Giovana Madalosso: Faria Lima’s luxury slaves – 04/23/2023 – Giovana Madalosso

Who imagines that behind the Ermenegildo Zegna shirts that parade through the Faria Lima restaurants there are people subjected to degrading working conditions?

For 15 years, I was an advertising copywriter at four of the largest advertising agencies in Brazil, freelancer at others and, to this day, I live with friends who are employed by some of them. No one speaks publicly about what happens at these agencies because if you do, you’ll never get a job again. As I am now out of that milieu, I can tell.

At one of the agencies I worked for, a creative director who had just arrived recommended that, during office hours, I do my job and then run campaigns for other copywriters, in order to prove that I was as good as they are. .

For months, I worked every day from 9 am to midnight, including Saturdays and Sundays. A colleague who had been working about 18 hours a day at that time even slept under our desk a few times because, according to him, it wasn’t worth going home to sleep just a few hours – and our boss knew that.

It seems like an isolated case, but it is not. Everyone who works in an agency knows that there are no fixed hours. The shifts are extended according to demand, and they can go into the early hours (normal practice on the eve of presentations) without a penny of extra time.

One of the most depressing moments in my career was one day when I decided to go out, at lunchtime, to donate blood for a friend’s father. When I had the elastic pressing on my biceps, the cell phone rang.

– Where are you?

“Drawing blood.”

“Did the needle go in yet?”

– No.

“Then get up because if you do, you might have to wait a while.” And you have to go back now.

The work that demanded this professional was not the delivery of a baby or a fire with victims. It was an adaptation of a commercial from 30 to 15 seconds. What made this commercial so urgent? The brand he signed: one of the largest telephone companies in Brazil. And that explains everything: in this system, whose most ridiculous face is Faria Lima, who cracks the whip and sets the pace is the money.

If at the bottom of the org chart is the creative and at the top is a CEO named Money, who’s in the middle? The agency’s management (and often the multinational and the investors that control it) and the clients, who know very well what goes on inside those walls but keep demanding deadlines that, they also know, can only be met by a team moved to installments of Jeep and doses of Rivotril and Red Bull.

The big brands that are on screens playing nice with the consumer —suddenly green, feminist and anti-racist due to market pressure— close their eyes to a scheme of exploitation and abuse that, many times, also involves other types of labor, such as the production of ghost campaigns.

Seeking to win prizes, agencies run after producing innovative pieces that, for various reasons, are not produced on a daily basis. To do this, Lacoste’s slaves are asked to work for free in the few free hours they still have left – in one of the agencies I worked for, we were obliged to do this on holidays.

Once the ghost campaign has been created, a film and an audio production company are called upon to make the piece, with the promise of other paid jobs in the future – or the veiled threat of never doing them. The exploratory scheme gains new dimensions: film director, photographer, editor, audio producer, musician and announcer work completely for free, with no guarantee of receiving anything afterwards.

All this with a single objective: the owner of the agency to appear with the award in the media, attract new clients and continue to drive the cogwheel. A wheel much bigger than it looks. To work day and night, these professionals need maids and nannies who take over their portion of domestic existence. In the house of each slave of luxury, there is another without luxury and, in the house of that one, often a girl dropping out of school to take care of her younger brothers. If not even those who drive a Renegade have the courage to open their mouths, how can they expect that from the weakest end?

It is not surprising that many shareholders and executives of the big brands have tried to re-elect a former president who has always worked hard for the dismantling of labor rights. It is necessary to reinforce the structures of these basements where the iron ball is the promise of happiness provided by the latest model of Iphone.

According to sociologist Orlando Patterson, what differentiates an enslaved person from a serf is the absence of social ties. Is it possible to maintain healthy ties with similar work schemes? Is it possible to stay healthy?

In my years at the agency, I saw the following campaigns created in my body and in the bodies of my colleagues: herpes, candida, eating disorders, anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, psoriasis, alcoholism and trichotillomania. Not to mention the death of a young art director, which no one can prove to be linked to agency stress, but coincidentally happened during a period of work overload.

In 2009, still in a multinational, I had to have my tonsils removed. A new creative director had just been hired and, upon seeing my request for medical leave, he warned: if you leave now that I joined, it could be bad for you. As I was having recurrent tonsillitis, I thought it best to do the procedure. When I returned a few days later, I was fired. Since then, I became a freelancer and, little by little, I stopped working for agencies. Today I speak for those who were not as lucky as I was.

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.