Ad Astra: The Creative Engine of Andrés Ordóñez

“I was born with a radial engine on my heart.”

When Andrés Ordóñez’s mother was seven months pregnant with him, she went on a 14-hour motorcycle ride. He came into the world revving and raring to go. Andrés, who was recently named the global chief creative officer at FCB, is still buzzing with relentless energy and determination. The network’s philosophy is ‘Never Finished’, and Andrés never stops moving forward.

Take Andrés’ passion for running. When he decided he wanted to start, he began with with a few 5ks. 5k grew to 10k, which became a half marathon, then a marathon. Next he ran 100km across the Sahara. After that, triathlons and a full Iron Man. Now he’s training to take part in the Comrades Marathon in South Africa – the oldest ultramarathon in the world. “Whatever I love, one way or another, I give myself in to it,” he says.

As a creative, running has also been Andrés’ secret weapon. “It frees me of whatever is in my mind. But also, when you run, your mind goes into a single focus. So, two things happen. One, you just release stress. But also, if there’s something that you have on your mind, it unlocks the problem into giving you solutions,” he explains.

That single-mindedness is born in part from Andrés’ parents, in part from that myth-making motorcycle ride – but it’s also a by-product of being Colombia. Not for nothing is Colombia a country that has produced more than its fair share of regional and global chief creative officers.

“We come from a side of the world where nothing’s given, so you’ve got to hustle for everything… We don’t go to other countries to settle for ‘let’s see what’s next’. I put it like this: it’s like you have horse blinders on. ‘This is what I want to do, this is what my life wants to be, I’m just going to focus on it, and I’m not gonna look back’. I’ll put any Colombian against anyone to work on anything. We love writing and we can sell, “ he says.

Growing up, Andrés’ engineer-trained father owned an advertising agency and his mother was a model. The pair had met – where else? – on an ad shoot. A young Andrés would accompany his mum on shoots and immerse himself in his dad’s library of awards manuals, digesting campaign after campaign. It would perhaps seem that a career in advertising was inevitable. But, on the advice of his dad, he initially went to study finance. 

His parents had divorced and Andrés had gone to stay with his mother in Miami, where he studied finance for nearly three years before the siren song of creativity became too much to resist. He swapped across to Miami Ad School, and with that, perhaps, the universe fell back into alignment.

Not that he regrets his time studying finance. It’s an invaluable bridge to clients, and, more importantly, their CFOs. “I do think that everyone should do at least a minor in business or something. As we hope to become leaders of companies, yes, we need to understand both sides. We need to be as creative as we can, but also we need to understand the business. When we talk about ‘creativity as an economic multiplier’ – it’s exactly that. It’s not doing creativity for the sake of creativity, winning all the awards. It’s about creativity that works. And when those things are tied together, everything follows.”

His first job was at BBDO Puerto Rico. An invitation to live on a Caribbean island, to work on the Jeep account. It was a dream. Stepping into the agency on the first day, Andrés was hit with all the possibilities available to him. He attacked it with his characteristic vigour, driven by curiosity. Before long, he was approached by a project manager telling him to slow down – he was asking for too much at the same time. But that insatiable curiosity and hustle proved to be a gift and before long he had gone from Jeep to the Pepsi account for the whole of Latin America. “What I realised is that the more that I got curious about things, the more opportunities opened for me and it started moving really fast,” he says.

That drive and determination, though, isn’t about personal glory for Andrés. As his career progressed, taking him back to Miami and then to Chicago in 2011, climbing ever higher, it’s not that leadership and seniority appealed as ends in themselves. He carries with him a deep sense of responsibility and care towards others and an unshakeable belief that doing right by those around you comes first. It’s something that really coalesced within him as a young man.

When Andrés was 20, his mother developed cancer. He was determined to fight for her and give her everything. “That was the last day she worked until the day that she left us. What that did was, it’s not about ‘I want to become the leader’. It’s always been about ‘surround yourself with incredible people, do the work and the rest will come’. I knew things were going to come. So I've always focused on the people and the work. And that has given me all of those opportunities of growing leadership roles,” he says. “It’s about focusing on the right things to take care of everything around me. I think that’s the way I’m driven. I will focus on that and the rest will come. I think there was no option at a young age but to focus and take care of her. 

“It’s always about taking care of people. I think it’s more important than anything.”

At work, that manifests itself in his determination to help his people reach their potential, to give them the chance to prove themselves. But that care should not be confused with an unwillingness to have hard conversations, albeit wrapped in care. That’s particularly true when it comes to feedback.

“I think, like any other relationship in your life, honesty comes first – and transparency. The worst thing you can do to a person and their work is to play around it. You know, if the work is not good, just say it out [loud],” says Andrés, who reflects that his team always knows that they’ve got more work to do when he starts a sentence with ‘I love you’. “It’s a way to say, ‘it’s not there’. Also, I’m not going to play around it, that’s how you burn people. That’s how you get to bad work. That’s how you lose incredible talent. I think you always have to set boundaries at the beginning of the relationship and say, ‘this relationship is about honesty, trust and transparency, and if we do that we’re going to do the best work of our lives.’

