Rafa Antón, Creative Global Director of LLYC and founding partner of China starts from LlyC, has received recognition of the professional career granted by the jurors of the Effective Awards, composed of 290 professionals who have been sworn in any of the editions of these awards.

Rafa Antón, who was already a finalist last year, has been valued as an essential figure in contemporary Spanish advertising. They highlight their entrepreneurial spirit, their sustained ability to adapt to industry changes and their work by creating unforgettable communication platforms with tangible results in the business.

The trajectory of Rafa Antón has been forged at the Leo Burnett agency, of which he became a creative head, and in China -now part of Llyc -which he founded in 2010. He has worked for clients such as Coca Cola, Levi’s or Adolfo Domínguez, a brand to which he has helped recover his relevance in the market with emblematic campaigns centered on the timely Term

He collected the prize excited and reflected on his career and the people who, over the years, have promoted it in different ways, in a speech that moved those present. He did it by claiming the importance of opportunities, of the confidence of his teachers, classmates, partners and clients. And he did so remembering the value of creativity, sensitivity, beauty or perseverance.

Has had the generosity of sharing it with Reason.WHY And we offer you complete below:

“I would like to thank you for giving me the tremendous honor of this award to the trajectory, and to receive it next to two of the professionals who best embody the strategy and daring, pillars in the career of any advertising.

Few have given so much visibility within the brands to the importance of understanding their essence as you, Álex. (Refers to Álex Pallete, founder of Picnic)

And there are already many years you have been, Ana, (Ana Robledo, Pikolin Marketing Director) Wasteing courage when telling those truths to the world. Congratulations to both of them, and to the other three finalists, for everything you have achieved and for what I am sure you have to achieve.

Thanks also for the opportunity to stop, look for the rearview mirror and try to understand what a recognition like this means.

Therefore, thinking about someone who is starting their way and looking for some learning in all this, I have dared to make a list of some of the necessary things to have a trajectory exactly like mine.

To begin with, it takes someone who, among other minor issues such as giving birth, has the intuition that advertising is a place weird enough for a child who also thinks we can fit there and be happy. Accustomed to overanizing everything, there is no day that I am not happy to have followed his advice without thinking.

Someone is needed who does not laugh when you see you entering your office of Torre Picasso with 20 years and a simple carbon drawing in the folder, and that makes a hole in accounts while convincing them that they let you plant your hands in an ad.

Masters are needed to teach you the trade: almost everything I know I learned it on that floor 28. It is then that it is necessary to have a boss to a sailor of stories of stories crazy enough to give you the controls of the creative department when you are still half cook, but sane enough as to know that an agency in which one does not laugh, wants and fun every day is not an advertising agency, it is something else.

You may need a good secretary, or secretary. The one I had was something else. It was the perspective, the sense and love of a second mother and was called pink. Having someone like that in your beginnings prevents you from becoming a moron too soon when things start going well.

You will need competitors who will soon call friends, or family. They need because they are brighter than you, more irreverent than you, more innovative, spontaneous and bold than you. They will make you better from day one and, over time, they will teach you that nothing happens because it is not the best if you hug your own way of being different in this profession.

And it is necessary, much missing, a handful of brave customers who want to really sell beer, hamburgers, current accounts or skirts. All the good we do is your fault. There is no more secret.

And one day a stage ends. And that day you need two partners who take away the vertigo of mounting your own agency. It takes a first client that creates in you blindly and entrusts you with your brand the same day you are opening it. And, to start working, you may need a creative young man with a soul of old to leave everything to follow you. Seeing him grow and fly on his own has been another gifts on this trip.

And if it is you who wants to continue growing, you need new partners. Partners of a planet other than yours and that, in this complex, changing, more arid world, they love you close because ideas and emotions cannot be completely out of that future.

Many things are needed. Popitre companions who are now dispatch. A boss who encourages you to make mistakes. Colleagues who give you loyalty and advice when things twist – and will twist. A team that knows how to win and, above all, lose for the right reasons. Collaborators capable of doing miracles with less and less, something that we must change.

But, above all, it is needed the best woman in the world by your side during all these years, supporting you and accepting that this couple is, in reality, a trio to which too many days invite advertising.

It is an incomplete list of people without whom my trajectory would not be what is, and that is why I pick up this award in all of them.
A trajectory in which I am the protagonist, but in which the important thing is the secondary ones. And we are all the secondary ones of someone’s trajectory: let’s try to be the best.

I also want to talk about efficiency and, to set an example, I will be shorter.

This recognition makes me very happy, although I am surprised that I get precisely here, in the house of efficacy, when I have a half -life trying to work in favor of the useless, what does not work, of all that seems that it does not translate immediately in profitability. But it is not so.

In times of ultra efficiency, saturation and reading in diagonal, it is the apparently useless what gives us true meaning as individuals and as a society. And the brands are part of that society.

We have an individual responsibility as great as the speaker that we handle daily; A speaker that often embruces, but also serves for subtlety, irony or poetry.

Respect people’s intelligence, sensitivity and time; Resisting the minimum common denominator that always leads to mediocrity and landscape is also our task.

The topic says we don’t save lives and share it. I can’t be clearer that we dedicate ourselves to one thing: sell. But I also believe that, like doctors, we have our own hypocratic oath, a much more humble that forces us to try to contribute some beauty to the world with our campaigns. Or, at least, not to leave it uglier than we find.

And I end.
This is a prize that overwhelms, but I recognize that it has to do with something that I know I have: perseverance.
Or, to be better understood, be a heavy balls as you know that you have once worked with me.

Insisting, the insistence, is the only way to build the trajectory of a brand while yours is built. It is uncomfortable, yes, but almost all the joys that advertising has given me have to do with her. That’s why I want to say goodbye blatantly the words that the dying protagonist of ‘All That Jazz’ let out his wife on the way to the operating room.

“If my trajectory ends here, sorry for the bad life I have given you. And if you go ahead, sorry for the bad life I am going to give you.”

Thanks a lot.
You have made me very happy. “

–

The jurors of the Effective Awards has recognized Cupra in the advertising career section of a brand. For her part, Adriana Domínguez, executive president of Adolfo Domínguez, has been chosen as the best promoter of marketing. And Sergio García, strategy director in PS21, has taken the Sub 41 Effective Award.
Rafa Antón shared a nomination with Ana Robledo, director of Marketing and Communication at Pikolin, and Álex Pallete, founder and director of Strategy at Picnic.