This house was done when they didn't know drugs were bad for you," teases José Mollá about the low-top 1960s Miami number that could pass as a location from Boogie Nights, as he sips on a clay chalice of yerba maté. The 41-year-old former copywriter's accent is soaked in the thick chimichurri of his native Argentina, not at all diluted by the four rainy years he spent living in Oregon creating award-winning ads for Nike. The house, set behind the palmed innards of Biscayne Bay, now serves as headquarters for the 35 staffers he and his brother employ at their Hispanic ad agency, La Comunidad.
It's the kind of office where flip-flop-wearing employees kiss on both cheeks when they arrive on Monday morning. It's the kind of office where business meetings are held by the pool and where the company chef lures staff with a family-style lunch. And there's a nearly perfect duplicate of it 4,000 miles away, in Buenos Aires, where another three dozen staffers work under Joaquín Mollá, 38, José's brother and partner, who used to run the creative department of BBDO's Argentina branch. To see Joaquín arrive in Miami and clinch José with a very Latin tight-gripped hug is to believe that this is the kind of company that could only be dreamed up over 10 days of solitude and a hell of a lot of rum on a 40-foot Hunter sailboat in the Caribbean.
For the Mollá brothers, ditching their high-profile gigs right after that trip to venture out on their own didn't exactly defy genetic destiny. José shows off a vintage poster of a man with nails lodged in his cranium, an ad for aspirin that their grandfather's agency created in the thirties. Not only did the old man build one of Argentina's first ad shops, but their father also struck out on his own when—in a telenovela-like moment—Gramps fired him.
With La Comunidad, the present-day Mollás conspired to start a bicontinental shop that would shake up old-school Hispanic advertising by feeding on human insight rather than the usual shorthand (sombreros, oversize families). Six years later, the recipe has proved that it works. Despite a bumpy first year that included both 9/11 and Argentina's economic crisis, the Mollá brothers have become two of the hottest creatives to straddle the U.S. and Latin American markets, creating campaigns for the likes of Virgin Mobile and Volkswagen. In 2007, after pumping up its business by a startling 60 percent and winning industry awards from Miami to Cannes, the agency was crowned Hispanic Agency of the Year in the ad trades.
They have understood probably more than any agency that the Hispanic market is just as much in tune with popular culture as the rest of the world," says Mary Warlick, who runs the One Club, an ad-industry organization that gives awards for creative work. In a spot the Mollás made for Citibank's "Live Richly" campaign, a Mexican man repeatedly asks an American pharmacist for "ass-parin," finally stooping to performing a charade of a headache. Cut to the slogan: "There are better reasons why you chose to live in the United States." By the end of the campaign, Citi had experienced double-digit increases in new Hispanic customers opening checking accounts.
But Joaquín explains that they are driven by the notion of community (the literal translation of comunidad), which is why they've turned down business that would have allowed them to grow even more quickly at the expense of their culture of on-site yoga and painting classes. "You can't change the world, but you can do something about the people that surround you," reflects Joaquín, who studies Buddhism on the side. Soon a 20,000-square-foot warehouse renovation in the heart of Miami's Wynwood Art District will house the agency's new office and an adjoining gallery space.
Despite their differences—José, an avid kite-surfer, is the extroverted front man, while Joaquín, whose abstract paintings line the Miami office's walls, is the introspective thinker—their lives continue to intersect. Four years ago, Joaquín introduced José to his now wife, a former model and Argentinean sportscaster who happened to be Joaquín's wife's best friend. Then last year both brothers became first-time dads within three months of each other. "We're best friends," sighs José, agitated by his own sentimentality.
"We married best friends. We started our own agency together. Now we have babies together. I don't think it's cool at all. No," he leaks a grin, "it's great."
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