Dream Teams: How Two Venezuelan Pisces Found Home in Each Other

Now plying their trade as a creative duo at Cheil Spain in Madrid, Andrea Hernando and Jessika de Freites are from the same city, but met 7,000km away from it. It was on their first day of university that they found each other and bonded over their shared experience as Venezuelans in Madrid.

That was 12 years ago. Jess remembers looking at Andrea for the first time and saying to herself, “she is Venezuelan as well, I just know it.” They were walking in the same direction searching for the same classroom. “It was a bit creepy or a bit cute or maybe both,” says Jess, “but I went to her saying something like ‘Hey we are going to the same place, can I join you?’ I felt like a little girl in a playground asking the cool girl if she wants to be friends.”

It was almost like destiny. “We built a very strong friendship,” says Jess. We were two Latin girls studying the double degree in advertising and audiovisual communication on a different continent, coming from Caracas, the same age (same zodiac sign as well) and aiming to eat the world. I found in her a friend, a partner and also a home.”

 

Andrea remembers how obvious their partnership seemed as it was laid out in front of them at the start. “We arrived in a country with four seasons, without contacts in any company and with family far away. We were at the same point!”

But it wasn’t always a given that they’d become creatives. Andrea told Jess early on that she wanted to become an account manager. “I think she totally would have rocked that too,” enthuses Jess. “She was the most organised girl in class, polite, always on time, aware of the deliverables. I realise I didn’t think of her as a creative, but as a girl with a massive energy to pull anything off. I love that she keeps being an organised and resolute woman but I definitely think that now she is right where she was supposed to be: mixing all those skills with her creative mind.”

Working together on academic projects soon laid the groundwork for Andrea and Jess becoming a full-blown creative team. “We had many projects in common and we decided to try to approach them as a portfolio,” says Andrea. She remembers laying out their goals together: “Let's do this together and see how far life takes us. And here we are: working better and better, making our own brand as a female team and the best part... being very close friends.”

While studying they learned about all corners of advertising from creativity to production, design, copywriting and event organisation. By the time they graduated, both did art direction and writing (and still do). But they realised that Andrea was better with words and Jess was better with Photoshop (“and interviewers always needed to know who did what,” notes Jess). 

They began at a design studio as trainees and soon joined TBWA\Madrid to work on McDonald’s. It was the first time they’d worked on a global network and an international brand. It was summer and much of the agency team was on vacation, so the project came to the young team with a lot of responsibility. It was a huge project: a TV spot, graphics, restaurant material and even packaging. “We ended up working tightly with our creative director but did almost everything in the first months we joined the group,” says Jess. “I remember doing everything hand in hand with Andrea. She had great ideas for the art and I got some for the copywriting: we did a bit of both worlds. We were very confident and believed in what we were doing so our CD gave us a lot of freedom, we went to the client meetings and spoke in our voices. It was a project full of learnings but also very independent in that early moment in our career.”

“We were beginners but our bosses gave us a lot of freedom in the creative process,” adds Andrea. “We did a casting all over the country looking for the best grandmother cook to challenge a world-renowned chef. It was an idea very focused on Spanish culture. I even remember it was on the news! It worked very well and we realised that we really want to dedicate ourselves to this sector.”

Ever since then, they knew they wanted to grow in that direction – big, populist work for international clients. Their work in their first decade has seen them do exactly that, delivering campaigns for McDonald’s, Mazda, Movistar, Telefónica, Real Madrid, Iberia Airlines, Samsung and more.

They both find it almost impossible to pick something they’re most proud of working on together, especially when they’re currently working on projects that they’re absorbed in. “The best collaboration is always around the corner,” says Jess.

Several projects have meant a lot to them and their careers though. The first campaign they entered for Cannes Lions was a proactive piece of work that they created, produced and executed – everything from the very beginning. ‘The Selfless Packaging’ for McDonald's was in the first few years of their career and, as Jess says, “the best prize was to see it done all by ourselves.”

Later on, they worked on a whole identity and campaign for a TV series - ‘Velvet Colección’. “We had the concept super clear since we got the brief,” recalls Jess. “I remember painting the draft of the poster with just a few actors and the TV company loved it so much they wanted us to include more characters on the poster. The whole output of it was just as we imagined in the beginning. We loved that our creative style was immortalised in a content piece.”

During the pandemic, Andrea and Jess were tasked with creating a campaign to present the whole technological project of the new Santiago Bernabéu Stadium designed by Telefónica Empresas. “We had four protagonists who were more than rock stars: Real Madrid soccer players,” says Andrea. The challenge was to create a spot in record time, with safety distances of six metres and covid protocols, Real Madrid's “impossible agenda” and only one hour to shoot with each player.

The concept was ‘The Stadium of the Future’. As Jess puts it, “a crazy futuristic script based on how these football stars would imagine the football of the future.” With very little time to shoot, the director working remotely and a lot of post production, it was a daunting task. 

