Make It Ours

Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Business of Marketing, recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by PJ Pereira. PJ has built one of the most fascinating careers in modern advertising. He sits at the intersection of creativity, technology, and storytelling. He's the co-founder of Pereira O'Dell. He helped, uh, create some of the most awarded branded campaigns in the last two decades, re- redefining what brands could create when they stop thinking like advertisers and started to think like publishers and filmmakers. But today, as co-founder of Silverside AI, he's once again exploring the next frontier. He's asking how artificial intelligence changes not only how we make creative work, but what great creativity actually looks like in the first place. PJ, welcome to the Business of Marketing.

Speaker 2: Happy to be here.

Speaker 1: So, as I've just said, you've built your career around staying just ahead of where creativity was heading, from advertising to brand entertainment to AI. Looking back, was there a common thread that connected those decisions?

Speaker 2: I think that if I look way, way, way, way back, I, I was the ... When I was a kid, I was a ... That, that little kid always in the corner by myself either drawing or writing or programming my computer, and then I started my career as a, as a programmer. So if there is one thread, it's that I have always been a, a kind of an outsider combining those three things, and for a while, no one understood me. At my first job in advertising, people asked me, "So are you a copywriter or an art director?" I said, "I'm a programmer." They said, "But you cannot be a programmer here. If you're creative, you need to be ... Programming is not creative. It's, is tech people's work." I said, "No, I, I'm ... I can draw. I can write, but I'm a programmer." The ... and it took, it took 30 years for the industry to finally realize that technology can be a creative thing as well. So now I can, now I can say, "No, I'm all three of those together." And I think that that is a thread, that is I have always played with ideas as a combination of the images, the words, and the tech.

Speaker 1: What have you learned about what appears to be an innate skill in spotting inflection points?

Speaker 2: Good question. So I, I think that there, there are two parts of it. One is almost obvious, although it's not, and the other one is my, my aha. So the almost obvious is that you need to be, you need to be curious. You need to be ready to test and try things before you even know if they're going to be useful or not. I've ... I hear people talking about, "Yeah, I need to be curious." Yeah, but the moment they feel like, "I'm, I'm ... Maybe this is gonna be a waste of my time. I'm not gonna spend my time on it," then they're not curious. Curiosity requires you being able or being ready to waste time. So I think that's part one, and it's almost obvious because everyone says curious, but wasting time is not necessarily something that people look, look forward to. I do. I enjoy wasting time because it's, it's investment on the future. The second part is that the only way to work to, to, to be a, a real innovator when there are other innovators that are trying to beat you and, and do things faster than you, is to, to try to find things that are not doable, which is the bizarre part. I mean, we, we are educated in the business to only propose to a client, to only have conversation about things that you are absolutely sure that are doable. I've been in meetings where my boss came to me and was like, "Oh, that thing that you tested, are you sure that it can be done?" I was like, "No." "Okay, then let's not talk about it," because if we sell them the idea and it's not doable, the agency's going to be ... is gonna suffer. So I was trained not to do it, but I never enjoyed this, this ... the thought. For me, what happens that if I propose an idea and we find out in the middle of the process, in the middle of the conversation, that it's not doable, that means that for that moment in time, we are ahead of the technology. And if we thought about that, probably the technology's eventually going to get there, and when it does, I don't have to start. I have ... I'm 50% in because the idea is ready. Now I just need to develop. And I, I told a friend of mine that once, and, and he was like, "Yeah, but you're telling your secret. Don't tell these things to people." This is out in the open. This is what it is. The problem is not knowing that this is how it is. The problem is having the discipline to doing that because it requires, again, requires you to be ready to waste your time, to s- have entire conversations and put your energy and your excitement in something that later went wah-wah, didn't work. No, it actually works. The fact that you had an idea that is not possible means that for the first time you're beating the engineers.

Speaker 1: 2026. What excites you most about where creativity is today?

Speaker 2: It's the ability to think and see and do all at once. I have won pitches that the team was working on things and I had a thought, and I finished the meeting with them and was like, "Let me d- let me do something," and I went to my backyard with my phone and I worked on an idea. Instead of writing the script, I made the spot and I had it made, like, in, in a day, and we presented a pitch. We won the pitch, and that spot was, was wanted. The ability, the distance between thinking and making is revolutionary in, in the creative process. I've never had so much fun in my, my career, and mostly because of that. Now, whatever's in my head, I'm responsible for making it, not ... I don't have to pray that someone else is going to understand what I mean. M- that's not very scalable, but it's fun as hell.

