LOCH Marketing

Overview

Nearly seven years at a Mexican marketing agency covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. LiuGong and Mahindra among the clients, a four-person digital team by the end, and a monthly score card presented to every client.

How the job grew

I joined a marketing agency in Mexico as one of two designers, doing websites, social graphics and print. By the end I was coordinating digital communications across a team of four (a social media manager, a web developer and two graphic designers) and working alongside the software engineer who built the heavier client platforms, an asset-management system and an app among them. I kept the parts I didn't want to hand over: the websites for the biggest clients, and the motion.

The clients

We were LiuGong's agency for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, reporting to their North American executives. We also handled Mahindra Tractors' entry into Mexico, where I built the website. Mahindra withdrew from the country a few years later, which is its own lesson in what design can and can't fix.

What I can show

Most of what I made there is not mine to publish, so this is a small sample, picked because it shows the motion work rather than the campaigns behind it. Both films are Christmas pieces, which is mostly an accident of what I was able to keep. The thinking in them is the one I used everywhere: make the client's own product the object in the frame. LiuGong builds machines, so a loader carries the gift. Planasa breeds berry varieties, so the ornaments on the branch are a strawberry, a raspberry, blueberries and a blackberry. The LiuGong spot is After Effects built in 3D layers, so there is real depth and camera movement without any modelled geometry, and the balloons in the agency piece are Cinema 4D: modelled, lit and rendered.

Learning it while doing it

Motion wasn't part of what the agency offered when I arrived. I learned After Effects and Cinema 4D and started putting them into client work, and by the end it was something we sold. I was still finishing my degree for the first years of that, which meant every skill on this page went into a live client project roughly as fast as I acquired it.

In front of the client

Every client got a monthly score card with the numbers, what moved and what didn't, and I presented them. I was in the room for new-business pitches talking through what we could do digitally, and in front of clients reviewing their sites in progress and taking changes on the spot. Explaining a bad month to the person paying for it is a skill nobody teaches you in design school.

In Spanish

All of it was made and presented in Spanish, for audiences across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Different market, different reference points, different sense of humour, which is most of the reason my early work looks unfamiliar to a US eye.

The websites

I built and looked after the websites for most of the agency's accounts across those years, dozens of them. Almost none are still online in the form I made them, which is ordinary for agency web work. Ana Ascencio is the one I can still show. She is a property developer, and her site had to do two jobs at once: look like somewhere you would spend two million pesos, and actually sort inventory: preventa, venta, terrenos, acciones. Dark ground, gold for anything you can act on, and a three-step enquiry form instead of one long wall of fields, because the people filling it in were doing it from a phone on a plot of land.