Clio Creative Summit: Mischief's Bianca Guimaraes Recounts Her Personal Journey

Join us on Oct. 16 in NYC for the 2023 Clio Creative Summit. The industry’s most celebrated and forward-thinking voices will gather to share the tools, ideas and practices that propelled their work to the forefront of the business. You’ll hear from visionaries about how to build a career that supercharges your strengths. You’ll learn to harness the power of creativity to unlock the potential of new technologies and so much more. Click here to register.

Bianca Guimaraes of creative hot-shop Mischief will sit on our “Building a Bridge to the Next Generation Through Mentorship and Community” panel.

Bianca Guimaraes traveled a long road to serve as partner and ECD at Mischief USA. She hails from Brazil, and her career journey included overcoming issues of language and acclimating to life in a new country.

Guimaraes got started in the U.S. after landing a three-month gig at JWT N.Y. Her main goal at the time was to convince management that she could add value so they’d hire her full-time. 

In the end, she landed a salaried position, spending four-and-a-half years working her way up to art director.

During year two, the ad maven received her first accolades for a project backing Band-Aid. 

“That put me on the map as a creative and tons of opportunities inside and outside came from it,” Guimaraes recalls.

Helping build Mischief into an adland player has been her most rewarding career experience. 

“I never imagined that moving to the U.S. would lead me to open an agency with the people I admired the most in this business,” says Guimaraes. “When we first started, the only goal was doing the kind of work that we love, and building the kind of agency we always wanted to work for.”

Her journey in advertising posed plenty of challenges. When Guimaraes first arrived, the biggest barrier was language. Though she spoke excellent English, brainstorming and conveying ideas in a second language was much harder than expected.

“When I tried to make jokes around the office, I’d lose the timing of them or trip on my words,” she says. “So for a while, I decided to put my sense of humor and personality to the side and just focus on communicating clearly. With time I became more comfortable and, trust me, nowadays I’m hilarious.” 

Growing up, Guimaraes couldn’t envision fitting into the traditional corporate world. So, finding a niche where she could express herself using creative ideas and visual language was paramount.

“I chose advertising through a process of elimination,” says Guimaraes. “I knew what I did not want to do. As we say at Mischief, the things we say ‘yes’ to shape us but the things we say ‘no’ to define us. That was pretty much the case for me.”