How Riccardo Fregoso Plans to Make Italian Creativity Count Again
Advertising is a people business. And if a company is defined by its people, Riccardo Fregoso’s character says a lot about DENTSU CREATIVE. Last month, the global creative network announced his appointment as chief creative officer of Italy.
Originally from Milan, Riccardo graduated in philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Bologna, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He began his advertising career in France at BETC and then worked in international groups such as TBWA, Ogilvy, McCann (winning Agency of the Year in Cannes in 2019 for the first time while he was there), and was most recently executive creative director at Publicis Italy.
Returning to Italy in 2020 was big for Riccardo. “There is nothing like home at the end of the day,” he says. “Of course I love France. I'm half French, my daughter is as well, but I needed to get in touch again with my roots - being close to my family. After 15 years in Paris, I was super happy to be back home.”
Back in Milan, he discovered a city that has “changed completely in a positive way”. Suddenly, he noted a culture more oriented towards sustainability, diversity and inclusion – a creative culture infused with the ethical considerations of global industry. (Although, he notes, that this is “in stark contrast with the very unfortunate evolution of the political situation nowadays.”) As such, it’s safe to say Riccardo has been flourishing in his home city. “Milan is really projected towards Europe in a very open way. And it's a city with a very high quality of life. So from a personal point of view, it was a very positive discovery.”
The Italian advertising industry had felt somehow stunted for years to Riccardo – a surprise considering how Italian aesthetics are still so dominant in many areas of art and culture. “In Italy everybody thinks (Italians first!) that it's a little bit less interesting than other countries,” he says. “You just have to live there and connect and you discover that it has a lot of potential. There is a sort of inferiority complex that has to be changed in a way.”
Riccardo wonders whether after so many years of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister, a certain approach had seeped into the culture of Italian advertising and made it overly business-oriented. “The creativity has migrated more into disciplines like design, for example, where it was more free from this purely business-oriented approach,” says Riccardo. “This is maybe an explanation. But now, we are out of it. And it's time to make Italy count again in the world of creative excellence.”
Having worked for most of his career in France, Riccardo feels that there, the industry is way less polarised. “You have many interesting entities. Of course, you have the big French groups, but still, it's quite open. For example, the race for Cannes every year; you never know [who will win]. Every year you have new challengers, whereas here, it's true that for the moment, the market – in the last probably five to ten years – has been more and more polarised, with Publicis Italy growing and growing - almost an international agency based in Italy.” That’s why, as an internationally-minded creative leader, Riccardo settled in to Publicis Italy. “You feel like you're still connected with the global world of advertising, so it wasn't so dramatic.”
What he’s discovered at DENTSU CREATIVE is a similar ambition. With over 250 employees and global clients including American Express, DAZN, Generali, Skoda and Spotify, the opportunities are thrilling.
Riccardo brings to his new role one key ethos: “opening towards the global world of advertising.” Along with this, focused attention on creative excellence, a capability of attracting the best talent and channelling that into the right projects and the right brands, he’s excited about unlocking Italian advertising’s potential. “It's really interesting to transform the local market in Italy in a way where we hopefully will have a situation much less polarised, much more open.”
The raw materials are all there, he points out. “Starting from lockdown, remote working, Brexit, there are a lot of situations that have opened up the European markets in a way. Naturally, I think you can imagine Milan today as a global hub for global brands, with global talent coming here and working from here. I don't see why Milan couldn't become another open hub for global creativity. And this is part of the plan for the new DENTSU CREATIVE.”
Another core part of that plan is rolling out what the network calls ‘horizontal creativity’ - which Riccardo equates to creativity, customer experience and media being connected on the same level. “Of course that comes from the very DNA of Dentsu – a media company first. For the first time, we have an entity that can not only claim, but do what everybody wants to do. And it needs to have a real, very agile connection with media and CXM - by which I mean in the same building, with people that can talk to each other very easily.” Riccardo adds that he wants to create occasions where a campaign or brand platform can be built starting from the media, starting from the creativity, or starting from the customer experience - with all three remaining unified throughout a project.
In Riccardo’s previous life in other agencies, he’s used to promises being made to clients early on to start from the media. But then, the media agency is seperate. “You start to work and you try to create synergies, but no one can, or someone can but then you start to work and everybody's super busy. And then the P&L is different and the objectives are different. And so you have the media agency ending up sending their traditional expected plan, the creative agency sending a big idea or whatever, but they don't talk to each other and then the result is not at the level that was expected.”
At DENTSU CREATIVE those promises are easier to keep. “We really believe that it's important to talk to each other,” says Riccardo. “When the client sends you a problem to solve, the problem can be solved starting from many different channels, through many different approaches.”
Although he’s only just started at DENTSU CREATIVE, throughout his years in the industry, Riccardo’s best work has demonstrated horizontal creativity in action. “I've naturally never approached the problem-solution question with a too-easy solution. What is the real problem? And what’s the real solution that the client is maybe not imagining but is going to help business?”
