The Argentine advertisement industry seems to be accomplishing a similarly herculean task: in international festivals, Argentina shows a performance that is better than the one of countries with a hundred times more investment
Source: Clarín (widest circulation Argentine newspaper) September 2008.
By Sebastián Campanario
Writer Eduardo Galeano often speaks of a "miracle" when he refers to the fact that Uruguay, a country with the population of single Buenos Aires neighborhood, has won two World Soccer Championships and two Olympic tournaments in the same discipline.
Saving the distances, the Argentine advertisement industry seems to be accomplishing a similarly herculean task: in international festivals, Argentina shows a performance that is better than the one of countries with a hundred times more investment. Local branches of ad agencies receive more awards than their head offices located in the USA. And in good proportion, that also helps compensate the lower comparative revenue when compared with offices in Colombia or Puerto Rico.
A good way to measure the degree of “creative efficiency” is considering the performance of local ad agencies and taking the ratio to the money spent in advertising. That is what DraftFCB Argentina did.
For that task, the main source of data was the most prestigious of the creativity surveys, the Gunn Report. This is a ranking created by the British journalist Donald Gunn, which considers the world's most important advertisement festivals, weighing more heavily those that are more prestigious or more difficult to get awards from. Argentina was the third most awarded country in the last three years and was always in the top six in the last five. The USA is historically the most awarded country, losing the top spot only once to Britain.
"Part of that leadership is explained just by a matter of scale. More money is spent and more campaigns are launched in the USA than anywhere else in the world" explains Pablo Poncini, President of DraftFCB.
However, when you look at the "creative efficiency" — a score in the Gunn Report divided by hundreds of millions of US dollars spent in publicity — Argentina easily sits at the top of the ranking, doubling the performance of the third best, Sweden. This indicates that in Argentina, the number of campaigns that receive awards relative to the total number of campaigns launched is higher than anywhere else.
The USA, first in the Gunn Report ranking, and in the gross investment ranking, appears in the 20th place in this creative efficiency ranking. Many of the highest spenders in the world, such as Britain, China and Japan, don't even appear in the compiled creative efficiency ranking, but several Latin American countries do, such as Argentina in the first place, Chile in the fifth and Brazil in the tenth. South East Asia also looks to be a hotspot for creative efficiency, with Singapore in the second place and Thailand in the fourth.
"The very high skill level in Argentine advertisement industry is mismatched with the size of their market. That is why agencies here look beyond the borders and eventually succeed even in countries that are competitive powerhouses" remarks Mr. Poncini.
In the case of DraftFCB itself, their bet is increasing the revenues from US and European clients. This year the local branch outperformed its US branch in the Cannes festival while working with only a 5% of the personnel and 1% of gross income of the latter.
