Hagall Muniz is Creative Director of MullenLowe MENA (Dubai, UAE)
Tomilli: Why are advertising festivals so important for agencies?
Because the festivals recognize ideas that will stand out and push the market forward in the creative/performance field.
More than this, festivals motivate employees to keep engaged over the usual everyday work or in the best cases, makes every day an opportunity to push the client to dare more and stand out together with you.
Besides awards, are there other ways to build a reputation in this industry?
Being honest with your colleagues is by far the best way to achieve it. They are the people who stay with you most of your time, the person you are on a daily basis talks much louder than the persona you want to be perceived. The best personal marketing is been true with yourself and respectful with others.
Find a balance between creative ideas that will perform well with the client’s business and create a legacy for yourself is the cherry on top that if you will be able to manage reputation will come certainly.
And from the point of view of creative direction, how does a creative director build a reputation?
Creative leadership is all, but reputation is consequence never the goal.
It’s a great intersection between being half creative and half business-related. The balance will come from these both worlds, that under your support, your creative team and the account management will feel empowered, consequentially the client will feel the vibe the agency has from your leadership.
How do you put together an ideal creative team?
Blind trust on the people of everyday technical work and hiring people that are better than you for the Tier one briefings.
To make it happens under the accounts we lead, we create a structure with three-layer were the base we call Speed/Technical owning the responsibility to dispatch and adapt the final work. The second is Craft, they have the time and expertise to develop the everyday requests with deep thoughts and references.
The main role we call Ideation, this team will have skills preferably better than ours, from the leadership, in order to guarantee diverse work from the approach and execution perspective. We love when they bring us problems that we have no idea how to solve, but that in the end, even very tired we were glad to know we made happen.
Is the portfolio everything for any selection?
Not at all, we can face it as a profile picture and bio on a Match app, to build. It’s a great first impression, but not all.
In order to produce great work and have a good work environment, we need to have many other boxes checked.
Recommendations from the market, not just the classic boring letters, but your fame on the market as well the personality and phase of the career you are now. How does it will combine with the current agency moment?
Sometimes we will need you just next year, or your profile would be great to have with another account. We are all humans, we can’t just be judge by some thumbs, prints, videos, and a witty bio copy. How you will face and deal with the team on a daily basis counts much more than what you will do in the end.
If someone presented you with their portfolio, how would they win you over to be hired?
Each case will have a different answer. The need of the agency, the skills I will be focused on that vacancy, how planned or urgent we should fill the gap, all combined will compile being the answer.
There is no formula, be yourself, show your best work, try your best, be honest and if it belongs to you will be yours.