One example of this in action is ‘Bordeaux 2050’ for the French Association of Journalists for the Environment (AJE), which wanted to transform shocking data about the climate crisis into something real and tangible. Partnering with researchers, scientists and journalists, the AJE used climate projection for the next 30 years to create a wine that simulates the exact taste of a Bordeaux grown in the future. “Of course, it wasn't the first idea that the client had,” Riccardo says. “We had to develop the wine, study and go to Bordeaux, talk with the vigneron, then go back, study again, talk with the engineer etc.. And then at the very end, we finally got to think about the campaign. But the wine was reinventing the media in itself.”
Another campaign Riccardo worked on which used media unexpectedly was Nestlé Purina’s 'Street-Vet' campaign, which gave a helping hand to dog owners by launching an innovative billboard that analyses dog urine and immediately detects their potential health problems. People walked their dogs on one of the streets or parks where the special billboards have been placed. The pheromones released by the billboard did the rest and attracted the dogs towards it. The urine was then analysed and, in less than 30 seconds, the result was screened on the billboard. If the tests came out with small imbalances, Purina Street-Vet suggested a diet that could prevent the disease progression. When a deeper medical check-up was required, pet owners could download the result and take it to the veterinarian for further investigation.
“It's a cross between outdoor, health, tech, innovation and direct,” says Riccardo. “So, it's very important for me to calculate this approach, and now I'm finally at an agency that has it as a first priority. That's why on Sundays, I’m now happy for the Monday morning ahead.”
The culture at DENTSU CREATIVE Italy allows space for inspiration, he says. And this is something that’s crucial to how his creative leadership will play out. “In general, it's really important to have an approach to work where there is a real balance of life, with its own sphere of inspiration of freedom,” says Riccardo. “It can be anything: fitness, family, travelling. I think it's super important to protect that. At most agencies today, unfortunately, there are a lot of people that think that the most important thing is just work, work, work – at night, during lunch, whenever. Maybe it's also because I'm Italian, but I think that lunchtime is super important. I also think that if you work until midnight, every night, it doesn't mean that you work a lot – it means that you're not organised enough, or maybe that the organisation is not organised enough, or doesn't have the right values.”
This feeling has led Riccardo to carve out time for his passion in photography. In November, after three years of research and shooting exclusively on film, he will present his first photographic exhibition, ‘Adriatico’, at Paris Photo 2022.
“I rediscovered over the years that I could be (and I needed to be) inspired elsewhere than just advertising. And so, I started exactly when my daughter was born, five years ago. Photography was an old passion - I had done it during college and university. But I started to rediscover it, and it became my space of freedom of inspiration.
“I was on vacation with my daughter and wife on the Adriatic coast in Italy (which is super ugly yet at the same time, everybody is so attached to it because it's Italy and the memories from the ‘80s and so on). And I was there because of my daughter. We started coming back to Italy and rediscovering the link with the family and going to an ‘easy sea’. It's not Greece or Bali, but it's very comfortable. And I had a sort of epiphany -taking pictures around there - because it reminded me of my young years. So this is photography for me: rediscovering a space of freedom. And rediscovering my roots.”
Making space for that kind of inspiration is in line with a company culture at DENTSU CREATIVE that Riccardo is keen to protect. Committed to being a force for good, DENTSU CREATIVE is the first network agency in Italy to be named a Benefit Corporation - upholding the legal standards of operating as a purpose-driven business contributing to an open, inclusive and fair society. This takes the form of legally-binding commitments that the agency has made. “I always try to be extremely vigilant on these kinds of topics,” says Riccardo, “but now I find an agency that finally is asking me officially to be vigilant and involved in that, and this is amazing for me.”
To uphold Benefit Corporation’s standards, the agency’s brands will conduct thorough training for its employees, partners and clients around diversity, equity and inclusion; to create shared values and accelerate their collective contribution to society. In addition, earlier this year, dentsu Italy launched ‘The Code’, a flagship school and early career programme to help upskill students across the country with free training and workshops on the latest digital skills. A particular focus on schools with fewer extracurricular opportunities during the selection process was conducted to ensure the programme is inclusive to students from rural parts of Italy, and for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds.
It impacts the kind of person who’s attracted to the agency, he’s noticed. “In general, in the personality of the human beings that are here, there is a lot of attention on work-life balance, sustainability, and of course diversity and inclusion.”
The various commitments include fighting for diverse casting, and challenging clients who request otherwise, switching all company cars to electric vehicles, working to create at least two pro bono charity campaigns a year, and giving each employee three paid days a year to dedicate to volunteering.
“We are legally bound. It's important and the atmosphere is that the founders of the agency are committed to it,” says Riccardo. “ There is a real will for progress that is also connected to the will for progress that we can live and breathe in Milan. We would love to represent a beacon of innovation and diversity -an example of creative excellence, craft with the Italian touch – for Italy, but also for Europe. Let's create places like that all over Europe, and not only in big, traditional capitals. And let's make sure that talent can grow and expand and create maybe the best pieces of their career, without having to renounce their work-life balance or their inspiration. This is really the dream that we have at DENTSU CREATIVE.”