Speaker 1: I love that. You've been quoted as saying that great work has to earn two things: the investment a brand makes and the attention people choose to give it. That's a really high bar, rather than just creating something that people notice. What distinguishes work that genuinely creates business value?

Speaker 2: I think that is, is, is exactly work that, that works for both the consumer and the ROI is for both the brand and the time that consumers are spending. I think that that's a very lofty and, and conceptual thing, but it requires you to be very disciplined as well. I walk around the, the Croisette here, and one of the things that I'm, I see over and over is how this industry's obsessed with the, with breaking the rules of advertising to do things that feel very different and very fresh, but they are starting to disregard the discipline of, of our business. In particular, we are losing our love for repetition and losing our love for simplicity. Uh, a campaign that requires a case study to be understood is not very likely to work in the real world. So I think that we need to get better at that in general, and it's not because we can. We have all admired the, the different ones, the exceptions that we ... That's the only thing that we need to do. And I, I s- I say that after winning Grand Prixs with web series and doing feature films and do- but we ... The format is not necessarily the issue. The issue is that we have to learn to, to rekindle our love for repetition and simplicity. Otherwise, we are just ... We are believing in something that is the, the, the, the side effect of what we are actually trying to do and thinking that that is the, the goal, when it's not. And I think we're, we're being misguided by our own, um, decisions in, in the Palais of the world.

Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about, you know, you, you just mentioned there movies, the, the legacy of kind of branded entertainment for a bit. You know, long before even the concept of kind of branded content became fashionable, you were creating work that audiences actively wanted to kind of spend time with. Beauty Inside, the Inside experience, they kind of changed some people and how they thought about branded entertainment. Again, similar to my kind of, one of my first questions, what did you understand back then that the industry hadn't quite fully grasped?

Speaker 2: I think that it's ... I think it's, it, it's exactly the point of repetition and, and, and simplicity. What happened back then, and it was at ... So take, take the, the whole series that we did for Intel, right? Four years. In every year we did, it was a story about what's inside that counts. And it's for Intel, that is, has always been before us, they had created the Intel Inside sticker. So everything there was a very repetitive message. It's what's inside that counts. What's inside that counts. We were trying to keep it fresh, but repetitive. And the entire time, what we were doing is try to find a complex, complicated story that you didn't need to ... The, the story was just a justifi- a, a, a way to get people to talk about that thing. They didn't have to watch the entire series to hear about, oh, it's what's inside that counts. They, they just needed to hear the story that, oh, there's a story about this guy that wakes up every day in a different body, but what's inside that counts. It's done by Intel. Oh, cool. That was what the idea was, and I think that what people missed and they did not realize it was right in front of them, but they were seeing ... They, what they saw was, oh, they're big brands and, and big judges and people. They're, they're doing formats that are way beyond 30 seconds. Trust me, if that story fit in 30 seconds, I would have done in 30 seconds. I prefer that it would be faster and quicker. It just didn't fit, and the idea required that the ... I let the idea do what it needed to do. But it had ... It was ... I would have never allowed the idea to get out if it wasn't repetitive and it wasn't simple, and I think that that's what people missed. They looked ... They pointed ... It's a very Bruce Lee thing, is they pointed at the moon and looked at their finger.

Speaker 1: That's a great phrase. Um, do you think brands have become more ambitious, or has kind of commercial pressure and maybe other factors kind of made them more cautious, or is that just too simplistic a way of trying to frame the world?

