My Story - Chapter 2: The chicken’s poop, the blog and the advertising world

On the previous post I mentioned how things got complicated financially in my family after my father was fired. That was actually the main reason why I had to leave private school and go to public school. Until then I thought things couldn’t get any worse, but I was wrong. My dad, a salesman, got a job as a sales representative at a construction materials company and his salary was based on commission. Sales weren’t going well and our apartment monthly fee was beginning to be a financial burden to us. My dad owned a really simple house in a small town called São Lourenço da Serra, 30 minutes away from the city of São Paulo. With approximately 15 thousand population, that small town was where my grandma, uncles and aunties lived and ended up becoming our home as well in 2004, when we moved there. The small house had only one bedroom and it was literally in the middle of nowhere.

Then another challenging moment in my life began. I had to go to a new school again and fit into an even more different reality. This time I was known at the school as the ‘boy from the city’. The house, the school, the distance from friends left me shaken, but at least I had my video game, right? Wrong! At the peak of my 14 years old, I was 'invited' to work at my uncles' store: Casa Agrícola Delfino.

Basically I was a ‘do everything’ at the store. I interacted with customers, weighed bird food, carried dog food bags of 33 - 66 pounds on my back (corn and wheat flour weighed 88 - 110 pounds, very heavy and could cause me serious health problems if I carried them, so my uncles prohibited me to do that). In addition, I used to take care of the seedlings, received and checked the products that arrived from suppliers, helped to load the truck and make deliveries, launched invoices into the store management system, answered phone calls and so on. Oh, I forgot to mention that I also picked up coffee and cake / bread from my grandma's house and took it to my uncles at the store.

But of all these tasks, the two that most impacted me were cleaning the chickens’ poop and giving shots to the sick chicks. The chicken and roosters were kept in cages and daily we had to clean the tray with a broom shovel and throw it in a bag, followed by spreading new straw on the trays. When the chickens or roosters got a cold (yes they do get cold and even have a runny nose), I went down with Jairo, one of the store employees, and we took one by one, removed the feathers located in the chest area and applied the shots. Some of the chickens were more difficult to catch. It was a little scary, but it was fun. Another remarkable moment was when I went out with ‘White Hair’ (his nickname) to make deliveries by truck. He was super funny and crazy. One day, in one of the deliveries, he let me drive the truck while sleeping in the passenger seat. He only asked for one thing: "don't tell your uncles". For about 10 minutes I drove on the dirt roads of some isolated neighborhoods in São Lourenço da Serra.

Despite gaining a lot of experience, I also earned a small salary. At the beginning it was 100 Reais per month, which after 1 year became 170 Reais. With this small income I was able to help my parents at home and buy my long-awaited first electric guitar, as well as investing in new clothes and sneakers. I consider this experience of working at Casa Agrícola Delfino as the beginning of my professional career. This experience was the spark of the development of several attributes such as responsibility, resilience, organization, customer and co-workers relationship and many other attributes.

Around 2016, my brother, who was living in Rio Grande do Sul, returned to São Paulo and started to live with us. As I mentioned in the previous post, he was web developer and worked for a couple of months at a big bank in Brazil, however when he delved deeper into the universe of advertising he got a new job at an advertising agency. Since the distance was an obstacle, he moved to our apartment in São Paulo, while I continued in São Lourenço da Serra. My brother loved (and still loves) reading. He left some books about advertising at home and one day I decided to pick up one to read. The book was called something like ‘That’s what Advertising is about!’, by author Zeca Martins. The book had an orange cover with blue details and looked super cool! The author was a copywriter and the way the book was written managed to captivate a 14 year old boy. The examples were super interesting and I, who never read much, devoured the book. I read it over and over and just loved it. With that, I started reading more about the advertising world (including another book by the same author called Copywriting) and getting more and more interested in the subject. I spent hours on the internet looking for creative campaigns, bookmarking links and seeking for more and more learning. As a thank you, I decided to send an email to Zeca Martins without much expectations of receiving a response. To my surprise he not only answered my email but posted the reply on his blog. I was extremely happy and it was at that moment that I got to know the universe of blogs. And that would change my life forever.

After that moment I started to research and find several advertising blogs in Brazil and worldwide. That's when I thought: why don't I create a blog too?

