Mexico reveals and rebels 🇲🇽

Yesterday, someone asked me what it was like to move to Mexico to work in advertising. And I thought to myself: moving isn't just about changing countries; it’s about changing the way you look at things.

Because Mexico doesn’t just “welcome” you. Mexico reveals you.

It reveals what you thought you knew, your small certainties, the prejudices you thought were filed away, and your automatic ways of working. It reveals that advertising doesn't travel intact: it gets contaminated, it stretches, it transforms into something else when it touches a culture that pulses differently.

And it also rebels you. It rebels against your habits, against your instruction manual, and against that silent comfort you carry around without even noticing. There’s something about Mexico that gently unsettles you: it asks you to look a little closer, to listen a little better.

It’s not just a “big” market; that word is too small for it. It’s a living market, full of tensions that don’t show up in decks but do appear during long conversations after a meal, in the streets, and in the way tradition and the future coexist without asking for permission.

And that’s where I discovered something I didn’t know I needed to know:

Coming from the outside doesn’t take anything away from you; it compels you. To ask the questions others have stopped asking. To see the signals that become invisible to those who grew up here. To walk with the awkwardness of a newcomer, but also with the respect of someone who knows they are entering a vast culture.

If Mexico is giving me anything, it’s this: A new, almost shy way of listening.

And in advertising—even if we sometimes forget—wasn’t listening always more revolutionary than speaking?