Speaker 2: I think it's a, it's a fake dichotomy that we as an industry try to establish, but I don't see it in ... I, I see clients becoming m- more and more ambitious, and I see agencies becoming more and more ambitious. What I see, if you walk at, at ... Here, this, this year for me at Cannes was very clear that that was happening. There are two festivals. There are the festival at the Palais and the festival at the beaches, and the conversation that clients are having at the beaches is not about the same things that the, the, that the, the judges are picking at the Palais. And that needs to be solved. We have a generation of judges that were, um, trained by portfolio schools and learning to craft the most incredible case studies and think of ideas, and I've ... I can't tell how many times I heard that, "Oh, I can see the case." They, they present an idea and someone say, "I can see the case study here already." And I think that that is a dysfunction that put us in trouble. When we think that when, when creatives complain that clients are not ambitious enough, what's really happening is that their, their ambition is different from the client's ambition. I sat- I had that conversation with a c- with a creative today complaining about these things. I left that conversation and went to a conversation with a, with a CMO, and she was asking me, "So what do you think about what you're seeing?" I told that same story for like, "Oh my God, I'm so glad you're saying this because I'm so confused. I look at that and that's not what I want to aim for. I want to do incredible work. I wanna do things like this." And you can see that she really wanted to do cool things, but the cool that she sees is not the cool that the industry's trying to do, just because we're pointing at the wrong things. We're maybe pointing at different moons.

Speaker 1: Different moons. I like that.

Speaker 2: And there's no ... There's just one.

Speaker 1: That's right.

Speaker 2: At least in our planet. We are not in fucking Tatooine.

Speaker 1: Not yet.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Um-

Speaker 2: Can I curse on this?

Speaker 1: Yes, you can.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you can drop as many-

Speaker 2: I'm sorry

Speaker 1: ... you can drop as many bombs as you like. Um, let's talk n- now about AI and what I would kinda call this chapter, the next creative revolution. So you've always been fascinated by tech, as you said, the kid in the corner, and tech's relationship with creativity. What led you to launch Silverside AI?

Speaker 2: All right. So I started ... It w- it was an accident, right? A happy accident, but because of that c- that thing about wasting time is a glorious thing, right? So 10 years ago, I was here at Cannes. I was president of the jury of the entertainment jury, and it was at the ... I, I was actually not at Cannes. I was in, on my way here, and I was in the plane and I thought, "Oh, there's a story that I had in mind. I think I'm gonna write it as a, as a s- script," and I wrote it in the f- in the plane here. And during the, the ... I'm not a p- a party person, so when the jury went ... You know, we finished judging and everyone went to party and, and everything. I went back to my room, thought, "I'm gonna work on my script." I finished the script, like, that's ... I'm not good on scripts. I'm gonna turn it into a book 'cause I wrote novels before. That was a story about kung fu versus, um, artificial intelligence, and I had a, an artificial intelligence character. So I wrote on that b- uh, I, I worked on that book for eight years and I interviewed the, the specialists in ethics and, and cyber ethics, and engineers and, and brain scientists, and like all kinds of crazy super smart people that you can't imagine. By the time that the book was ready to launch, I, I, I started to hear these rumblings about generative AI, and at that time it was like the beginning of GPT, oh, this, this GPT-2 thing. I feel like I'm gonna play with it because I wanted to use it for, to launch the book. So I started to work with copy written by, by, by computers and feel like, oh, that's not very good, but it's a fascinating idea. And I started to play with the images and to vide- with videos. I feel like that's not very good, but it's fa- fascinating idea. I can see because I always worked with technology before, I've always been fascinated by it. I could see that eventually it was gonna get to a good point. So I called, uh, my partners. I ... Maybe we should create a little lab inside of Prodo. We hired a couple people, some of the, the freelancers that did some work for me for the book. It's like, oh, how about we, w- come work with us? I feel like, yeah, let's do it. So we started to play and we started to do more of those things. The more we experimented, the more I noticed that this was going to be a big deal, bigger than anything, much bigger than the internet. And because Andrew and I both had had digital agencies in the very first wave, we remember how traditional agencies were not very fast to adjust. They had incredible ideas, but they could not adjust fast enough because there were too many people trying to adjust these interactive possibilities to the structure that they had, and it slowed them down. So I feel like maybe we should do the same thing. Let's create something that is completely unbound by, by the legacy, by what's, by our current process and our current roles, and see where it goes. And maybe later in three months we're just gonna connect it back. Oh, okay. We started to do it. We tr- we called it a lab, not an agency. We call it Silverside because, you know, we're based in, in the Bay A- kind of starting in the Bay Area, and silverside is a, a l- small fish that lives, it is natural to the Bay Area that is sits right in the middle of the, the food chain. So it's not a predator, but it's not something that is eaten by everyone. So it's there and helps everyone succeed. Fuck it, we are here.

