by Rea Gierran
MANILA – Asterio Gutierrez wrapped up adobo-Tambuli Asia-Pacific conference with his bare-bones presentation, talking about a few good men.
First on the list was Eric Cruz, a Filipino American creative who stared a lab in Tokyo. “Everyone started creating their own lab and I would daresay, he’s one the very few people who pulled it off,” Gutierrez said. As the lab got more and more famous, phone calls from young creatives dying to work with him deluged. “He could’ve abused their desire to work, but he didn’t. He made sure they get paid. He took a lot of them in and put them under his wings,” he said.
It was in an advertising festival in Malaysia where Cruz and Gutierrez’s paths crossed. “I told him, I’ve been dying to work for him, and then he said, do it, come to Kuala Lumpur, and so I did. It opened a lot of doors for me, so when I left, I told him, I hope to pay him back. He told me to just pay it forward.”
And pay forward Gutierrez did when he met Japanese creative, Rei Inamoto. He was surprised when he received a Google Hangout invitation from the former Global CCO of AKQA Worldwide, an agency many consider as the premier digital network. “He asked me which office I would be interested in, and so I joined the office in Shanghai.” During that time, Gutierrez was running a team of ten people whom he connects with regularly via Skype. He calls it, ‘Inspiration Sessions’. “It was born out of my first trip to Adfest, an Asia-Pacific advertising festival in Thailand where I was seeing in flesh all the names of the people I use to see in the list of winning campaign credits only. I promised myself that I’m going to come back, and I’m going to make sure I will earn more than five minutes with them.”
Gutierrez would send out emails to creative heads, asking them to train his team. Inamoto was one of the firsts to accept Gutierrez’s invite. “It was one of the most inspiring sessions ever. We’ve learned that you can be tough, but not rough. You can be absolutely demanding without being a d***.”
When Gutierrez left the agency, Inamoto was kind enough to ask him if there’s an office he might be interested to work in and he said, “Maybe instead you can help my art director move to another office. My art director is now in Oregon, living an awesome life.”
The third man is an English creative, Sir John Hegarty, Chief Creative Officer of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Going back to Gutierrez’s Inspiration Sessions, he wanted the best of the best for his team. “Sir Hegarty spent a whole hour with my team. He toured them in his office, which is absolutely generous and humble, knowing that a founder and head creative is speaking to a random group of ten people from China and from a rival network. Until now I’m still overwhelmed on how humble he is,” Gutierrez explained.
Gutierrez said that Eric Cruz, Rei Inamoto and Sir John Hegarty are three of the finest spirits he has ever met, but interestingly, they’re also the most demanding. “I remember reviewing ideas with them. They would always ask what’s the meaningful human element of this. They demanded goodness with equal measure of greatness. These three people have done so much good work, which are still around. It is through meeting with them that I’ve learned these lessons: creating is inherently an act of good, doing good takes great, and it takes such generosity of spirit to do good.”
