How Ogilvy Honduras Is Thriving on Pressure After Recent Awards Success

“Honduras has a lot of unique situations - for good or ill. There's a lot going on in our country, which is pretty fertile ground for addressing things with creativity.”

Alan Cruz is the head of strategic planning at Ogilvy Honduras, an office that has been thrust into the limelight with back-to-back successes at Cannes Lions. In 2022, Alan served as the lead strategist for the ‘Morning After Island’ campaign for charity GEPAE (Grupo Estratégico para la Pastilla Anticonceptiva de Emergencia). The project helped grant legal access to emergency contraceptives for Honduran women for the first time in 12 years, earning the agency the first Cannes Lions in Honduran history - including a Gold Glass Lion.

This year, the office struck Gold at the festival again - this time in the Brand Experience & Activation category - with ‘Heaven Fish’. This Regal Springs campaign gathered the fish that fall from the sky during an annual natural phenomenon in the region, and gave the local Yoro people the exclusive rights to distribute them, supporting the community.

Speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway about the agency’s rise to prominence and how this awards success has changed its strategic approach, Alan says that lots of the work from Honduras is driven by cultural insight and purpose. However, since winning the nation’s first Lions, he has felt a shift in the local industry - from both the creative and client side. Now that the bar has been raised, there is more pressure and higher expectations from all directions. 

“We have had clients start to tell us, ‘Hey, where's my Lion?’ or, ‘Hey, where's my Effie?’, so there’s definitely been an impact,” he says.

As a strategist, this has inevitably influenced Alan’s day-to-day, especially when it comes to ideas of scale. While effectiveness and creativity are a given, the size of a campaign’s impact beyond ‘generating pure awareness’ is now being considered to a higher degree. Having these conversations with clients in the briefing process is vital for Alan, who says that these grander ideas often need increased investment to succeed. This mindset made it very important for Ogilvy Honduras to reach Cannes 2023 ‘with a commercial client’, to show how the agency can marry commercial effectiveness with brand purpose. 

Enter Regal Springs and ‘Heaven Fish’. 

Alan says that the world’s leading producer of premium, sustainably farmed tilapia fish was the perfect brand to do it with because purpose is inherently part of the brand’s DNA. “They've had this conscientiousness about the environment and society and everything else,” he says.

Avoiding an “empty, meaningless gesture”, he explains that the agency was keenly aware that the global discussion in the industry, especially among awards juries, had turned more sceptical toward hollow, purpose-forward projects. The plan for ‘Heaven Fish’ was to create something sustainable - and commercially viable - with the potential to grow and develop over the years. The idea was also designed to be applied in different ways, to different markets and applications in the future. 

“It was important that we show the world that Ogilvy Honduras is not only about purpose and social good - of course, that's important - but also that we're an advertising agency that can sell products,” he says. “‘Morning After Island’ didn’t have that commercial element, so we wanted to show that we have those chops as well, and make sure our second win made that plainly evident.”

‘Morning After Island’ was, of course, a significant launchpad for the agency’s continued success - and a source of several valuable lessons. First and foremost was the value of genuine integration. Alex explains the project was Ogilvy Honduras’ most successful attempt at really integrating creativity with strategy, communication and PR, and resulted in established strategic partnerships and alliances throughout the region.

Secondly was the value of earned-first creativity. Beyond directly helping the women with the island itself, the strategy was to create so much international noise that the campaign would break through and local Honduran media would force the government to pay attention to a long-ignored issue. “That was a very valuable lesson,” he says, “That we, as a relatively small country, could have that reach.”

He continues, “Number three is that there really is value in purpose. There's been a big back and forth in our industry recently about the importance and value of purpose, and I think the nuance there is that purpose can work if it's sincere, genuine and really a part of the brand itself.”

Equally vital for the strategist - across all his projects - are consistency and patience. The ‘Morning After Island’ project, for instance, was the culmination of years of iteration, rejections from potential collaborators and persevering through frustrations. “We kept going at it, and the work itself makes it worth it. That's one more point in favour of purpose… the Lions are great, we love getting the awards, but that's not really the driver behind it all. When you have it and it's real, it drives you like nothing else. It really motivates a team.”

And it’s not just the agencies that have their sights set on awards nowadays. Alan reveals that some brands in Honduras are just as hungry for advertising silverware.

Since winning at Cannes, more multinationals - especially in the food industry - have sought after the agency, bringing with them large-scale brands and ideas.Which, according to Alan, aren’t abundant in Honduras. “It seems to be becoming more important for brands themselves to win at Cannes, or to win advertiser of the year, for instance, at these festivals,” he says. “So when you see that there's only one agency in your country capable of doing that? Well, that's where you go.”

And they certainly have been going. 

Even with both of the Honduran offices expanding in the last couple of years, it hasn’t been possible for the agency to cater to all of the increased interest from brands, says Alan. “There has been a significant influx - some are pitches, some are just direct requests - and, if I'm being honest, we've had to become selective. We have a certain amount of creative resources, time and the rest, so we've had to decide where best to put those resources, even taking into consideration that the agency has grown.”

This growth and awards success in Honduras has, predictably, made the Ogilvy network proud, with Alan and the agency enjoying their time as the talk of the town. “I'm not going to lie, it's a good feeling,” he says. 

“But at the same time, it means that there's a spotlight on you, and all the pressure that comes with that. For us, it's been nothing but positive. We thrive on pressure in this office.”