Speaker 1: Love it.

Speaker 2: We're helping the startups, we're helping the big tech companies, we're helping the agencies, everyone, and we're just h- there to make the ecosystem thrive. I feel like, oh, that's a lofty idea. Let's do it. And that's how we, we, we ... Silverside was born. I feel like, let's see if it can help this industry figure this out. And guess what? It was a very, very good idea. It could have been a waste of time, but it wasn't. Not this time.

Speaker 1: And where are you now on that journey?

Speaker 2: On the beginning, in the very, very beginning. I think we are, um, if you look at how, um, the company evolved from the very first weeks as, as a lab doing things that we had no idea what, what it was, just trying to understand what was going to be possible, and then doing the first, um, Coca-Cola commercials, like a global campaign for Coca-Cola using AI and getting emails the next day wishing that I had cancer, uh, 'cause, because people were just petrified and angry at me. And then, and then to doing, doing it again the following year with a much better technology, and doing everything that comes after that and building a company and seeing the company evolve from a, an, a lab within an agency to a company that could produce, do strategy and creative and production, to one that can develop technology, to one that can do all those things but also help clients transform their business, is a fascinating thing. And I don't know if this is the end of it or if you're gonna keep changing things. I guess there will be more changes. We just cannot know what's ahead. You have to be ready to, to move and, and play and dance with the song.

Speaker 1: So I mean, you know, you, you basically, I think kind of hold the accolade for, you know, delivering, you know, the world's most viewed AI campaigns. You know, you just mentioned Coke. I mean, you, you blew, you blew the roof off. The, the Zeitgeist kind of when that kinda came out, Amazon, Svedka. Um, you're in the UK. You know, kind of like give me a sense of kind of where you're going.

Speaker 2: Forward. I have no idea what forward is, but it's forward. We are not ... This is a, a ... And it sounds like I was just making a, a, a nice quote, but it's, it's, it's more profound than that I pr- I promise. The thing is that this is a, this is a, a ... We're not talking ... People talk about AI as if it was one thing. It's not. It's a generation of technologies, right? It changes the way that everything works. It's, it's the fundamental element underneath every task, in every profession, everything that anyone does. If you have, uh ... If you, if you're listening to music, there's AI on your headphone, and y- and the song that was produced, there's AI, there are AI elements on it. And the, the, it was, the, the, the, the, the algorithm that put that song in front of you on Spotify, there's AI. There's AI on everything. And the, the trick with it, if you want to stay in the front, is that every- everything you're doing is not really that. Every step you're taking, more than what you're trying to achieve, is a glimpse of what's next. So you have to be aware that, that, that task that we ha- you have at hand is 30% of what you're actually doing. The 70% is your understanding that, of what the next evolution of that beast is going to be. So if you are not moving forward, if you are too busy executing the wor- the project that you have in your hands right now, you lost the, the ... You lo- you missed the train because it just moves too fast. I, I feel like it's ... People say that it's a full ... Just keeping track of what's going on is a full-time job. A way to, to, to manage that is by everything you're doing, you have to be doing that work, but also trying to understand what's, what's gonna be the next thing that is gonna come from that experience that you're developing. This is a very experiential technology. This is a difference w- from what's happening right now and the, the technology that we have experienced before in our lifetime. You could ... Before, you could read a report from a Harvard engineer and see a presentation from a St- a Stanford professor, or just ask your intern to do some, some research online, and you could, if you're intelligent enough, you know what's coming. This is not, at least not yet. This is a technology that requires you to be living to be see- to, to understand. And th- I think that that's the problem with all the investment I, I see out there. You see these big executives from big organizations say, "No, I'm, we're ... I know what this AI thing, uh, is 'cause I've done ... I asked my team to do some research, and they found that this is the biggest partn- the bus- the big partner. So I'm do- making a, a 5 million de- deal with this partner here. Now we are ahead of everything." And maybe that person, you are gonna be ahead of everything for two months. Two months later, what those reports didn't tell you is that someone else is going to completely outdo that. And because you are not doing it, you are asking your intern to tell you, you're going to miss the boat. Guess what? Your intern probably told you that, and by the time that you're processing it, they started to realize that, oh, I think what's coming is actually that other one. There has never been a smaller gap between the interns and the CEOs, and I think this is a revolutionary thing from an economic standpoint, from a business process standpoint. The closer to this has been the beginning of the digital, the digital days, where my fir- I was in my first job in advertising, and I was the closest person to the CEO of the agency, although, although it was, it was my first days, because he knew everything that everyone else in the agency could do. He could do, he could do that better than everyone else. The only person who had a little bit of an edge against him was me because my things, he didn't know. Now, with the way that the work is, if we're inventing the first agency right now, th- there's a good chance that the intern will know a lot of things that the CEO doesn't even know that they exist and they, they, they're possible yet

