PR / News

Darío Rodríguez Chavarría - Attended Creative LIAisons in 2015

26 October 2020

 

DARÍO RODRÍGUEZ CHAVARRÍA

Group Creative Director
Publicis Mexico

 

An Art Director who loves writing.

Part of the first Mexican team to win the gold medal at the Young Lions Competition in Cannes, in 2013.
 
Has a pineapple growing in his living room and doesn’t believe in wearing a watch.
 
 
 
 
          
                Attended Creative LIAisons in 2015

As a young, naive Mexican creative, looking at work from the great powerful countries in advertising like the USA, England, Brazil and Argentina was a little intimidating. Somehow, it seemed like the Mexican industry was too far behind and being able to do great work was just for the huge, famous, first world agencies.
 
Creative LIAisons was a great opportunity to understand that the struggle of creativity is richer, deeper, more intricate, more human than one can imagine and at the same time it´s exactly the same whether you’re in Mexico, Norway, China or any place on Earth. First class work can come from anywhere.
 
We all started from nothing.
We all had stayed up all night hundreds of times trying to solve a complex brief in a simple way.
We all need to learn how to tell a story.
We all have work we’re proud of.
We all have work we’re ashamed of.
We all look up to the big names like John Hegarty, Dan Wieden or Marcello Serpa.
We all have to work on banner ads.
We all have thought about quitting.
We all have enjoyed our wins more than enough to remain positive about this business.
We all doubt ourselves sometimes.
And we all are never done being creative.
 
Creative LIAisons was one of the milestones in my career that helped me understand that growing as a creative is not linear, and that somehow, creativity is teaching us a masterclass about equality. Whether you are Mexican, British or Vietnamese you’ll have to take 7 kicks in the balls every day. You’ll have to fall in love with writing, designing, editing, selling and starting over. You’ll have to learn to listen and then start over. And you´ll have to be a nerd about it. You’ll have to power through weird meetings, endless keynotes and ambiguous feedback. You’ll have to learn to separate work from home, as you are doing both in the same living room (die COVID, die already!). And I could go on and on writing until the end of the internet and that could only be the tip of the iceberg.
 
Good work is democratic (even Bill Bernbach was no one at the beginning), but the catch is: Are you willing to do what is necessary to get it? There are no shortcuts to first class work. But spoiler alert: no matter your skin color, no matter what your passport says or whether you believe in COVID-19 or not; if you commit, in the end it always, always, always pays off.
 
As Amir Kassaei, former Chief Creative Officer of DDB Worldwide once said, “Enjoy the pain”.
And as I tell myself every day, “start with the project you have right now”.