. I had like one hour long presentation.

This is the next presentation. And she looked at me and said, 'Okay, turn the camera on and say you have five minutes.' I said, 'What? Five minutes.' And I forced myself to do it in five, couldn't do it in five, did it in 10. But by doing that in 10, it forced me to learn exactly what I had to say to sell that idea. And then she said, 'Okay, yeah, this is not about the five minutes. It's about exactly figuring what is the core thing that you need to do, what you really need to say, and what are the tangents that you may take or you may not take, but you know that if you take them, you have to come back.' That discipline of being able to present in another language, and for what, how it forced me to to delineate that clarity, that the what, that idea is.

It was the most important skill I learned in my career, and it happened during those six months. If it wasn't for that difficulty, I would have never had to learn it that way, and the fact that I did kind of helped me get much better at at taking things that what my team creates, and sometimes they come up with a brilliant idea, but eventually you need to find a simple way to explain to someone that wasn't there, along the way. And like, oh, that really is brilliant! And I think that can I can help them um get some their best ideas sold because of those six months of hell, Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that story. That's incredible.

I see a lot of parallels to like the resilience that you faced then and the resilience that it takes now as a champion of AI. You can see, you know, there's a bit of backlash and there's a little controversy and there's fear and there's anxiety. At least from an outside perspective, the way that you're handling it and representing agencies and representing the creative community in that, it's really remarkable. And it actually gives me a lot of hope and it's inspiring to think that AI can have a massively positive impact on all of us in this industry. So kudos to you. Speaking from the heart here, all of my experience playing with this new world of AI and what it represents and how it changes the business and how we do things, I can

tell you with all my heart that that i feel more creative than i felt before i think that the impact once people let go of of their fear and try it for real they're going to to realize that this is going to be there could be a rent a creative renaissance because we we got used to a very industrial creative process and like the way we separate our step the creative process in multiple steps is all almost harry ford like yes it's industrial okay you're first right then someone else does this other part the specialist taking part and move to another one and all creatives i know at some point all marketers i know at some point complain that Why do I need to turn off my creativity at this point just because I have to finish this?

I just had an idea. Can we change? Oh, no, no, no. Now we have to finish this. Now we have to wrap it. We can only have ideas on these parts of the process. With the way things are being transformed, the cycles are shorter and you keep doing multiple cycles of the whole thing. And it feels incredibly more creative and incredibly more rewarding for people with a creative mind. Not only the creatives as the creative department, the writers and art director, but anyone related to anyone that joined the marketing world has a creative spirit. And I can tell you, we all got to feel more creative when this becomes the norm. But you have to trust me on this because unless you try it with really try to do it-not to prove that I'm wrong, but to see how it is.

If you try it, you're going to see that I'm right. Every person that has done that told me the exact same thing. And every person who is just trying to say that, trying to prove that this is evil, that it's not going to work, goes there, tries, and fails the first time. Like, eh, it doesn't work. See, the craft is not there. See, the quality is not there. See, and they find an excuse to put that aside. And they are missing the opportunity. Yeah. In PJ, we trust. Trust the method. Trust the beauty of our collective resilience. I think that is a trust. Our collective resilience and our collective creativity and our collectively resourcefulness will find a way to make creativity still reign. Mic drop. I love it. All right.

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PJ Pereira: Closing Remarks

So this has been incredible. If you know how this podcast usually ends, we love to do a little 'this or that' just to get to know you a little bit better. We've done some digging on you and I think we have a couple of really good ones. Are you ready? Just the first thing that comes to mind here. All right, let's go. Winning a big pitch or winning an MMA match? MMA match. Ooh, I love that. Launching a campaign or launching a novel? A novel. Okay. Daytime Emmy or Cannes Lion? Daytime Emmy. All right. Mid-journey or million-dollar production? Mid-journey. Let's go. PJ, this was incredible. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm so grateful to have had the time with you today. No, it was my pleasure.

And I think that thank you for opening the mic for this conversation. As I said, this is important. This is not just a conversation about one person in one portfolio. I think this is a moment in our industry, a moment in history that we have every single person is now deciding if they are going to stay behind or if they are going to adjust to what the future is. So thank you very much for giving me a little bit more space to get a few more people to feel like, okay, I'm going to take that as a good opportunity, not as just a massive threat. So if you're listening and you're that person, thank them for that. If our listeners want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to find you?

I think LinkedIn tends to be the easiest process. My professional self, I have my LinkedIn. I'm the ad guy on TikTok and Instagram. I'm a writer. On TikTok, I'm more of the writer. On Instagram, I'm more of the fighter. So I separate those things. And WhatsApp, I'm family. If you want to talk to me as an ad guy, go to LinkedIn. If you want to talk to me as a writer, talk on Instagram, as a fighter on Instagram. Perfect. We'll link to all of those for you so they have easy access to it. All right, my friend. Have an awesome day. Congrats on A-List. Let's stay in touch. I'd love to continue to follow your success. Let's do it. All right. Thank you.

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