Speaker 1: I love that. And it's such a great antidote to this whole thing around young people and, and the, the, the risk of them not having jobs and removing the, the lowest rungs on the ladder.

Speaker 2: Yeah, this is, this is, this is crazy that, that the co- I think that I understand the anxiety. I understand the fear. Listen, I started to, to, to write about this be- to, to study this because I was writing a book with this, a- an AI character, and guess what? The AI was the villain. I have done all the research I could to make the, to paint the, the worst picture. Maybe that's the, the advantage that I have. 10 years before everyone was a- I was afraid 10 years earlier, and I had time to come to terms with my fear, understand that, yeah, um, a society that can believe what they're seeing is a great society for autocrats. Oh, that's a danger. A soci- a society where five men in the world, five, six men in the world have more powers than, than entire countries is a threat to society. I understand that. That's a problem, right? I'm not ignoring it. A society where all the content that was created, independent of the IP, becomes, uh, fodder for something else that disregards what came before and who it came from is a problem. We need to legislate. We need to think about that. We need to ... And, and the problem, those things are not fast enough to adjust, and now we're having to risk. I know that all those problems e- exist, and I'm not discounting them. But from the inside, when I'm working, I see people who are extremely careful about how they, they, they put ideas out in the world. They craft their ideas and craft their prompt and their workflows so there's o- originality and there's a- as little, um, derivative elements as they can, because they respect their peers. They respect their people who came before them. I can see, uh, 23-year-old kids who are there generating images for a director, and all of a sudden we see like, oh, this is actually pretty good. Can you put that together? And then when we realize that 23-year-old kid that in a traditional process would be doing coffee runs for five more years is directing a film and is running on national TV. When would that happen? So I think that the, the, the conversation, the fear around AI is coming too much from an anxiety standpoint that, again, it is important. We need to understand that that's true, but it ... we need to look at the other side as well so we can see what's possible, and we can have a measured perspective and take advantage of the good parts and protect ourselves from the bad parts. Otherwise, you know what's gonna happen? We're not gonna replace the people in the industry with the, with the technology. We're going to replace the industry. And I'm not making that up. I saw interviews with Mark Zuckerberg saying that, "Oh, I have tools here that in the future advertisers are not gonna be- need agencies anymore because my technology's gonna do that and that and that." Guess what? This is true. They are trying. The engineers are trying to make, develop a technology that will replace this entire industry. If the industry doesn't make the technology ours, if you don't steal it and don't make it ours, they will succeed, and it's gonna be horrible. It's gonna be crappy. It's gonna be the worst time in the history of advertising. But it will ... By, but eventually they will learn. They're gonna hire new generation of kids, and they are gonna learn to be creative again. And then it's gonna be a new-

Speaker 1: New era

Speaker 2: ... a new inter-

Speaker 1: Yeah

Speaker 2: ... a, a new industry, and it's not gonna be us. While if we take it and make it ours, we steal it from them, they have no chance.

Speaker 1: I love that. This new industry, this next generation, we're seizing the opportunity, converting these threats into opportunity. Where there is fear, we need, we need courage. If you were starting your career today, what would you be doing differently?

