Felipe Serradourada Guimaraes’s life could have looked a hell of a lot different. He spent most of his childhood on the tennis court, training for hours each day to become a professional tennis player.
To his parents’ slight dismay, he changed the trajectory of his life when design, art and marketing became much more appealing. Advertising wasn’t on his radar as a career so much, although he was aware of it from the Mel Gibson movie What Women Want. Gibson’s character in the film was a creative director for Nike. “I had no idea what that was,” laughs Serradourada Guimaraes, but says it looked exciting.
When that seed was planted, it was around the time the young creative “fell in love” with skateboarding, which is a culture that goes hand in hand with graphic design. Serradourada Guimaraes would skate with friends all day in London, then come home in the evening and learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator. “Skating wasn’t going to pay my way,” he shares. “I ended up in Falmouth for an advertising degree for a year. That’s when I teamed up, understood advertising and was like, ‘Shit, OK, let’s do this.’”
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The young Serradourada Guimaraes and his creative partner at the time were given a directory of ad agencies, stopping at the letter B. They knocked on the door of BBH and managed to secure a placement. In those early days, they pitched an idea for Fifa 12. Barely a month into the job, they stood before a room of senior leaders and, when they finished, everyone turned to look at them. “That was the minute our career turned because, after that, they were like, ‘Oh, maybe these kids kind of have something in them.’”
After four years at the agency, he joined R/GA for a stint, but returned to BBH in 2018 and says the place feels like home, although he admits to being “spoiled” in the beginning, with the shop going through a real hot streak.
He recounts a story from one of his early Cannes Lions experiences, when he was still very junior, and shares his experiences with young teams. “It was our third year in the job. We’d come back from Cannes and we’d won four Lions. We went into the office of Nick Gill, who was the ECD at that time, and we were all feeling super pumped, on top of the world. We went in and Nick was like, ‘So, how are you guys?’ And we were like, ‘Well, great, obviously, we’ve just come back from Cannes.’ And he was like ‘Oh, really. How was that?’ And we were like, ‘What!? Surely he should know?’ And it was just because everyone else had won so much and we were just another team that won some stuff. That was the era of BBH, where you just made incredible work.”
In those early years, after four or five years of that incredible learning environment, things began to shift. Many of those brilliant creatives moved on to other agencies, and the level dipped. BBH went through a tough period, says Serradourada Guimaraes. “That brings it back to where I started. I do have a soft spot for it. It’s almost like I should leave it how I found it; that’s what has been driving me. I found BBH at the height of its creative game. When I leave this industry, I want to make sure I leave it there.”
Serradourada Guimaraes often talks about confidence – not in an egotistical way, but as a creative necessity. When asked what makes a great art director, he quotes music producer Rick Rubin from a Zane Lowe interview. “He doesn’t play any instruments, he can’t read music. And Zane asked, ‘Why do people come to you?’ And Rick said, ‘My confidence in my taste.’ I think art direction is being a tastemaker. It’s having enough references to understand and have really good taste.”
That sense of taste, he explains, comes from everything he has absorbed over the years: sport, skating, design and the confidence to back himself. “It influenced the confidence bit,” he says of his sporting background. “Sport is an interesting industry, because it’s probably the only space where people enter it hoping or knowing or believing that they can be one of the greats.”
That belief runs through BBH’s iconic mantra of zagging when the world zigs. As executive creative director, Serradourada Guimaraes has been tasked with keeping that spirit alive. However, his approach to leadership is less about telling people to be bold and more about permitting them to do so. “I want people to bring themselves to the work. The beauty of hiring incredible talent and diverse talent is that I want people to put themselves in the work. If you put yourself into the work, more likely the work will feel different.”
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He describes leadership as giving “license for people to do their thing” and uses a metaphor he often repeats to his teams. “The best work is where you can see loads and loads of fingerprints. So it has my fingerprints as a creative director and ECD, it has the team as the ones that originated, but also the director, the editor... everyone should be molding it and leaving their mark, otherwise the work’s probably not as great as it could have been.”
When he took over the creative department, Serradourada Guimaraes set a simple but ambitious goal: “I want to be the best out-of-home agency – not just in London, but ideally in the world.” That mission, he explains, gave the agency a clear creative north star and helped shape some of its most recognizable work for clients such as Burger King, Tesco and Häagen-Dazs. “I think it epitomizes everything that BBH should be. Great out-of-home is famous. It’s beautifully designed and crafted. It is the distillation of a great idea in its simplest form and it’s also really iconic.”
He points to the recent Tesco and Burger King campaigns as examples. “You need the iconic status of Tesco to be able to replace the letters with food. You need to be able to have the confidence in swagger and icon status of Burger King to be able to put such raw imagery on it. All the work looks different – Burger King to Tesco to Häagen-Dazs. It all has the same principles and the same ethos, but they come from different insights and have different tones.”
The Burger King work has been a defining moment for Serradourada Guimaraes and his team. Whether poking fun at McDonald’s with chargrilled lines in outdoor ads or sparking debate with “post-birth” imagery, the brand has become known for work that captures attention and conversation in equal measure.
“The responsibility is huge. It’s such a heavy crown to wear, no pun intended, because historically and globally, Burger King is such a creative powerhouse. Our client is trying to bring an identity to the UK Burger King. Still, it is also incredibly daunting, because its business problem is it’ll be outspent, media-wise, by McDonald’s tenfold.”
That challenge drives the creativity. “It’s not even coming from a place of vanity. We have a duty of care to make that brand famous and talkable with very little money. Therefore, the work must spark conversation. It has to be shared.”
He recalls the ‘Bundles’ campaign as proof of that. “It had the best delivery quarter it ever had because we needed to make a really hard-working delivery campaign that gave us reach, talkability and cut through. It’s incredibly exciting but very daunting.”
Tesco has been just as important to his creative story. “I’ve worked on it for nearly 10 years. Taking it on as a creative director was a big thing because the responsibility is huge, but also what it needs to do commercially is huge.”
That next creative step came with Tesco’s ‘Icons.’ “It was a culmination of everything, investment in the craft. We started by changing the photography across the brand, pushing how it shows food, and then moving it out of Tesco Food Love Stories into a white world that felt more iconic. Taking your logo off but still retaining a true retail ad that’s just pictures of food – that was pretty special.”
The reception proved it was worth the risk. “It had everything I wanted that brand to be. It was confident, iconic, about food and very well branded. It’s one of my favorite pieces of work I’ve ever made.”
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