As Brazil is celebrated at Cannes, what can we learn about recognizing regional creativity?

In bringing together an international panel from The Drum Network, we approached the topic of creative cultural identity from six different perspectives, with some experts speaking on the matter as expats with a new perspective, now living and working in another country, others working in their country of birth and, in one case, a panellist speaks as someone displaced after his home country was invaded.

Maira Genovese is a Brazilian who left her home country 20 years ago to come to England, without speaking English, before founding her own integrated marketing agency, MG Empower, in 2017, which is now global.

Reflecting on Brazil’s status at this year’s Cannes, Genovese says: “Brazil has shown good consistency in the past and now there are so many international brands that are looking to Brazil for inspiration, even through product development.”

Beauty brand Sol de Janeiro is a good example of this, according to Genovese, who points out the ‘January Sun’ brand name is written in Portuguese, “but it was born in New York and celebrates the diversity of Brazilian people.”

She also credits the late Washington Olivetto with driving the Brazilian advertising industry forward. He was, she says, “a global pioneer who added music and dance and sensitivity and sensuality into campaigns, into TV, into radio”.

Like many of our panellists, Genovese spoke about the importance of “understanding the culture” for anyone wanting to work within a country they’re not familiar with and how it presents opportunity. “H&M, for example, is going to be huge in Brazil. It is launching 10 stores in Sau Paulo and then Brasilia… I was speaking with them recently and I said, ‘If you go to Brazil without understanding the country, the people or the culture and are entering Brazil with the same approach that you do internationally, you’re not going to succeed,’” says Genovese.

ShowHeroes Group’s regional director for Hispanic LATAM, Raquel Baranda, spoke in detail on the importance of local knowledge. The company works in contextual video and CTV advertising solutions.

“There is a global point of view that Latin American countries are one, but you’re talking about 20 countries with 20 cultures and if you include the Caribbean areas, it’s 33.

“It’s risky when you start looking at how the digital industries can be focused on metrics and KPI’s,” says Baranda, a Spanish national who has commissioned market research focused on creative rather than other metrics to better understand how to connect to brands with audiences across different regions.

“We need to connect technology solutions we have right now in digital advertising to spotlight the importance of creativity, to connect people while adapting to different cultures,” says Baranda, who adds: “Just don’t think that because you have something in Spanish it will work in Mexico and Chile. It will fail.”

It should be said – so this doesn’t sound wholly patronizing – that some of the panellists who focused on their adopted or birth countries are speaking about a globally recognized creative scene. We can’t, for example, pretend that the German advertising industry isn’t well known.

Indeed, if you look at The Drum’s World Creative Rankings 2025, you can see that the World’s most awarded agencies are from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and France.

Serviceplan Berlin managing director Jeannette Bohné was born in Germany and is, she says, “half Spanish.” She recently judged Cannes Lions’ social and influencer category.

Germany “definitely gets enough of the spotlight, but interestingly, if you look deep down enough in the credits to see who is doing the best work in Germany, often it’s an international team and I think a lot of agencies in Germany have understood that for bigger brands wanting to reach a global audience you need to build an international team, so you can start to speak a language that’s not just understood in your market”.

In terms of what characterizes German creativity, she says it is ‘seriousness’ and although she is being light-hearted, she means it. “I think German creativity is kind of an odd thing, because usually when we compare, for example, Brazilian or English advertising with German, they set out to entertain but in Germany the idea is to give information and find a way to turn that in to something you still like watching, sometimes so you don’t even notice that you’re being educated”.

With this in mind, German advertising takes craft very seriously and is on “more of a blue and grey scale than bright green or pink,” she says.

Some agencies may be able to export their cultural identity or at least an essence of it. “It’s an interesting one because [working overseas] you have to filter your Germanness out and then softly infuse it back in,” says Bohné, who is also acutely aware of local cultural nuance, having worked in the UK and on various international campaigns.

“If you are trying to advertise somewhere new, I would honestly watch as much of their TV as possible to understand what it’s really like there,” she says.

Thinking broadly, with an international team, having an essence but not an overbearing cultural identity as an agency is Bohné’s philosophy. “I think a super German campaign from Germany, overseas, would be a really hard sell.”

Bohné, who used to work for Amazon, says sometimes large companies can have a tendency to merge regions based on market maturity. “If your market is fairly new, let’s say like Turkey and South Africa, where if people are unaware of your brand, maybe you can work with the same creative, but when two cultures are so different, it’s not always the smartest move.”

Some regions really do need more attention, particularly those that are well-positioned geographically or culturally to tell particular kinds of stories.

The Benelux region (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) and specifically Belgium is such an example, says Jérémy Pacome, a contextual advertising specialist and GumGum’s commercial director for international, EMEA and Benelux, who is French but lives and works in the Netherlands.

“If we look at Belgium, it has two cultures within one country, with the north speaking Flemish and the south speaking French. They don’t feel French or Dutch. They’re Belgian people,” says Pacome, who makes the point that work created within the country, for Belgians, has to resonate with both cultures, while working within meagre budgets.

With major brands like Nike and Adidas working with Netherlands-based agencies, Pacome says the Netherlands used to not be recognized for its creative clout, but the same can be levelled at Belgium today, which is “still a bit overlooked.”

However, “if a campaign has been successful in Belgium,” Pacome reasons, “it shows these agencies can already work across two languages and cultures,” which should help to build confidence in clients that Belgian agencies can work well when approaching other regions.

Strategic marketing agency GPJ’s SVP and head of creative for EMEA, Jorge Narvaez, is Colombian and has worked all over the world, including the US, Spain and now London, where he looks after a team of 120 designers working on global projects. His career has given him a unique perspective on cultural difference in creativity around the world.

“Now I have a huge team of designers from Europe, the Middle East and America and while I used to work in advertising, now I’m in experiences,” Narvaez says. Though he agrees that understanding local cultural nuance is important when working in other countries, he says: “Always the most important thing is how the work makes you feel, then beyond this it’s the cultural texture and difference that makes it rich.”

His take on different markets include the importance of “being hospitable in the Middle East where people want to embrace you,” while in India it’s about “thinking about differing levels of education,” in the UK it is about “being funny” and in the US it is all “in your face.”

Even from the perspective of commissioning work, Narvaez thinks it’s important to think about how creative work differs around the world. While he knows he’s generalizing, he makes the point that it can be useful to approach different regions when you’re looking for a particular type of work. “If I want clean graphic design, I’ll go to Germany. For pattern and color, India or Africa,” he says.

EVP of creative content at Locaria, Misha Pimenov, is Ukrainian and had to flee his home country after it was invaded in 2022, so now lives and works in Portugal.

“There is still a big team in Ukraine,” says Pimenov, who is also reflecting on Ukraine’s cultural identity as it was put to him that Ukrainian creatives might be celebrating their national identity in their work more than ever.

“I would summarize that identity as freedom and then you can extrapolate that as freedom of creativity, choice, expressing yourself. There is even a cultural phenomenon in the way our president dresses,” he says.

On an international level, Pimenov also contributed to the conversation around understanding local markets and added: “While cultural relevance is very important these days, there will often be a centralized framework and centralized clients, tapping into local markets. As a company, we’ll often work with local brand teams, which might produce their own content in line with an overarching idea.”

It all comes down to knowing local markets through experience or inside knowledge. “If you’re working in Romania, you can’t use a Taylor Swift track, you need a rock band, or in Poland, a Polish comedian is going to work better than a worldwide celebrity.”