One thing that Andrés finds really helps him connect with and understand others is the fact that he’s never worked in his native country. He’s only ever worked in places where he’s ‘different’ and with people from other countries. He speaks with warmth and affection about the Windy City and the renowned niceness of Midwesterners. He’s called Chicago his home since 2011, first at the Bravo Group, then Energy BBDO before joining FCB Chicago as CCO in 2019. 

This experience has connected him to a universal view of creativity. “I’ve always been a bit more about understanding that creativity, great work, transcends culture. I love to be surrounded by people with different knowledge and cultures. It expands your wings,” he says. At FCB he’s been seeing that come to life with various international collaborations. One successful example is 2021’s Chatpat – a collab with FCB India and Chicago that turned a kid from an Indian slum into a social media influencer and won multiple Cannes Lions. This year, he says, there’s been really exciting work cooking between London, Mexico and Brazil.

That collaboration doesn’t just happen between teams in different countries, it’s also something that occurs between agency and client. Those values of honesty and trust are just as crucial here.

“A client relationship is as important as an idea. You need to create trust in order for them to know you really care, you’re really doing things for the right reasons and that you really care about the brand,” he says. “If you build trust, it’s very easy to sell the right work. If you don’t have trust from the clients and you have the best idea in the world, it might not go anywhere.”

One thing that Andrés believes really underpins that trust is the fact that FCB genuinely walks the walk when it comes to brand guardianship. He reflects on the industry’s recent tendency to scrap storied agency brands. “We live in a weird time because I feel we’ve seen so many mergers. At the same time, how can we go to a client, tell them what we should do about their brand when we don’t take care of our brand. I believe we have to lead by example, as an agency network, and take care of our FCB heritage and our brand, as much as we take care of our clients to set an example that can exist for another 150 years and become stronger.”

Andrés feels a deep sense of responsibility to not just the FCB brand but the culture and creative momentum that’s been nurtured by its former global CCO Susan Credle, who is now working as the first ever ‘creative advisor’ for FCB’s holding company IPG. “I never said I’m going to come here to do the new FCB, it’s more about writing the next page of what Susan has started. So it’s a continuation… I always say I’ve got to make sure she feels proud of what she built.”

David Lubars, BBDO’s outgoing global CCO, is another senior advertising creative who has made a big impression on Andrés. He recalls the way that David would walk into a room, walls plastered with ideas, and instantly pick out the good ideas. It stuck with Andrés and to this day ‘the wall’ is one of his favourite parts of the creative process. The visceral physicality of seeing 50 or 100 ideas posted up and feeling the butterflies that come when you see that nugget of brilliance. 

When it comes to honing his own instincts, Andrés inevitably turns to his beloved running as a metaphor. “The first time I went for a run, I came back home, I was purple, I was cold. My wife was like, ‘why are you doing this to yourself?’, and then here I am months later running 100k in the Sahara. It’s the same thing. The first time you find that idea you’re like, ‘oh! There it is!’. But you still don’t understand… and you start developing this sense about it. I also believe that creativity is a muscle you need to train over time. People believe that, as you grow into more roles, you do less of the work. I believe that you actually have to work more, get your hands on it more and more to make sure it keeps on working.”

These instincts are distinctly human – and he hopes that the growth of artificial intelligence will afford him even more time to spend honing those instincts and doing the creative work that he loves. The son of an engineer, Andrés is drawn to technology to the point that he’s been asking his wife if he can get a robot. He’s enjoyed playing with AI and says he has it in one form or another on every system he has. His greatest hope is that the hours or days saved building boards or pulling insights together can be reinvested into craft and creativity. He also says that there’s value in generative AI as a mechanism to get conversations started.

But as much as AI has the potential to liberate creatives, there are, nevertheless, certain principles that will always endure. And those principles relate to the innate humanity of the creative act. “It’s about building trust. It’s about taking risks,” he says, explaining that FCB’s ‘Never Finished’ ethos means that they’re always looking to push ideas further. “Every creative act is an emotional leap for all of us.”

“Going back to the AI conversation, what AI is doing is pushing us to be stronger creatives… I think it’s going to make us trust ourselves in a bigger way, take bigger risks because we have to do the things that AI doesn’t know and has never seen.”

That idea of leaning into those things that AI can’t understand, taking time to step away from the internet, is something that means a lot to Andrés. He says whenever he goes to a new city, he likes to go out for runs, to explore what the world has to offer. (“I feel that advertising doesn’t happen in the office. Advertising happens out there. Creativity happens out there.”) Going for a walk, people-watching over a coffee, it all has so much to offer creatives. Andrés also reflects that incredible art can also open our eyes to what’s possible.

He’s not advising that creatives pull the plug completely. Rather, they need to understand what the online world and tools like AI can do and where their limits are. “I think the internet is good [in order] to understand the base. I always tell everyone, ‘understand where the base is, use it as that, and then beat it.' But you cannot beat the base if all you know is the base. That’s where you’ve got to get out there and do something different. You’ve got to open your mind to other things and experiences in order to get the best out of you. Experience is what makes us incredible humans and it unlocks human potential.”

And so, internal engine revving, as much as this future-facing creative embraces technology, he’s not one to be shut up indoors or tied to a computer screen. Instead, he’s bursting to get out into the world to fuel himself on experience. 

Andrés Ordóñez just keeps on running.