Brazil’s high-profile Peralta agency looks for new partners in life after StrawberryFrog

It’s over a year now since Peralta founder and CEO Alexandre Peralta (pictured) expunged (literally so) the StrawberryFrog images sprayed all over the interior of his Sao Paulo hotshop. How’s he getting on in the wake of his split with mercurial and moody SF panjandrum Scott Goodson?

The other day I caught up with him and had a chance to find out.

Peralta, it may be recalled, is a copywriter by background who worked at some of the big multinational agencies such as DDB before moving to local Brazilian agency, Africa, as its creative director. When he set up shop with New York-based Goodson in 2007, the idea behind SFPeralta was to provide Goodson’s micro-network with an arm in the booming BRIC market and Peralta with access to international clients.

It didn’t quite work out like that. Peralta did indeed acquire international clients, such as PepsiCo’s snack business – but no thanks to StrawberryFrog, which became increasingly beset by financial and managerial crises. The result was an amicable (well, more or less) decision to go their own ways. Goodson needed the money (he had a 30 per cent strategic stake in SFPeralta, but no managerial interest) and Peralta felt his agency would be better off without him.

Rightly so, it turns out. At the time, the Peralta Sao Paulo business had revenues of about $8.5m and was growing 50 per cent a year. It has won new international business, including Bacardi Brasil (Martini and Grey Goose) and two Mondelez brands (i.e. Kraft of yore); more business from existing clients Pirelli and Natura; plus Vigor – the Brazilian dairy company giant. So much so that the agency is putting in place for the first time a chief operating officer.

The new COO is Jairo Soares, a partner and media vice-president of Peralta these past five years.

At the time Alexandre Peralta dissolved the StrawberryFrog link, his agency was being actively courted by MDC-owned CP&B. Nothing came of that overture, and Peralta Sao Paulo retains its independence. However, the founder remains open-minded on the need for a collaborator:

“An international partner can be welcome in the future if it is capable of improving our portfolio even more,” Peralta tells me.

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This post first appeared on Stuart Smith’s blog The Politics of Marketing.