Thaiza Akemi

I'm Thaiza, I work for Itaú, and I'm a partner and marketing director.

I’m responsible for the content, the communication, the company’s platforms, the causes, in short, all the bank's advertising.

The business challenges faced by big traditional banks I believe come from new competition that’s emerging and which has never been around. We’ve always compared ourselves to other traditional banks and seen them as competition. I can't just look at the banks I've always looked at, I need to look at FinTechs, I need to look at major retailers, I need to look at acquirers, I need to look at influencers, opinionated influencers, influencers against the market, experts, economists. It's all part of my ecosystem today, and they can help me thrive and join me in this mission or they can destroy me.

The biggest disruptive force in the market was content itself. It was when we understood that content is not an advertising discipline. It's not. It's not part of advertising. It is advertising itself. Content is the creative currency of any brand from any institution. It's what enshrines a brand, and if poorly done, is what destroys a brand. It's all kinds of brand communication. So when the industry, when the market understood that, that's when we started to see the small disruptions happening, the explosions happened right after that, which culminated in social media.

The best content ideas come from co-creation. I believe that the best ideas are born out of community, so much so that I’ve created a management position called ‘culture and communities’. I truly believe community marketing is the discipline of the future. It's actually not so far in the future, it's happening now, however it's not something often seen in big and traditional advertising agencies. That's the reason why we’re doing everything we’re doing here at Itaú. That's our commitment. I’m putting together a team this way because we really believe this new discipline will guide our communication methods. Good content, good publicity, good communication must all have a real connection with communities, with people.

The digital platforms environment is bustling. It's not like there's a new platform every day where the content fits. The thing is that there are new ways to create content on each of the platforms because a new format is created when new platforms launch. It brings up a different creation process that we’re not used to or familiar with. In this universe, if we get stuck in time, we don't evolve.

One of the most interesting changes happening at Itaú right now is the modernization and updating of our partners so that we can find companies such as Genero and VidMob. We’re beginning to open up to a range of possibilities in order to find the perfect balance between customization, very high creativity standards, very high quality standards, but also co-creation and content creation networks. These three things cause disruption and that's why I'm at Itaú, that's why I came to work here.

The most important thing to me, and this is one of Itaú’s biggest goals today, is to have the most diverse team possible in all aspects of diversity, whether social, racial, ethnic, gender, and all. Because I believe that these people bring up things that neither colleges or courses, nor Harvard or Yale can teach, which is that pinch of determination, courage, discipline, which comes from having perspective. There's something we always say at Itaú, we say that we are more Itaú when we have more diverse perspectives. So the more diverse voices we have, the more Itaú we become. And it’s not only about Itaú, the same is true for any other company. The more people and different points of view we have, the stronger the company gets.