“We had to imagine that everything we were filming in a small sad court would look like a scene from the Dune movie,” says Jess. “We had to learn to trust the team. Luckily, we partnered up with an amazing group of professionals, and we can’t be happier with the result.”

“Our soccer fanatic friends think we were with the players for hours but that's not the truth,” says Andrea.

They’re proud of every project of course. Working at TBWA, McCann and now Cheil, each client brief comes with lessons to apply to the next. Andrea and Jess combined many of these accumulated bits of knowledge as part of the team on the ‘Unfear’ campaign for Samsung that has won several international prizes. Although they stress that “that wasn’t a collaboration between us two, it was a collaboration with the whole team of Cheil Spain.” 

Although they’ve been part of the Cheil network for less than a year, their hard work has been noticed. Global chief creative officer Malcolm Poynton has recognised their promise by putting them forward as mentees on LIA’s Creative LIAsons programme this autumn.

Always driven to develop and learn, the pair have consistently worked on personal projects too, such as the subversive, humorous feminist short film ‘Esto no es una escoba’ (‘This is not a broom’). Creating outside of their agency has always helped the pair to identify their style, the concepts they like to create. In one of the agencies where they worked, the creative director told Andrea and Jess that he hired them for these projects, not for the campaigns. “It's more powerful to show who you are when you do the brief, the idea, the execution and the whole process your way,” says Andrea.

Ten years since they started as a team, the pair work in harmony, complementing each other neatly. While Andrea likes to dress in a timeless way, Jess loves to change styles. Andrea jokes that she’s the only person in the world who can convince her to change her look up. “I think she has a fun side that never turns off, and I need it because I have a worse temper than her,” she laughs. “Seriously now, I think we are complementary because we push for the other one when one of us isn't 100%. I'm not me alone and she is not her by herself, we both ARE.”

They can communicate without words, maybe because they’re both Pisces, suggests Jess. “I can sense when I’m flowing with the writing and can help her arrive somewhere she is not seeing. The same happens with her, she can sense when I’m blocked and helps me with a visual reference or an idea that unlocks the process. I feel we are a machine in movement with perfect synchrony. It’s very smooth to have the work done with my partner.”

Frustrations are natural, but disagreements soon pass. Sometimes a third opinion can help them reach a middle ground. “And when we disagree, we make a list of pros and cons before deciding (this is very us, we love lists),” says Andrea. “We are good at separating disagreements from everything else, we don't take it personally.”

To ensure this, they have one ‘rule of engagement’: ‘You can throw away an idea but do that politely and with arguments.’ “I believe it makes us better professionals,” says Jess. “If we disagree it means that something in the idea is not good enough and if we manage to get to an agreement, that will make the outcome even better.”

During Andrea and Jess’s trajectory their creative references and inspiration have evolved. When they started they were big fans of Jessica Walsh's work, but usually looked more at the brands and agencies than the people behind the work.

Today it's clearer: “I'm inspired by creative women,” says Andrea. “Girls who don't give up on this challenging industry and show us that we are here because we're worth it, for our skills and our hard work. Because we don't want to fill a women's quota, we want to inspire others who come after us. It's difficult, but there are many references even if they are not always the visible face.

Jess notes that today it is easy to keep track of the work of people around the world. “I normally find more inspiration in people from other disciplines: artists, musicians, filmmakers, graphic designers, photographers but also in cities, people in the cities, local shops, bars with charm… Oh, and surrounding myself with great people. That has always pushed me to go further and keep the stakes high.”

Madrid is ideal as a place to find inspiration, whether that’s in exhibitions, going to concerts and making different plans. “Whatever inspires us, we say yes,” says Andrea.

They are learning from each other every day.  “One of the most powerful things Jess has taught me over the years is to learn to say yes without overthinking it,” says Andrea. “Yes to personal projects, to create powerful brandings for family businesses, yes to direct music videos for neighbours... saying yes (like Jess) is learning all the time. She also made me understand that ‘work in progress’ ideas are more valuable than ideas that we mute because they are not 100% perfect.

“Another important thing we learned together is that there are no rules. We do not work in a business that completes objectives with a regular process. We have to read the instructions before playing but skip them if we want to win the game. And that's where we are.”

In these 12 years of friendship and almost 10 years as a creative duo they have literally grown. “We are not the same girls that were thinking creative ideas till dawn in a student apartment," says Jess. “We have grown wiser, stronger, more confident and kept the passion of the first day. I can’t point out one thing we’ve learned from each other but I can definitely say Andrea has taught me to be a better professional, a better friend, a better version of myself.”

The pair’s portfolio is packed with hits. And so it should be. Andrea has a healthy perspective on it: “I am proud of our trajectory because I could say we have been lucky but the reality is that we’ve worked for it.”