Tátil’s Ricardo Bezerra calls for global agencies built from the Global South

Ricardo Bezerra, global chief creative officer of Tátil, argues that global agencies need several creative centres of gravity as cultural and economic influence moves beyond traditional Western hubs.

He pictures an agency with multiple centres in different parts of the world, each able to contribute to global projects on equal terms within one ecosystem. That is often not how Western-headquartered agencies work, he says, with leadership and ideas flowing from a single centre, even where they run effective regional studios.

The cultural and business case

Bezerra says the case is commercial as much as idealistic. Western culture is no longer simply exported to the rest of the world. Instead there is more exchange, with movements from countries such as Brazil, Nigeria and South Korea having global impact. He points to K-pop, Brazilian funk and Afrobeats, and how they have spread into fashion, entertainment and visual culture.

When brands engage with another culture only on the surface, he argues, they lift its most visible symbols, such as colours, music, language or aesthetics, without grasping what lies beneath. An agency from the country of origin may be needed to translate a culture rather than just export it, and the better an agency understands where something comes from, the less likely it is to reduce it to a stereotype.

For that reason he is wary of copying the London or New York model built around one creative centre. He proposes a global ecosystem in which each studio is closely tied to its origins, and expects such an agency to be founded somewhere in the southern hemisphere. What is needed, he says, is to change the logic of the industry, not the address of the headquarters.

Bezerra says that in Brazil complexity is something people are born into. The country is shaped by many cultures, ethnicities, contradictions, inequalities and kinds of terrain, and is always weighing local against global, tradition against innovation and scarcity against abundance. He links this to the Brazilian idea of anthropophagy: absorbing influences from elsewhere, digesting them through local culture and returning something transformed. He accepts this is one Brazilian view and expects other centres to bring their own.

Faster growth in the south

He cites BCG projections that the combined GDP of Global South countries will grow by an average of 4.2% a year through 2029, against 1.9% for advanced economies.

Global brands will need to accept an agency from the southern hemisphere leading a new kind of internationalism, he says. Brazilian agencies and others like them have already had to become culturally bilingual, understanding international creative codes and knowing when to translate, challenge or reject them.

Bezerra describes his own move from Rio de Janeiro to New York as transformative, but says it taught him that sometimes you have to leave home to see its value. That led him to what he calls a reverse creative diaspora, in which people return to their origins with what they have learned and engage with the world from there. Brands, he argues, need global fluency without cultural homogenisation.

Examples from Latin America

He cites Colombian agency Panorama’s identity for 12 Mil Music, a label set up for HYBE Music, among the businesses that took K-pop global, to take Latin music to audiences worldwide. Rather than resorting to cliché, Panorama drew its typography from “everyday Latin life” and based its colour palette on the work of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, creating something artists across Latin America could own.

In Brazil, he says, Natura could have copied the look and language of the global beauty industry, but much of its best work draws on its ties with Brazil’s biodiversity, communities, ingredients and knowledge.

Tátil handled naming, branding and packaging for Natura Ekos Ryos, made with ethically sourced ingredients and developed with Amazonian communities and artists. Its packaging contains recycled material, including plastic gathered from rivers in the Amazon. Bezerra says the Amazon as a territory, along with its ingredients and people, became part of the design system and brand story rather than just an aesthetic reference. In ancient Tupi, “Y” means water, an idea that informed a custom typeface and a bottle whose form suggests flowing water.

He argues that the more specific a story is, the more universal its appeal can be when a product is sold worldwide, and that independent agencies in southern-hemisphere markets should resist becoming alternative versions of Western agencies and instead develop their own worldview.