"Without brand positioning you have no choice but to opt for quality or price"

30/06/2022

We spoke about his past career and also his current position at Zinkdo. The company is experiencing a period of significant growth at the moment as just a few weeks ago it merged with the Adsmurai agency which specialises in the automatization and optimisation of Paid Media campaigns. It faces the challenge of a five-fold increase in volume in four years.

Why did you decide to study Information Science at the UAB?

It’s strange because I did my Batxillerat in science subjects and I wanted to study biology – genetics specifically – but my teachers persuaded me with two arguments: if I had to work and study at the same time it would be much more complicated being a front-line biologist; and also I had the ability to express myself well and people listened to me. They said that I could make a really good journalist and specialise in scientific journalism if I wanted to. I’ve always been interested in the world of communication, I’ve been writing fiction and poetry since I was small, and so I changed my career path.

What was your experience at the UAB like?

I really enjoyed being at the faculty and I learned a lot. But I do have some quite harsh memories. My life was pretty chaotic as I worked in the mornings and went to the faculty in the afternoons and then at night I worked for magazines so I hardly slept. I finished work at the same time as my first class started. I would have liked going to more parties and doing more things on the campus – living university life a bit more.

When you finished your degree what were your first professional moves?

I looked at the advantages I had compared to others, and I found only two: curiosity for the scientific and technical field and the fact I spoke English. Through a journalist friend I started to discover the basic of the internet: chats, email lists, the first web version and I thought it was all marvellous because since I spoke English and had scientific knowledge I could find documentation from all over the world from home. I was also interested in how this could help me in journalism. I decided to go a bit further and took a postgraduate course in how to create digital newspapers and after that a European Master’s degree in Interactive Communication and Multimedia Communication at the UAB. During my postgraduate course I was in touch with Vicent Partal, who is now the editor of VilaWeb, and who at that time was on the board of editors for the Web magazine of the Godó group—one of the first publication in Spain about the internet. The editor of the magazine was looking for journalists and so I got in—first as a contributor and then as editorial coordinator. I stayed there for two or three years.

It was a critical moment for the internet.

Yes, 1998/99 was the time of the dotcom boom in Spain. There was no professional category for producing internet content and the companies looked for people with a minimal idea of digital communication and we were made some good offers. I was lucky to be taken on by Retevisión Espanya as content director because they were setting up a portal like Terra or the first version of Yahoo!, called Excite. That gave me the opportunity to spend two or three weeks in Silicon Valley. Instead of writing about internet I was now part of it.

How did your career move on from there?

I was working on the Excite project and the company decided to send me to Madrid, but it didn’t suit me to move there. So I started working for Bertelsmann On Line. This was the e-commerce boom and it was my job to cover everything to do with music at a time when music was being sold in CD format. I had to persuade a lot of record companies to give us their data bases, information, covers, image rights and so on so that I could set up the music sales division. After a year the dotcom bubble burst and the company decided to abandon the online sales project. That was when MTV Spain entered the picture, preparing to join the digital world in Spain and I started working for them, and this time I did decide to move to Madrid. That was an interesting point of inflection: I started as head of digital for both web and mobile: ringtones, SMS, etc. I went to Madrid to spend a year or two there and ending up staying almost eight years, first at MTV and then at Nickelodeon, Paramount for Spain and for Portugal. I’ve had an interesting and fun career with music and comedy.

Which of your projects do you feel especially proud of?

The very first version of MTV.es. We managed to make it in just under two months and it was really complete. We started out from 0 with a small team and we worked really hard. But it worked out and they congratulated us from the International department. In fact, we kept improving the website and we won a few prizes for best cultural website and entertainment website. We had really good people working on it and it was the first project I had to start from scratch, directing all the aspects of it and we met all of our objectives.  

After eight years in Madrid you decided to come back to Barcelona.

Yes. We made a list of the things I wanted to do in Madrid before I left: one of them was to be on Pasapalabra. I managed to do that and I won! The show has changed a lost since then when it was less complicated. All you needed was sangfroid, a good memory and a bit of luck. Now they create TV personalities that are there for months. Winning that quiz show allowed me to be economically sound for a while, so I negotiated my departure from MTV to come back to Barcelona and I took a trip round the world.

