Fernando Musa leads something of a double life. He is co-founder and chairman of the ad network David, which was “born from the legacy of David Ogilvy, the pioneer of modern advertising” and has six offices across the US, South America and Europe. But he is also CEO at Ogilvy Brazil. This seems like a lot of jobs for one man to manage, but he wears the situation surprisingly lightly.

“I love it,” he says of having both jobs. “People keep asking me why I do it but I love it. Seeing and living both sides gives me more cards to play and makes me smarter to understand different points of view…. This is a tool that gives me more references to play better, simple as that.”

And he seems able to juggle both while also having a personal life. “I still have time for my kids, otherwise it won’t work,” he continues. “Because it’s about people and if you don’t have the whole experience of being a person, you cannot do good work. So you have to have time to play.”

If you’re left feeling a bit lazy reading about this, you’re not alone. Yet there is a logic to Musa’s point about the different perspectives that his two jobs bring. While both David and Ogilvy Brazil are part of the WPP network, they have distinctly different styles.

David is the young upstart of the two, of course. Now 11 years old, it has built a reputation for producing unexpected, smart and often irreverent work. Its back catalogue includes many campaigns for Burger King (including the much-discussed Moldy Whopper campaign, and recently the Bald Thru, a campaign that awarded balding Brazilians with a free burger) as well as Netflix, Coca-Cola, Dove, Supercell, HSBC and many more.

Its Madrid office enjoyed Cannes Lions success this year for an OOH campaign for JC Decaux, which picked up coveted Grand Prix awards in both Titanium and Creative B2B. Titled Meet Marina Prieto, the campaign featured a series of images of an anonymous grandmother shown across unbooked media sites on the Madrid subway, causing intrigue for commuters and raising awareness of the power of posters. It resulted in the outdoor advertiser signing up 180 new brands.

Musa sees this phase of David’s development as it becoming a “mature brand”. “Five, seven years ago, people were like ‘What is David?’,” he says. “Now it’s clear that we are one of the top players in the creative industry. We are like the teenagers, you know, going out a little bit alone. I think we are exactly in that phase. It is good, but this is exactly that moment where you are about to decide what you’re going to be in the future.”

He sees part of this future planning as being a case of reconciling what they once wanted the network to be with how it has come to be perceived. “When we founded it 11 years ago, we never knew how this is going to be,” he explains. “We imagined that it could be this, or that, but while you are living and doing this you start to become not exactly what you planned, but what people think you are. And then you’ve got to make a [choice] between your idea of planning and how they see you.”

At the heart of the network are the people, according to Musa, who have given the network a strong sense of culture. “We have the good part of being part of a group [at WPP], but also, when clients come to us, they feel the independent way of doing things. The talent is fresh. The people really care about the work. Even though we’re part of something bigger, we act fresh, and clients feel that.

This industry used to be a place where you’d find people who were alternative. There’s too many people now that fit perfectly into something. I prefer not to fit

“We are starting to build stories,” he continues. “We’ve known each other for many, many years. Some of the people have worked with me 15 years ago at Ogilvy, some others have worked with Pancho [Cassis, global CCO] in the past. I know it’s a little cheesy to say you’re like a family, but we really know each other. We care about each other, it’s much more personal. We like each other and the work reflects that.”

He also stresses that the larger network is bigger than the individual offices: “You have the feeling of being part of something big. The idea of David comes first, then comes the local office.”

Speaking of the wider advertising industry, he expresses concern that it has become “too corporate”. “This industry used to be a place where you’d find people who were alternative, who did not fit in everything,” he says. “There’s too many people now that fit perfectly into something. I prefer not to fit.”

This is in part caused by a kind of echo chamber effect that can build up when people become “self-centred” within companies and start to believe that “the world is only what you live around you”, he explains. In response to this he hopes that David will maintain its element of youthful irreverence and keep “poking and provoking and seeing the world from a different kind of perspective”.

“I think the [question is] how to grow up without losing the fun, and this youth-like dreaming for life – not becoming cynical about what we do…. We care about the work, and we want to keep doing better. If you ask me the philosophy [of David], we like to work in advertising, we like to use creativity to solve problems.

“We might change lives in that, we might change some stories of something. Sometimes we might change laws or the way of doing things through ideas, through advertising, through creativity. We have a bunch of people that still believe it.”

It is clear again here how Musa’s double life as a leader of two different agencies can help him grow the “empathy” that he sees as vital for the creation of compelling and engaging advertising campaigns. That, and remembering to look around you and see the world as your audience sees it.

“Our work is all about people,” he concludes. “Sometimes I just watch people and see their behaviour, because it’s all around. I tend to like more of these kinds of ideas than any other, because if it happens in life, you don’t have to explain. You go to your family outside of the industry bubble, and people say ‘wow, I got it’. Of course you got it, you do that shit.”

davidtheagency.com