A conversation with Edwar Jaramillo, WhereNext’s creative director.

In an advertising career spanning over two decades, Edwar Jaramillo cut his teeth at several Madison Avenue firms, helping their clients sell beauty creams, credit cards, and even toilet seats.

In 2022, he led a government-funded campaign called “Colombia, the Most Welcoming Place on Earth,” which helped to boost investment and tourism in the South American country. The work was inspired by research in which visitors to Colombia stated that friendliness was one of the outstanding characteristics of Colombian people.

In 2023, as ProColombia’s creative director, he worked with WhereNext to develop Colombia’s Cannes-award-winning Finding Encanto campaign.

Two months ago, Jaramillo joined WhereNext. As our creative director, he leads multiple campaigns that promote sustainable development in Colombia and worldwide—including Destination Nature, a forty-million-dollar effort to develop nature tourism in areas of the country that were hit heavily by the nation’s armed conflict.

We spoke with Jaramillo about how his work positively affects Colombia’s tourism prospects and the impact smaller, localized businesses like WhereNext are making in the global development and creative services industry.

How do you feel about your new role in WhereNext?

I’m very happy to be here because we are doing work that makes an impact. And we are not inventing stories, as happens often when you work with manufactured goods. Because our clients are innately purpose-driven, we focus on amplifying and communicating their existing narratives.

For example, I once worked with a beauty cream, and we built a fictional lab for their commercial. None of it was real—the lab, the people in it, nothing.

But here, it’s different.

With a tourism project I’m working on called Destination Nature (more below), we are helping communities in Colombia affected by the armed conflict identify, develop, and market attractions that already exist. The destinations we are talking about are real. The prehistoric paintings in the caves near San Jose del Guaviare are not made up with Photoshop. The travel experiences in these regions and the local people benefiting from a new sustainable tourism economy are not things you can fake through artificial intelligence.

What kind of projects are you handling at WhereNext?

I have been very involved with Destination Nature, which is almost an extension of what I was doing at ProColombia when we developed the Most Welcoming Place on Earth campaign.

Destination Nature encourages people to visit places that are still not very well known, even by Colombians, because they used to be conflict zones. We are inspiring Colombians and foreigners to fall in love with these places.

My work now is very different from selling potato chips—which is something that can be bad for someone’s health. The work we are doing here helps to promote the sustainable development of some parts of Colombia. We help people and tourism-related companies get their message out. We are encouraging a regenerative form of tourism that also has the potential to protect the biodiversity of these regions.

How are you trying to achieve that? How will you convince people to get out to often-overlooked places?

We are working on a campaign that will challenge people to get out there. The idea is to turn something negative, a societal fear of these places because of their unfortunate history, into an opportunity for positive communication.

So, is the challenge to break with negative stigmas?

Yes. For tourists to go there, it’s as simple as making the unknown more known, challenging people to visit the unknown, and doing so in a responsible way that benefits the local community and ecosystem as much, if not more, than the traveler.

How do you see the future of tourism in Colombia?

Tourism is growing in the country and will continue to do so. The recent peace deal between Colombia and the FARC guerilla group has made the country more appealing and helped to change the perception of international travelers. National travelers, who may have gone to Miami for a vacation a decade ago, are choosing to explore their own country in increasing numbers. Colombia has advantages, such as its mega-diverse natural history, geography, culture, and music, that help it stand out.

In some parts of Colombia, tourism can also become a sustainable development alternative so that people work with visitors instead of working with illegal logging or illegal crops.

What other kinds of campaigns are you leading?

We have been working with Swiss Contact, an international development agency that runs projects that help farmers who work with crops like coffee or cacao become more competitive. Their project is called “Making Colombia More Competitive.” Our client wants to communicate their achievements without sounding pretentious.

So, we developed a campaign called the “C + C Effect.” We are developing communications showing that cacao has displaced coca in a certain community, which is “the C + C effect.” More opportunities for women to work in a particular village are part of the “C+C effect.”

As I said before, this kind of work differs from selling products for mass consumption. We are promoting what people on the ground are doing and helping them to amplify their message. Internally, we call this “storydoing” rather than “storytelling.”

Big New York City and Washington, D.C.-based companies have traditionally dominated Advertising and Global Development. What kind of an impact are smaller businesses like WhereNext making?

With a company like WhereNext, there is greater specialization in a particular niche. And there is a more intimate knowledge of each client and their goals. Our creative studio, production house, and communications agency are integrated with our global development consultancy. That gives added value to our clients because our consultancy doesn’t need to subcontract out video production, graphic design, audio podcasts, or copywriting, for example. We avoid the “broken telephone effect” between multiple subcontractors and are more consistent and speedy across our client’s communication channels.

Another exciting thing about WhereNext is that we now export Colombian talent to projects in other countries worldwide. For example, our project with the FSC Indigenous Foundation in Panama is run by our Colombian project management group. This team brings an intimate regional perspective and street smarts to the project that some of our US or European-based competitors lack when working in the Americas.

I’m also working on a new WhereNext product called “A Sea of Opportunities,” a nautical tourism consulting package targeted at global development firms and government ministries in Latin America. Our Colombian-based consultants lead that program.

We’re noticing a greater demand for companies like ours. For example, you can see it in the increased number of contracts issued by global development funds where only small or regional businesses located where the work will occur are permitted to apply. These contracts are labeled “small business set-asides” or “localized bids.”

How do you get the most out of your team?

My team is split into two groups. We have a creative group with graphic designers, copywriters, videographers, and editors. And we have a project management group constantly communicating with our clients.

The project managers give our creative team information on the client's needs, and we start designing the content and creating messages.

But both teams are really content creators, and ideas can come from either group. This flat hierarchy and openness to ideation allow us to have solid communication and be good friends in and outside the office.

As WhereNext’s creative director, I don’t see myself as the guy who has to come up with all the ideas but as the one who can recruit and administer talent. If I come up with ideas, that’s great. But it's even more important to encourage a working environment where team members propose ideas and those ideas are respected and listened to.

Finally, what do you do when you’re not working for WhereNext?

Last year, I started designing micro-terrariums. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own, and I’m now making and selling them in small quantities.