Ad Astra: André Moreira Leads from the Centre
In his prime, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a character of mythic stature. And to a young André Moreira, a comic book nerd growing up in Lisbon in the ‘80s, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer of his era appealed as a larger-than-life figure. “He had these goggles, almost like a comic book character,” says André, as well as extra-long shorts and extra-short socks. The all-star stood at 7’2”. He had the aura of a superhero. He even had a signature move – the Skyhook.
Surrounding this one figure was the broader basketball scene of the time. Intertwined with hip-hop culture, it popped with bold colours, was awash with brands like Nike and Gatorade and heroes like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. André’s aesthetic sense – on which he’s since built his career in advertising – was formed in no small part though that filter.
An only child obsessed with comics, drawing and building LEGO, André spent a lot of time alone, shaping his unique approach to creativity. “All of those things are constant sources of inspiration,” he says, speaking at the creative headquarters of T&P, where he now works as global chief creative officer. “I’m definitely someone who is driven by aesthetics. Comic books were something that, in the culture of the time, was really powerful. I was really drawn to that.”
Early on, he became as introverted as that set of interests would suggest. “I ticked all the boxes,” he chuckles. “The shy only child, a socially awkward teenager who lived in his head, like a lot of creatives do – which is good training for this job. But the danger is that you can get lost in your world.”
Plays, Not Players
Starting to play basketball helped him find confidence. “It was very useful for me to experience that, because it puts you in a situation where you have to deal with other people. You work as a team, and you start understanding the power of that.”
It’s a perspective that André’s career as an advertising creative has only reinforced. “Basketball offers something very similar to this job,” he says. “It offers a certain amount of self-expression and creativity within the confines of a team structure.”
Unlike sports with larger teams, like football or rugby, basketball needs five individuals on the court who work fluidly and creatively together. “The team talks a lot, and at the same time, it only works if it works together. So I do think it’s a good metaphor for a lot of what we do.”
His blend of teenage passions carried through into his advertising life. Starting as an art director in Portugal, he later advanced into creative direction, moving to London in 2007 and working on multinational client accounts including Peugeot, Huawei, Chivas Regal, Toyota, Lexus, Aon and Mars. Between 2023 and 2025, he looked after StudioX, WPP’s bespoke global network for Coca-Cola, overseeing creative output across multiple continents as CCO. “Being drawn to powerful visual stimuli is very helpful when you’re doing international, global work,” he says of comic book and basketball-influenced tastes. “The power of an image travels so fast and so strongly, especially nowadays. So I think being interested in everything with a certain aesthetic power has been super helpful during my career.”
When it comes to cinema, Stanley Kubrick is André’s biggest inspiration. When covid struck, he tried to build a refuge for himself in a corner of his home. “The first thing I did was put a lot of my heroes in that space. At home, there’ll always be three or four bits of Kubrick paraphernalia around me. Every shot is powerful in itself. I watch his films over and over again. The other day, we were watching ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ again. It has so many strong images that, with the right music, are so visceral. He’s always there for me.”
As an art director, the act of writing came later for André. But he’s had the confidence to confront that discomfort. “The more I progressed, the more I thought having a very succinct way of describing an idea was hugely helpful, especially when doing international work, where you have to sum it up in a very simple way,” he says. He’s pushed himself more in that direction, finding time to pursue journaling, eventually getting confident enough to put it out there into the world.
At the start of this year, André began publishing a series of journal entries on LinkedIn: ‘Diary of a CCO’. “One of the things I’ve felt as you progress in your career, especially when you get to a certain level, is that there’s really no manual. There’s not actually a lot of content out there about how to do your role, and how best to do your role,” he confesses. “Obviously you read interviews, you talk to people, you might listen to a podcast. But I just thought it could be interesting to share some of those learnings, because it might be helpful for someone else going in that same direction.”
For an industry in flux, his hope is that his reflections will serve as a point of view from someone who’s been through it, to hopefully encourage others that it’s worthwhile putting the effort in. It’s helped him too. “Just the process of sitting down and committing to it helps you process some of the things you go through. I find it quite cathartic, even, to go through that exercise and come out the other side feeling like I was able to process something. It’s helpful for me individually in that way. And I think a lot of what we do is so based on instinct, because of our experience. So, it’s good to force yourself to sit down, process it, and learn from it.”
Knitting a Fragmented World Together
Despite his shy beginnings sketching superheroes, André’s career has been much more like a basketball player’s, channelling energy between different individuals, coordinating strategy and connecting different types of creativity. In his first years at CHI&Partners, later to become The&Partnership, he played a key role on the Toyota account, where integrating many disciplines became foundational to his thinking. “The whole approach was about combining media, creative, production, and data in one team. That immediately appealed to me, because I really believe in that. It’s that combination of talent that can get you to the more unexpected, interesting ideas.”
That progressed to his StudioX role on Coca-Cola. André established himself as a connector of global talent and disciplines, liaising between the different creative leaders across continents, helping them to do their jobs and sharing ideas between teams. He revelled in finding a way of working that was delivering results in China that could find applications in Latin America.
All of that feeds into how he sees the T&P global CCO role, which he stepped into at the start of 2025.
T&P is an interesting brand within the WPP stable: big enough to be global, small enough to be personal, as André sees it. He personally knows every creative leader in the network. He’d like it to work as “a close-knit network in a fragmented world.” That closeness between teams in different countries is something he is really trying to push. “It could set us apart,” he ventures. He’s in no doubt that brands want their agencies to work like that.
