199: Arturo Nuñez (Nubank)

Arturo Nuñez on Innovation City

“Great advertising communication is when the customer sees themselves reflected.” -Arturo Nuñez

Welcome to Season 6 of Innovation City (The Miami Edition), a podcast featuring innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency and Aīre Ventures, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community.

Welcome to Season 6 of Innovation City (The Miami Edition), a podcast featuring innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency and Aīre Ventures, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community.

Today’s guest is Arturo Nuñez, Chief Marketing Office at Nubank, the world’s largest independent digital bank. Nuñez’s impressive career in marketing spans decades of working for the NBA, Nike, APPLE, and other corporate giants. In this episode, Nuñez sits down with the team to discuss the art of storytelling in marketing, building emotional connections, and how to make brands accessible to all consumers.

They discuss:

 

Arturo’s Superpower

• Connecting people and putting people together 
• Arturo believes that your quality of life depends on the quality of your relationships. 

Origin Story

• Arturo started working in corporate America at age 16. He was always trying to connect the dots for people that they couldn’t see in an attempt to attract ethnic customers and people of color. 

Arturo’s Career Journey

• Arturo’s journey started with a meeting at In Roads Northern New Jersey, where he observed an Afro-Latino man in a business suit for the first time. That organization and encounter changed his life. 
• Joined the program at In Roads New Jersey and ended up at Johnson & Johnson in marketing through their internship program. 
• After college, due to his internships and experience, he went on to gain numerous prominent marketing positions for companies like Colgate Palmolve, Pepsi-Co, Nike, APPLE, and the NBA. 
• After he thought he was retiring, Arturo went on to do passion projects like opening a restaurant in LA, a bar in Miami, and then his own consulting firm. 
• Arturo’s current position is the CMO of NuBank, an amazing company that’s disrupting banking as we know it. 

NBA Stories

• David Stern really professionalized basketball and he had a vision that it was going to be international. He thought by telling the stories of athletes he could inspire more people to play the game. He was right, and Arturo got to be part of this epic journey.
• By the time Arturo left the NBA, there were 19 Latino players in the NBA. 
• During his career, he got to travel to to China with Kobe Bryant and there were 35,000 fans outside the hotel and they were fined by China for having an unpermitted event. 

What have you learned about the power of creating access to brands?

• Any great marketer, is a storyteller.
• There’s a myth in marketing that products need to be aspirational, which is code for, don’t talk about the people. You need to reflect the people to be successful. 
• If you can reflect the people, you can build emotional connections with people and that is the key. 

Inspiring Marketing Campaigns 

• One of Arturo’s favorite campaigns was Proctor and Gamble’s Mother’s Day Olympics Campaign, which he didn’t work on. He just admired its genius. 
• Arturo believes that great advertising is when the customer can see themselves clearly reflected. 
• One of Arturo’s favorite campaigns he ever worked on was with LeBron James when he moved to Miami and was seen as a pariah. They worked on a campaign called “training day” inspired by Muhammad Ali. Arturo became one of the first people to humanize LeBron with this campaign. 

What’s different about being an entrepreneur?

• Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone and it’s no glamorous feat. 
• When you’re an entrepreneur you have to wear all the hats; you’re responsible for everything. You don’t have a huge budget with people running around doing things for you. 
• You have to just keep persevering and getting back up.

Lightning Round:

• What did you learn from your biggest regret?
  • The importance of being of your word
• What makes you feel loved?
  • Wife and children, feeling something that is not transactional
• What risk are you happy that you took?
  • As an immigrant, every single time I left one job to go to another, my parents were like, “what?” Each move was a risk, but no risk no reward. Staying in your comfort zone is no way to grow.
• What was your childhood dream?
  • Arturo wanted to be a lawyer

Get in Touch

Email: arturo@aiecreative.com