Six Things You Didn't Know About David's Anselmo Ramos

Anselmo Ramos is making a big move from Brazil to Miami to lead the first U.S. office of David, the WPP international startup he founded with Ogilvy Latin America colleagues Gaston Bigio and Fernando Musa in 2011. The trio initially held dual roles at David and Ogilvy, enabling Mr. Ramos to also mastermind the stellar Dove Real Beauty "Sketches" campaign. Now the chief creative officer and co-founder of David is fulltime at the startup agency, whose biggest clients in the U.S. are Burger King and Coca-Cola. Here are a few things you don't know about him in the latest installment of "Six Things." 1. "We live in a hotel." Despite moving his entire family to Miami in August, they don't have a home yet. Mr. Ramos and his wife Camila, a chef, are living in a Miami hotel with daughters Helena, 12, and Stella, 7, and a dog and a cat. (At least there's a bar. Back in Sao Paulo, he started a negroni cocktail club to enjoy his signature drink). 2. "I'm proud to be an American." Mr. Ramos became a U.S. citizen after working in New York and Miami for eight years, before Ogilvy lured him back to his native Brazil in 2007 as chief creative officer. 3. "I love Jean-Claude Van Damme." He's a big fan from way back, and adopted "No Retreat, No Surrender," one of his hero's movie titles, as his motto. "They're bad movies but they move me, and I'd been asking my creatives to do something with Jean-Claude Van Damme. When I saw Epic Split [for Volvo Trucks], I wanted to kill myself." 4. "I grew up knitting." In Sao Paulo he attended a Waldorf school, where there are no tests and the emphasis was on activities like knitting and sculpting. As a kid, he knit socks, sweaters and even a flute case, but says friends who claim he goes home every night and knits are really just kidding. 5. "I love self-help books, those cheesy books you buy at airports." He has a whole collection, and reads them all. The latest addition, acquired on a recent business trip to New York, is Emily Post's "The Etiquette Advantage in Business: Personal Skills for Professional Success." 6. "I'm a screenwriter on the side, and every Monday night I sit down and write; it's sacred." He's written three unproduced screenplays in Sao Paulo over the last three years. They were in Portuguese, but now that he's back in the U.S., the next one will be set in Miami and written in English.

Six Things You Didn't Know About David's Anselmo Ramos

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