Speaker 2: I would rely less, I would believe less on the divisions and the specialties that we currently have and, and that I ... I, I would worry less about being a copywriter or an art director or a programmer. I would just ... I would embrace doing multiple things. I would embrace being okay in some features and some, some, uh, skills and much better than others. You know? And, and understand that, you know, I'm ... It, that may be enough. It's okay to be okay in a lot of things as long in some you are special, but that doesn't mean that you can only do that special part. You can do everything and have full control of your ideas and, and what you're making. That, that idea, that thought that... This is the most fascinating thing for me, actually. I went to business school. In my first, um, first quarter in, in college, I was taught about the revolution that Henry Ford created. He took one process where everyone does the whole thing and broke into the smallest, most efficient parts so we could break it and make specialists handle that, and it was, that was the essence of the Industrial Revolution, right? Years later, I get my first job in advertising, and it's like, how we can do this? I can write. I can program. I can do that. And they say, "No, no, no, that's not how it works." You need a specialist, and you take one step at a time. And once you finish that one stop, you lock the script, and you, then you go to the, the storyboard. Then you lock the storyboard. Then you go to the next thing. You keep locking things as you move forward. And somehow, somewhere- Someone was instructed and believed that an industrial revolution model was a good way to frame the creative process. And we think, "Oh, that's how creativity should go." It's not. This is insanity. Creative is supposed to be chaotic. We should not be locking things. You know, when I- I- I remember being in a, in a shoot with a, with one of my favorite creatives ever, and we're looking at the scene, and there's a, a character walks in and looks at the other one, and then he looks at me, and he's like, "Wouldn't it be funny if he had a horse?" The producer looked at him, saying, "Shut up." Because we couldn't let the client hear it and like the idea, because if he liked the idea, there was no way to produce a horse. It was, it w- we were shooting. Now, look at that. If we were shooting, "shooting" in quotes, and, and, and we look and think, "You know what? Maybe this scene in Egypt should be in Japan instead." You know what happens? Japan. This happened. We actually had that. I, I was pr- I was in, in production and a client called me, said, "You see this scene in Egypt? I think it's, it, it, uh, we need to move it to Japan." One year or six months earlier, at least three people would have been fired. One on the client side, one on the agency side, and one on the production side. It was no stress. It was done.

Speaker 1: I love that. You're painting a picture of a world that I subscribe to. It's an impossible question to answer, and you can challenge me on the date, but if we're sitting down here drinking our Coke, Cannes Lions 2030, what do you think will have changed most dramatically about the relationship between creative tech and marketing?

Speaker 2: So I think that there are three, three big changes happening right now. They're three different expressions of these waves. They're crashing at the same time. One big change is that the economics of creativity has shifted. What was expensive is now cheap. What used to be cheap is more expensive. Fast is slow, slow is fast. So we, we need to ... Everything that we, we have built and learned that, that was, "This is the way to go because it's the way to be efficient with ideas," is up for grabs. We need to rethink, and we're not ready to rethink. So that's one big change for a combination of all those aspects you're saying. Another big, uh, change is the creator's economy. Creators, the, the importance that creators, uh, have built for themselves in culture shift everything, the t- how the ecosystem of information a- and entertainment exists. All right? And, and that's a combination of all those elements, and, and we're not prepared to deal with it. The third part is that the ultimate understanding of a bra- of the soul of a brand used to belong to the creative director in charge of that brand, is that, was the person who knew intuitively how a brand should speak and behave. That is switching to the CMO. And that is not because the, the creative directors are lazy or because they're not capable. No, no, the CMO, the CMOs around the world raise their hands right now, "This is my responsibility now." Maybe for incompetence of the, these creative directors, maybe because of big egos on the, the CMOs. It doesn't matter. We can blame whoever we want, but blaming is not gonna help us. What hap- what happens is that that soul is shifting to another body, and if we just try to fight that, we're just going to make enemies of pieces that should, should ... of, of two parts that should be allies, right? And when you combine all those things, we have a, a, a, a, an ecosystem and an industry in disarray because we, we don't know how to plan things to be efficient. We don't know how to be in front of people because they are pulverizing a completely strange way, and who was the role of, of clients and agencies is, is switching and, and we don't know exactly how ... It, it, everything's up for grabs, and we need to reinvent the industry. For me, this is the, the, what? It's the 77th year of Cannes, whatever. It's my 27th. But it sh- we should all be looking at this as year one. And that's not as a statement because every year is a year one at Cannes. No, this is really year one because nothing that we know really applies for next year.

Speaker 1: Year one. Let's celebrate. PJ, thank you. It's been an incredible conversation. You've been listening to the Business of Marketing, recorded live at Cannes Lions. I'm Justin Cook. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.