Marketing That Scales or Marketing That Dies: Inside LATAM War Rooms Where Playbooks Collapse | by Alexis Soubran | Aug, 2025
I thought my job was scaling ads. It turned out my job was fighting in war rooms where global playbooks break.
By Alexis Soubran, CEO of Minimalist Agency
⸻
I’ve been in this industry for 12 years.
Thousands of campaigns. Hundreds of different minds.
Here’s a truth: most marketing conversations are theater.
We argue about clicks, impressions, “engagement.” Meanwhile, the CFO leans back and asks: “Where’s the money?”
Growth doesn’t come from dashboards. It comes from war rooms — messy, tense, collaborative spaces where vanity metrics die, and finance and marketing finally speak the same language: payback.
⸻
Principle 1: Don’t Chase Cheap Users. Optimize Payback Time.
The fintech case we remember was Bitso.
The war room was awesome:
• Marketing pushing for lower CPA.
• Finance demanding profitability.
• Product worried about churn.
The pivot wasn’t mine alone. It was a team reframing exercise:
• Performance leads rebuilt bidding.
• Analysts fed “first deposit completed” as the new signal.
• Finance validated the LTV math.
• Product ops fixed onboarding leaks.
Yes, CPA went up. But payback time collapsed.
A $50 user depositing $200 in week one is worth 10 “cheap installs” that never convert.
That was the turning point: Bitso turned ad spend into cash flow, not sunk cost.
This is performance marketing LATAM when done right.
⸻
Principle 2: Influencers Are Not Ads. They’re Assets.
Influencer marketing ROI is misunderstood. Treating it as “buying posts” is why so many brands waste money.
With SharkNinja, our war room strategy was to turn creators into long-term brand ambassadors.
• Influencer managers sourced credibility-first profiles: baristas for coffee machines, chefs for blenders, parents for vacuums.
• Creative leads killed scripts. Real life only.
• Analysts caught the magic: a mazapán ice cream hack with the Ninja CREAMi that beat KPIs by 515%.
• Media buyers scaled it on Meta, CTV, and retail PDPs.
The win wasn’t from a single “post.” It was from a shared team asset that kept driving sales months later.
That’s what influencer marketing ROI really looks like.
⸻
Boardroom Flashpoints: How Teams Survive the Pressure
Every war room I’ve sat in shares the same DNA: panic, politics, and eventual alignment.
The Sacred Playbook Fight
• Global CMO: “This spot crushed it in Germany. Launch in Mexico next week.”
• Local performance lead: “That kind of humor doesn’t land here. We’ll burn 70% of budget in two weeks.”
• Team solution: Test with 10% spend. Let the consumer’s wallet decide.
The Panic Metric Fight
• Regional director: “CPL is up 15%! Shut it down.”
• Analyst: “Yes, but CAC is down 25%. Payback time is a month faster.”
• Outcome: Finance reframed reporting. Campaign stayed live.
These weren’t “guru calls.” They were collective war room decisions that saved millions.
⸻
The Only Conversation That Matters
Growth marketing isn’t about dashboards or shiny tools.
It’s about teams with the courage and the data to flip the question from:
“How much does it cost?”
to
“How much value does it create, and how fast do we get it back?”
That’s the war room conversation that decides if marketing scales — or dies.
