Gustavo Fonseca

I grew up in Brazil, studied web marketing, and moved to London with the intention of staying a few years. That was over 20 years ago.

I left London for Málaga a few years ago. My little family is the centre of it. Two boys, a love for sailing in Croatia when summer allows, and a snowboard that gets used more than it should. I do the same work, at the same level, from a much better view.

London shaped how I think about this work. I didn't learn performance marketing in a classroom. I learned it by running campaigns for some of the world's most recognised brands: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, DC Comics, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, WWE, Back to the Future. Global audiences, multiple franchises at once, subscription models, one-off purchases. The kind of breadth that forces you to stop thinking in templates and start thinking in principles.

From there I moved into automotive, leading digital strategy and lead generation for Renault. A completely different world. In e-commerce, someone either buys or they don't. In automotive, a customer might spend six months in your funnel before they walk into a showroom. I learned to read signals differently, to build programmes that kept people warm across a much longer journey.

Somewhere in between all of this, my best friend and I started building something. Not in an office, not with funding. After work, over coffee at Pret a Manger on Victoria Street. Every evening, tired from the day, but we kept going. The idea was a blockchain-based platform for distributed teams: work gets delivered, payment gets released automatically through smart contracts, no middleman, no disputes. It was ahead of its time. A group in India acquired the platform and the underlying technology before it had even launched. I was not yet 30.

That changed things. Not because of the money, but because of what it made possible. I had done well early. The question became what to do with that. The answer was One Love Gallery, a charity that sells art to fund humanitarian projects. Nine completed so far across Africa, Asia and Brazil: orphanages, water wells, community infrastructure. I wanted to give something back before I was too busy to remember why it mattered.

Today I lead performance marketing at Classy Agency in the US, managing multi-million pound campaigns across Google, Meta and Shopping for e-commerce brands. I care as much about building the team as I do about the results. People who understand the work deeply produce better outcomes. That's not a soft belief, it shows in the numbers.

The goal has always been simple: build things that help the people around me. Better experiences, better digital tools, better ways to track engagement and improve what is not working. Make things that people actually want to use. I keep building because it makes me a better strategist. You understand what is possible when you have had to make it work yourself.

I write here because thinking in public forces clarity. If you're reading this and want to talk, I'm at gustavo@fons3ca.com or on LinkedIn.