PJ PEREIRA [AI & Advertising]

[SEASON ONE]>-<[EPISODE ONE]

Welcome to the first issue of POP ROCK DISCO.

So…what is POP ROCK DISCO (PRD)?

In short, PRD 🪩 is an ongoing publication that captures creative work in real time. We bring together industry-leading creative professionals to discuss their current work.

Not an interview. Not an after-the-fact press junket. Real conversations with real creatives about what’s working and what’s not…in real time.

PRD isn't built around a release schedule. Creative work doesn't always happen on a fixed timeline, so neither does its documentation. New episodes arrive when there's something genuinely worth documenting and sharing, but the publication itself is always active (stay connected on Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn).

Right now, that means two components of the PRD ecosystem:

As for me, my name is Vince, and I’m the creator of PRD 🪩 and its first-season host.

In a nutshell, I’m a former executive producer and head of creative media at Google turned serial media founder who understands the pace, pressure, and complexity of high-level creative work from the inside.

In today’s media, most interviews happen after the work is done and it’s been polished, explained, and packaged into a repeatable story. I want something different with PRD. I want to talk to creative professionals who are pushing the boundaries of their industries while they’re still inside the work. Inside the mess, the chaos, the ambiguity. To bring people inside the creative process as it unfolds.

As for our inaugural issue, we welcome advertising legend PJ Pereira, Creative Chairman at Pereira O'Dell and Founder of Silverside AI, an AI innovation lab spun out of Pereira O’Dell focused on helping the world’s best brands revolutionize their marketing ecosystems.

PJ is a pioneer at the intersection of advertising, technology, and entertainment, and he’s spent the last two years at Silverside rebuilding the way creative work is actually made.

In this conversation, we discuss topics such as exactly which "permanent" rules of the advertising industry turned out not to be permanent at all, why he spends at least 20% of his time helping the larger industry navigate this AI technology transition, and, when it comes to big corporations with AI, how we can “take those fuckers down” as independent creatives.

PJ’s working on the edge of AI creative technology right now and is pushing the limits more than most - it was a fantastic conversation. : )

For the full experience, you can watch the video episode on our new YouTube channel here.

You can also listen to the full podcast episode here.

As a final note, this project was born from a deep love for the creative experience and creative people. If POP ROCK DISCO is your vibe, we’d be honored and grateful if you shared our world with your world to help keep it going. 🪩 🪩 🪩

When you’re done reading, listening, and watching😉, let me know what you think by replying to this email (ALL are read) - I’d love to hear from you.

Welcome to POP ROCK DISCO season one!

— Vince

Open Tabs is where we round up what's still unresolved for guests - the ideas, questions, and projects they’re actively working through right now.

Here are PJ’s top 3 OPEN TABS:

PJ grew up in Brazil watching Coca-Cola's holiday trucks roll through the streets of Rio, completely unaware, as a kid, that the same trucks were doing the same thing in cities all over the world, at the same time. Years later, working on his first big project at Silverside, that childhood memory became the pitch.

The technology couldn't beat a real camera crew at the thing Coca-Cola already did well - capturing the warmth of a truck rolling past, a kid running up to it. PJ didn't try to compete there.

It was supposed to be a single YouTube video — one minute, seven seconds, never meant to run anywhere else.

It happened again the following year (2025), with a different piece of the campaign. Same pattern: built for one purpose, scaled into something much bigger once it proved itself. The point PJ comes back to isn't "AI made it cheaper." It's what it let them attempt in the first place.

Every industry runs on assumptions nobody questions - until something forces them to. PJ Pereira has spent the past two years finding out which of advertising's "permanent" rules were never actually permanent.

Here are five rules PJ's flipped completely.

More Time = Better Craft → Less Time = Better Craft

The old logic was simple: rushed work is worse work. PJ doesn't believe that anymore. Give a project too much runway now, and the underlying technology might leap forward mid-project, forcing you to redo everything you already built.

It shows up in a literal way: PJ now finds himself asking clients to shorten their timelines and watching them get visibly confused. "You're the creative. You're supposed to be asking for more time."

2. Production Is Sequential → Production Is Cyclical

The entire ad industry has run on one model since the 1960s: brief, then locked script, then shoot, then edit, then post. One step closes before the next opens - Henry Ford's factory floor, applied to creative work.

At Silverside, there's no such thing as "locked." Work moves in 2-3-day loops - revise, reshoot, re-edit, repeat - until the clock runs out and you ship.

According to Periera, this requires clients to move at the same speed. "We tell our clients that if they don't change the way that they (work), they cannot take full advantage of what this is bringing to them."

More Risk = Slower Decisions → Lower Risk = Faster Decisions

Big creative bets used to mean real money and real exposure - which meant fewer of them, decided slowly and carefully. PJ says that calculus has flipped because the cost of testing an idea has collapsed.

He points to a specific moment when this became clear to him: a client liked an idea his team had pitched alongside the one the client asked for, just to see what would happen.

Copywriter + Art Director = The Team → Concept Creative + Film Director = The Team

Bill Bernbach paired copywriters with art directors in the 1960s, and the industry has used that same configuration ever since.

The reasoning is that the moment an idea exists, it's already in production. There's no longer a clean handoff between "the idea" and "the making of the idea", so the team has to be built around that, from day one.

Reading About It = understanding it → Doing It = Understanding It

PJ's sharpest critique isn't aimed at people who are skeptical of AI; it's aimed at people making big decisions about it from a distance.

His point cuts both ways: at executives who outsource their understanding to a report, and at the industry's broader posture toward AI in general.