What did you do once back in Barcelona?

The company that worked with me at MTV, Overalia, was thinking of opening an office in Barcelona. I worked for them with the idea that they would open an office in Barcelona and I would be the director. But in the end they decided not to. During the couple of year I worked for them I realised that the clients were asking me for strategy and content and that what Overalia was selling was more technical support. So it was a very natural evolution for me to establish myself as an independent consultant and that led to me working 12 or 14 hour days from Monday to Sunday. I needed more hands and new ideas and that is when I set up Zinkdo with the last of my prize money from Pasapalabra.

And how has Zinkdo evolved?

The work philosophy at Zinkdo has not changed, we are doing what we wanted to do. We do the “thinking” part, which is the agile, highly implementable part, strongly rooted in the reality of our projects. And where there has maybe been the greatest evolution is in the “doing” part, the execution of strategies to measure the results, because we have increased our service portfolio, instead of specialising or reducing. For example, at the start we did not have an organic positioning in search engines, but then we saw that if we produce content it has to be optimised for the search engines and so we have concentrated increasingly on SEO. Also at the beginning we did not do advertising campaigns, and then we saw they were necessary for a good social media strategy. The market, the evolution of the digital environment and the digitisation maturity of our clients have meant we can offer more and more services. We need more and more tools to be able to offer a strong and complete service. We have grown and evolved and just a fortnight ago we closed a deal to merge with Adsmurai, a much bigger company specialising is social media ads. Their clients were asking for what we do: strategy, organic content, brand diagnostics, and not we have joined forces to become part of Adsmurai as an independent business unit.

You’ve spent more than 25 in the internet and digital world. How has it changed?

In very general terms in the mid-1990s lots of companies were curious to see what their internet presence should be and they fell victim to fads. There was a tendency not to let opportunities slip without really understanding what the opportunity was. That has changed a lot and companies have seen that they need to invest more and more time and money in the digital environment and that the returns do not always justify this. We have gone from “I need to be there” to “how can I monetise or how can I get economic profit from that presence,” since my business model has to grow using those tools. Also, from the 90s to the present day the number of tools have multiplied and so the question has gone back to the same as it was before: do I have to be there with all the new stuff?  Does my company really need to be on Tik Tok, for example? We’re in that loop of moving from fads to needs and from needs to fads.

And that is precisely the value that Zinkdo brings. When a company presents you with a project and say what they want, you propose a digital strategy in line with its objectives.

We do. When a client talks about economic profit, the strategy is focussed on a series of sales, but sometimes a client will want their brand to be positioned in a certain way or that their target public understands it in a certain way, and that is where the whole content part comes in, which is what we have been working with from the start. Without brand positioning you have no choice but to opt for quality or price, and if you go for price you end up losing because there is always someone who can do it cheaper. The idea is what story, what content, what format and what platform do I have to give my argument for the public to understand it so that my brand gains value. That is what we try to do.

What are your professional and personal challenges for the future?

They go hand in hand. The challenge we are facing is very important and very interesting. Up until now, over these nine years, we have grown organically. But no longer. The injection of resources that joining with Adsmurai means forces us, in the best possible way, to obtain five-fold growth in four years. We are currently a team of 13 and we need to reach 50 as well as multiplying our turnover. And that is a big challenge...not just for capturing new clients, but also for managing bigger teams and the changes in the dynamics of our work internally to ensure that it is scalable. On a personal level it is also a very interesting challenge because it means that I have to focus ma lot more on the business, the company side, and step back from the day-to-day of every project.  I am also Deputy CEO of Adsmurai and that gives me the opportunity to take part in a much bigger project with huge possibilities, not just in the Spanish market but also in Latin America, the Middle Est and other place where we are planning a presence.  

You present the first TEDxUABarcelona event. What was that like?

I am very grateful; it was really exciting. I have had the privilege of being able to enjoy the experience, to get to know some fantastic speakers with wonderful and very generous proposals. I enjoy myself when I climb on a stage, which I do at any opportunity, and if it is also at the university where I studied, I can’t ask for anything more.