As numerous media outlets in South America consistently report, star advertiser Washington Olivetto has died at the age of 73. In his homeland he was considered an absolute superstar, and his advertising even made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
In 1986, Olivetto founded the agency W/Brasil, which was one of the top addresses in the country for over two decades and can claim to have won more than a thousand creative awards. In 2010 the agency was taken over by McCann and renamed W/McCann. Olivetto worked as Chief Creative Officer and Chairman of McCann Worldgroup until 2018 and temporarily lived in London.
The highly decorated advertiser made a name for himself not only in Brazil and Great Britain. In the 80s he worked for a while at the creative company GGK, which was also very popular in Germany at the time. His incomparable career began very early: at the age of 19, he wrote a commercial that was awarded a bronze lion at the Cannes advertising festival. At the age of 22 he won his first Gold Lion – numerous more were to follow.
To this day, Olivetto is considered one of the most awarded advertisers of all time. At the height of his career, a restaurant in São Paulo named a dish after him, and in 2011 the Brazilian Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor. He made it into the Guinness Book of Records with the longest-running campaign of all time for the cleaning brand Bombril with the famous brand mascot, the Bombril Boy. However, his great fame also had a dark side: in 2001, Olivetto was kidnapped and spent 53 days in captivity.
In 2007, at the invitation of the German ADC and the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, Olivetto presented the best Brazilian advertising creations at an event in Berlin. In an interview at the time, he explained that Brazilian advertising and Brazilian football had risen to the top of the world with the same recipe for success: simplicity. “If you watch Brazilian footballers on the field, it looks very complicated and artistic. But the players can only do that because they have previously looked for the most elegant and easiest movements for themselves and then implement them with as much fun as possible. The same thing Recipe also works for advertising creation.”