The cool thing is that I was able to put into practice all my previous experience with design and programming. I created a blog on Blogspot, made a logo, edited the layout of the site using HTML and thus was born By The Way, my advertising blog. The proposal was simple: I looked for campaigns that I thought were super cool and posted them on my blog along with a brief explanation and analysis. Later on I got into writing slightly larger texts with thoughts about the universe of advertising. When the blog already had a fair amount of content, I found that a common practice among bloggers was to exchange links. If your blog is good, I post your link on mine and you post mine on yours. I remember that I even tried to contact the largest advertising blog in Brazil, but I didn't get a response. At least I tried. Perhaps my blog wasn’t that good. :)

Back in that time, the golden age of the blogosphere was just getting started. And it was a magical moment for me. I started to make friends with other bloggers and had the opportunity to meet some in person and even do projects with them. But there was one blogger in particular who was the key to everything, and his name was Jonathan Benarrós, from the AdMe blog. Jonathan worked at the Riot agency, an agency specializing in social media marketing. Jonathan saw the work I did on By The Way and asked me if I was interested in working at Riot. In order to do that, I would need to do some kind of a challenge where I would have to choose a brand and put together a business case of how it could be promoted creatively and effectively via social networks. I accepted the challenge and started preparing the case. I had help from my brother as a consultant, but I literally put all my acquired knowledge to the test (even if that wasn't much) to create something consistent and that would get the agency's attention. And it did!

I was called for an interview in a building at Alameda Santos, Avenida Paulista. I was 17, dressed up, and I went to the interview with my dad who left me at the reception of the building and waited patiently for me until it was over. I did the interview with the executive director, Daniela Oliveira, who asked me questions about my experience with blogs and advertising. That was my first formal job interview and I don't remember exactly how it went, but I remember that I was calm and confident about the knowledge I had and how I could collaborate with the agency. It worked! I got a job offer by email and I couldn't contain my joy. Next step: packing and going to live with my brother in São Paulo.

The only constant thing in our life is change. When I got the job in São Paulo, I had to go through a whole life change and adaptation process again. I had to go to a new school again and this time I went to a very, very tough public school. I would have to study in the evenings and the students were, how can I put this, very heavy. Luckily, I had only 6 months for graduation, it was more a matter of holding on until it was over.

As I was 17 at the time and haven’t even started college yet so I couldn't be hired as an intern like most of the agency's content employees. The agency wasn’t very big (they all fit on a small floor) and ended up hiring me with a formal contract as a content analyst. I was happy and super grateful that they did this for me. I still remember how my co-workers used to ask me at the end of the day when I was leaving to go to school: “So, what class do you have today? Math? History? Chemistry?". If you think about it, that was the reality.

I was able to handle the job responsibilities at the agency well. Basically the job was to promote brands and campaigns via social networks (Orkut, online forums, blogs, etc.). We also did quantitative and qualitative weekly reports to send to the client. In some moments we also participated in campaign development for the social and digital environment.

Paulista Avenue, crowded bus every day, one of the worst public schools in the region, first job at a real agency, 17 years old. It was a lot to take on and I remember thinking about giving up several times. Conversations with my family helped me to persevere and keep fighting. I'm glad I continued. And I was ready for more challenges to come.

You must be wondering what happened to my blog. Eventually it grew and after a few months it received a complete redesign of its name, layout and even got a .com.br domain. It evolved into ‘Falando Nisso’ (Portuguese for By The Way), and more and more users were reading it every day. I was even getting famous in the blogosphere (which was not a big deal, but it was cool for me at the time). I made friends with famous bloggers who worked at the agency and they helped me with many tips and increased visibility. Everything was going great, but I was just getting started and I still had a lot to do.

Following the model of the previous post, here is a list of what I learned from this period of my life:

• Always be curious! This is an attribute that we need to take for life. Sometimes it is out of curiosity that a passion or opportunity is born. My curiosity to read my brother's books made me totally change the course of my life.

• See opportunity in each and every challenge. My first job at my uncles' store was certainly not the dream job. However, I gave my best and learned the most from the experience. As much as your current job is not ideal, take this opportunity to do two things: 1. develop attributes that only you could learn from it and 2. make an extra effort and work in parallel on a project or action that will take you towards what you really want.

• Never be intimidated by getting in touch with people you admire or are interested to meet. Even if they eventually end up not responding or responding superficially, you may be surprised at the responses you get and the opportunities they can generate.

• Many people ask me how I learned English. I always answer: playing video games and surfing the internet. Navigating international blogs / websites and reading about campaigns from other countries helped me a lot at that time to develop my English skills.

• It may be a cliché, but that doesn't mean it's not important: Don't give up! Difficulties make us develop attributes that we cannot see at the moment. Trust and count on the help of people around you who love and support you to find comfort and strength in difficult times.

Special thanks to some people who played a very important role in this phase of my life: My uncles, Cabelo Branco, Jairo, Zeca Martins, Jonathan Benarrós, Daniela Oliveira, Luiz Stamboni, Ian Black and Natália Luciano.