Juan Carlos Ortíz de DDB Latina
The FIAP awards festival carries a large part of Ibero-American history with it. That is how DDB Latina President and CEO Juan Carlos Ortiz summarized the importance of the festival and its alliance with PRODU for the 2021 edition. “It is doing something interesting, which is to heighten still more the relevance of a festival with such an important name. This is a festival with a fame of its own because of its history. Things don’t happen overnight, and this is a festival that truly has a history,” Ortiz as jury president of the FIAP Innovation category advises participants that the works they submit should live up to the festival’s strategy of relevance. They should “illustrate a trend or some type of human reaction, be it a smile, a memory, an act of intelligence or by telling an exciting story, something that all societies would find intriguing.” He added that he feels happy “to have been invited as jury president at the FIAP and I’ll do my best to reward those entries that will make history.” He believes that deep down what a festival marks is, first, a comparison between people who feel they are making a name for themselves in the world, and second, it also marks the trends and challenges occurring in the industry itself. “We must never believe that anything is established once and for all. We have to challenge them every step of the way.” This year, the festival will particularly recognize the creativity seen during the pandemic, about which Ortiz questioned whether context conditions ideas. “Ideas must be judged according to the context they appear in, and if going through Covid is part of the cultural context, then it can’t be ignored. But if in five years that virus no longer exists, that will be a different story. So it’s rather odd to say we must isolate ideas from their context. Covid is part of the cultural context, so it must be part of the process of creating ideas.” Every industry in the world needs some level of self criticism, not just the ad industry. “So having advertising festivals is very important because they don’t just reward talent, they are also an exercise in self-criticism. They show us where we are and where we have to go. Festivals are very important for that.”
2020 nos convirtió en rastreadores de oportunidades: Juan Carlos Ortiz de DDB Latina
