He’s so skirt! Meet advertising’s Jorge Brunet-Garcia

For the past seven years, the team at Brunet-Garcia has worked to provide a multicultural approach to the advertising world.

The advertising agency started with two employees and now has about 17. The client base has grown as well and includes accounts in Brazil, numerous states and some of the largest companies in Jacksonville, including Haskell and Interline.

Skirt! recently talked to Jorge Brunet-Garcia, president and CEO of Brunet-Garcia, about the agency, its unique window displays and its commitment to clean up the block around its offices.

 

How is Brunet-Garcia different from other agencies?

We started the agency focusing on minorities. As the agency grew, we realized we had a lot of mainstream clients, as well as minority clients. We started reflecting more and more the changes in society. The focused change from being Hispanic-centric to being more multicultural. … As the agency developed, we became more and more a mirror of society — both in personnel and in the way we approached advertising.

 

Do you think the agency mirrors what is going on in Jacksonville?

I think to an extent it does. We’re probably more of a microcosm because of the way we have approached the business. We are somewhat reflective of Jacksonville society, I think more pronounced.

 

You always have unique window displays. Why are those important to you?

We started with the Super Bowl. When the Super Bowl came to Jacksonville, we were situated in a thoroughfare where a lot of people were going by our window. We had just started our business, and we thought, well, it would be a great way to advertise without having to pay for advertising. We did a graphic of a soccer ball that had laces like a football. We used the saying, “Are you ready for some futbol?” It looked like Latin American football. That was a big hit. We got a lot of press with that, and we thought, wow, that’s pretty clever. We kept using those windows as display — like Cinco de Mayo celebration, we did a jar of mayonnaise and called it “Cinco Mayo.” People as they went through started looking for these things.

 

Didn’t the agency just win some awards?

Yes, we had a great year. We started the year by winning an international award, Felicity, for some of the work we’ve been doing around the neighborhood. It’s a program called Block by Block, which basically is an activist-type movement where we go out and clean our block and tell the people next to us that they should do the same thing, and here’s the materials to do it. It creates a better place to live and work. We’ve been doing that for about a year here on Hendricks [Avenue] … We won the largest number of ADDYs locally. We went to regional and won the largest number regionally, and then we went to the national ADDY Awards and we won a total of five awards. That was the largest number of awards won by any agency.

 

Why do you think you’ve been so successful?

I think that everything this year just clicked. Plus, I think we’ve been a lot more aggressive in entering shows. I think up until this year, we’ve been very busy trying to grow the agency and to really focus on where our business model really is. And then we felt that this year was a good time to start showing everybody else who we were.

 

Tracy Jones: (904) 359-4272