Conveying thoughts and energy between teams has repeatedly delivered for André. At StudioX that took the form of ‘What’s Cooking’ sessions, where people in different parts of the world would share what they were working on. “A normal thing, but the twist I thought was interesting was that we always brought some of our clients to those meetings,” he says. “It was really interesting because I didn’t expect it to work in that way up front. In a big global organisation, sometimes amazing work is happening in, for example, Korea that no one knows about. Surfacing that work to the wider community and seeing how others reacted gave that team a huge boost. It also created competition with others, but most importantly, in a structure that was just starting, it was powerful because it made everyone feel their work was valued and appreciated.”
Someone in Latin America could see an idea from Africa and realise they could adapt it in their market. “For a business like Coca-Cola, that was transformational,” says André. “As you might imagine, there’s a lot of duplication across regions. Doing simple exercises like this not only created efficiencies but also surfaced smart learnings. And the coolest thing was seeing a small idea suddenly become a huge thing.”
One of the biggest insights that André carries with him from that time came from a client, Samir Bhutada, vice president - global digital experiences and commerce at Coca Cola: “One day, he was frustrated that we weren’t adopting work from each other as much as we should. He said, ‘If you look at internet culture, it’s a remix culture.’ As soon as he said that, it made me think of this really cool YouTube film, ‘Everything is a Remix’. It breaks down how the internet works in that way. One person creates a dance move with a song, everyone else takes it, does their own twist. And these things grow. No one in that process ever feels like they’re just copying. There’s excitement in bringing something to someone else’s idea. That was a really fresh insight for me, because in our world, it’s almost the opposite. It’s like, ‘That team had that idea, we cannot do that.’ I understand why, but at the same time, it made me think we should be much more open to remixing each other’s ideas.”
Alongside comics, ballers and Kubrick, André’s creativity pantheon also includes designer Thomas Heatherwick. “I just love how he goes from a chair to an Olympic cauldron, to a mega-development like Hudson Yards,” says the creative chief. “And I love his ethos that it’s all just a three-dimensional object. It might be huge, it might be small, but it’s still the same principle.”
You might find the designer’s recent book ‘Humanise’ on André’s desk among the film’s memorabilia. The premise is something he finds as at odds with advertising’s conventional thinking as Samir’s insight about remixes: The world has conformed to a certain type of aesthetic – minimalistic, plain. In Heatherwick’s view – very boring and cold. He says we need to humanise. Which means ensuring that each object you create is something you can personally relate to as an individual. “It might be that it has a ridge you touch when you hold it, that suddenly gives you a certain feeling a regular cup wouldn’t. Or when you’re walking past a building, there’s a texture on the wall that catches your attention, and suddenly that building has life. I find that idea of humanising the landscape around us very applicable to our world. Because we produce so much clutter that is anything but human,” says André. Embracing those idiosyncrasies is something he’d love the agency network to lean into more.
Mechanised Magic
For years, its former chief executive Sarah Golding was vocal about her ‘Magic and the Machines’ agenda. And much of T&P’s most iconic work in the past decade has been harnessing both. Look at the Lexus hoverboard from 2015, through to using AI to create bespoke messages from José Mourinho for Snickers. “That kind of thing is a big part of our DNA,” says André of his agency’s unique flavour. “I’d say we do it with a more human touch than others. There are other places which are even more in the innovation world. But it almost feels like hardcore innovation. I think we’re probably closer to the blend of storytelling and technology — more pure creativity, storytelling and tech together.”
The new platform for British Gas – ‘Taking Care of Things’-- illustrated that blend earlier this summer, introducing a new family of fluffy brand mascots for the energy provider. “A big part of what we’re trying to do has a technology component, because we’re building all of those characters from scratch. It’s a huge CG job. But it feels really human and down to earth. And we’re building them in a way that allows us to be much more relevant and agile – part of culture.” If something happens in the world, the assets are built to respond quickly. That could be energy price rises, or an episode of ‘Coronation Street’ that becomes unusually popular. “We can have the family respond to it,” says André. “The end result is better because we combined really insightful, human writing and thinking with the latest hacks in CG – and did it in a way that allows us to move fast.”
Sometimes the blend has nothing to do with tech innovation, but media innovation. Like turning Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wardrobe choices into a media platform for the Estonian Ministry of Defence. “I’m getting chills even now,” says the CCO about the moment the project really realised its potential. “He’s standing in front of Parliament, wearing this sweatshirt with ‘Will to Fight’ in Estonian. Everyone rises immediately from their seats. And because it’s on TV, there’s this huge swell of support for the cause. Everyone in the country was part of it. A huge idea. For me, it’s the symbol of a small team really connected in its different components. Out of that comes a creative idea, which is a media idea, which is a commerce idea.”
This is the core of André’s philosophy: leadership through connection, facilitation and humanisation. Far from the introverted kid sketching out imagined adventures of superheroes in his room, he’s a creative team player. But unlike Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he’s not the top-scoring finisher. More like Magic Johnson, he’s the playmaker. As a youngster, basketball shaped him to become the kind of leader that a network centred around an ampersand really needs – a connector.
“The more I did it, the more I really fell in love with the idea of teams, group dynamics and how these things work. In my day-to-day, I still imagine all of this as a big game. We have our team, we’re playing against that team, and each of us is trying to pitch in any way we can. The reality of basketball is that the best teams are greater than the sum of their parts.”
It was T&P’s ‘The Power of &’ philosophy that attracted André to the agency from the get-go. “From the first conversation I had with people here, the thought of ‘The Power of &’ came across,” he recalls. “And immediately, even without knowing much about the place, I felt a connection there – because it’s something that I’ve always, on the one hand, craved, and on the other hand, believed in. I’m a big believer that the output will be better if we approach it that way – the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts.”
