I'm not from São Paulo, I'm from the northeast of Brazil. I had to leave home because the ad industry of Brazil mainly sits in São Paulo, in the southeast. I worked for an independent Brazilian agency that was very famous at the time. The first time that I put my name to an ad by that agency, I considered myself to be finally in advertising. And it was a campaign for a charity asking for donations to help the underprivileged people of Brazil.
It was a series of print ads trying to make people aware of the hardship that they were going through, and that you could help them out. So I wrote some lines. I also did the layouts, but there was a writer that wrote, mainly it was his responsibility to write the lines, but because I was ambidextrous in that I wrote and did the layouts, I wrote one or two headlines.
I made horrible mistakes in printing the campaign at the wrong time. It was my first time in a big agency. I didn't know how the printers worked, and I arrived late to print the campaign. And my boss was furious with me because it took forever for me to get the presentation mounted. As he came back he said, 'everything is going wrong, and it's your fault'. He said, 'the one thing that saves you today is that the headline he likes the most is the one you wrote'. So I was saved by the gong.