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Next week marks five years of Lento. I started the business in Latin America, built the first team there, and spent the better part of a decade calling it home — some of the best years of my life, if I'm honest.

This week our team has been pulling late nights prepping our LATAM clients' Cannes entries, and somewhere between the briefs and the time zones I found myself thinking about what that place actually taught me about creative work, and why the industry is only now waking up to something that was never lost.

I've been lucky enough to work alongside some of the most talented people I've ever met. Every day I'm grateful for the people from this region who are part of the Lento team. I genuinely believe in what's coming out of Latin America — not as a trend, not as a moment, but as something that's been building for a very long time.

I wrote it down and turned into this week's feature. I hope it does justice to the people who deserve the credit.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

I moved to Buenos Aires in 2018. Seven years was long enough for the novelty to wear off and the real texture of the place to reveal itself.

A video editor rebuilding an entire campaign on a Tuesday because the peso dropped overnight and the production budget was suddenly worth 60 percent of what it had been on Monday. A pitch where a team presented five genuinely different creative directions — not five variations of one idea, five actual directions — in the time a London agency would have spent getting the brief approved. What looks like chaos from the outside is a different kind of discipline. One built by people who decided uncertain conditions weren't a reason to produce uncertain work.

The industry is catching on. Bad Bunny performed the Super Bowl halftime show entirely in Spanish to 128.2 million people who didn't need a translation to feel it — the first solo Latino to headline it, the first halftime set performed almost entirely in Spanish. Brazil was named Creative Country of the Year at Cannes 2025, first time ever. GUT Buenos Aires was Independent Agency of the Year. Wagner Moura was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars for The Secret Agent, a film shot entirely in Portuguese — the first Brazilian man in history nominated in that category. The coverage called all of this a breakthrough. People who had never been south of Miami suddenly had opinions about Latin American creativity.

Latin America's creative dominance isn't a moment. It's a hundred years of extraordinary people building something remarkable, largely without an audience paying attention. Now you're paying attention. The question is whether you understand what you're looking at.

👉 Read the full piece

The caption read: glowy skin starts from within — hydration, sleep, and my new morning routine. The linked routine was a $340 vitamin C serum, a $95 gua sha tool, and an eye cream promising to address "volume loss." The face in the photo looked extraordinary. Rested in a way sleep doesn't achieve. Lifted in a way serum can't manage. The comments filled with women asking which step made the biggest difference.

Nobody asked the obvious question. We've collectively agreed not to.

38 million. That's how many cosmetic procedures plastic surgeons performed worldwide last year, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery — a 42.5% increase over four years. Eyelid surgery, which subtly refreshes the upper eye area in ways concealer cannot, has overtaken liposuction for the first time as the most common surgical procedure globally. Facial bone contouring is up 44% in twelve months. These aren't fringe practices. They're established, increasingly sophisticated, and widely accepted.

Now put those numbers next to the sentences appearing in every publication that employs a beauty editor. The era of natural beauty has returned. Women are dissolving their fillers. Nobody wants to look done anymore. Both narratives run simultaneously, often in the same publication, sometimes in adjacent articles. The result isn't confusion. It's a reframing.

Bella Hadid spent years attributing visible changes in her face to growth, makeup, and time. When she eventually acknowledged having a nose job as a teenager, the admission didn't introduce new information — it confirmed what everyone had already perceived. The procedure itself was never the point of tension. The tension lived in the years of explanation that belonged to an entirely different category than what anyone's eyes were registering.

She's not alone. Watch any interview where a woman in her late forties looks impossibly smooth and even-toned, then read the profile. You'll find paragraphs about sleep hygiene, cutting out alcohol, a facialist in the West Village, or a red-light therapy device that changed everything. Vogue runs these. Harper's Bazaar runs these. So does Goop, which at least has the entrepreneurial honesty to charge you for the myth directly. The language is consistent: the transformation is lifestyle. The secret is discipline.

👉 Read the full piece

I was watching the Moschino Fall 2026 show last month. The theme was Argentina, mi país, and I couldn't look away.

Not because of the clothes, though they were stunning. It was something harder to name. The collection carried the specific weight of a place: the melancholia, the faded grandeur, the heaviness of a culture that holds beauty and tragedy in the same hand. The lighting wasn't dramatic for drama's sake. The crushed velvet wasn't texture for texture's sake. Every decision on that runway pointed toward a feeling that anyone who's ever stood in a Buenos Aires salon at dusk would recognize immediately.

World-building dressed as fashion. And it's exactly what the best packaging work is doing right now.

👉 What the best packaging is doing right now

Four men sit around a dimly lit spinning table with a brick-built World Cup trophy at the centre. Messi reaches to place his minifigure on top, but the table rotates before he can. Ronaldo tries next, then Mbappé, then Vinicius — each denied by the same slow spin, four of the most competitive people alive collectively failing to claim a children's toy. Then a kid walks in, drops his own custom figure on top, and that's the spot.

Messi posted it with the hashtag "HonestlyIt'sNotAI." Within 24 hours his post had 17 million likes and 180 million views, and across all four players' accounts the campaign hit 314 million. Fans called it "the most GOATed ad of all time" and, separately, "the most expensive group chat ever assembled."

Why it matters: Whilst the timing of the ad launch is tactical. The strategy is something bigger. For decades LEGO built its cultural relevance on licensed fictional universes — Star Wars, Marvel, Harry Potter — other people's mythologies rented at considerable expense. The F1 partnership in 2025 was the first sign they were moving in a different direction. Revenue grew 12% that year, more than twice the rate of the broader toy market, with the CEO specifically citing F1 as a key driver. Football is the next move in that same bet, and it's a considerably larger one.

👉 Watch the campaign