Puerto Rico’s advertising industry just proved it can go head-to-head with the world’s biggest agencies — and win.
On July 7, San Juan-based De la Cruz Ogilvy won its first-ever Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the top honor in global advertising, for a campaign most Puerto Ricans experienced not as an ad, but as a Super Bowl-night scramble for $1 groceries.
The campaign, “Uva Uva Bombón,” was built for Uva, a Puerto Rican delivery platform, around a phrase the agency’s creative team found buried in Bad Bunny’s catalog after combing through more than 270 of his songs and roughly 122,000 words of lyrics.
Two weeks before Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show in February, Uva told its followers a specific line: if “Uva Uva Bombón” was sung during the broadcast, a curated set of items across the app — food, drinks, experiences, products — would drop to $1 for as long as the performance lasted. Users could request the song directly through the app and push the ask out on social media.
When Bad Bunny sang the phrase on live television, the app automatically triggered the $1 store. Every item sold out before the halftime show ended.
Numbers Speak for Themselves
Active users on the app rose by 173%, new users grew 70.9%, and sales climbed up 13%, with the brand referenced live to a global audience spanning more than 130 countries, according to de la Cruz Ogilvy’s own account of the campaign. Thompson told Caribbean Business the campaign also drove roughly 9,000 new app downloads for Uva.
The agency entered Cannes with 18 shortlists across categories; “Uva Uva Bombón” alone added the Grand Prix in Direct Lions (Challenger Brand), three Silvers and a Bronze — one of the strongest showings a Puerto Rico agency has had at the festival.
In an interview with Caribbean Business, Thompson described the Grand Prix as validation of a strategic shift the agency began years earlier. “We started about seven years ago in a transformation of the agency where we were focusing more on the impact of ideas and the impact that ideas can have on our client’s business,” he said.
With roughly 20,000 entries submitted to Cannes Lions annually, he added, taking the top prize “means that you really have something very important, especially for our clients.”
A Global Mindset
Asked what the win says about Puerto Rico’s creative industry more broadly, Thompson was direct: “Puerto Rico[‘s] industry has the potential to do global work. Sometimes I feel that we stay [in the] frame of mind of an Island — but we can do international work outside of Puerto Rico.”
The Cannes win did not happen in isolation. The same festival also awarded a Bronze Lion in Industry Craft to “Glowing Relief,” a separate campaign by de la Cruz Ogilvy, created with Alivia Health, Farmacias Plaza and Alivia Home Delivery.
The campaign introduced a glow-in-the-dark prescription label designed to comply with U.S. pharmaceutical labeling requirements, allowing patients to identify their medications during Puerto Rico’s recurring power outages without batteries, flashlights or electricity. The labels integrate seamlessly into existing pharmacy workflows, requiring no new hardware or staff training, making the solution immediately scalable across participating pharmacies.
Glowing Relief has become one of Puerto Rico’s most decorated healthcare innovation campaigns. In June, it was recognized in Fast Company’s 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards, selected from more than 1,500 entries submitted worldwide. Fast Company honored only 191 projects—including 97 winners, 90 honorable mentions and four Visionaries of the Year—across 14 categories.
Earlier, the campaign also earned multiple honors at the 2025 Effie Awards Latin America, further cementing its reputation as one of the region’s most impactful healthcare marketing initiatives.
Speaking with Caribbean Business, Thompson tied Glowing Relief to the same mission that produced Uva Uva Bombón. “It’s not only about selling, but also it’s about giving something back,” he said, describing the Fast Company recognition as proof that the agency’s work “can impact communities and society.”
He said the full business impact of the Cannes win is still unfolding — the festival wrapped only weeks ago — but the agency has already been approached by the global headquarters of an existing client to develop a campaign for international release. Thompson declined to name the client but said the concept has been approved for rollout across roughly 15 markets.
Underneath both wins sits a less flashy but arguably more telling data point: in the 2025 Effie Index — the industry’s global ranking of marketing effectiveness, built from finalist and winner data across Effie competitions worldwide — de la Cruz Ogilvy placed No. 1 in Puerto Rico and No. 36 worldwide, putting a San Juan agency in the same conversation as shops in New York, São Paulo and London on the metric that matters most to clients: results, not just trophies.
That track record feeds into what Thompson describes as a longer-term ambition: turning de la Cruz Ogilvy, and by extension San Juan, into more of an international hub, not just a Puerto Rico shop. “How do we become an international agency?” he said. “We have the credentials — 41 years being established in the Puerto Rican market — but also now we have been gaining our credentials in our capacity to do work that can travel the world.”
As an early signal, he pointed to an uptick in unsolicited résumés from candidates outside Puerto Rico since the Cannes win: “There’s something happening in that agency that I want to be part of it,” he said, describing the sentiment. He also cited a comment from Liz Taylor, Ogilvy’s global chief creative officer: “Imagine how cool it is to say that you work in Puerto Rico — such a beautiful island — doing work at an international level. It’s a creative heaven.”
Thompson said the agency’s next stated goal is to expand its reach into the North American market.
On AI: ‘There Will Always Be a Human Element’
Asked whether artificial intelligence threatens the advertising business, Thompson pushed back on the premise. “I don’t think AI will terminate our industry. I think that AI is an opportunity,” he told Caribbean Business. “AI learns from us, AI learns from our history” — but campaigns still “has to be created by humans.”
He described AI as a tool that can accelerate process and thinking rather than replace the cultural fluency behind campaigns like Uva Uva Bombón. “We understand humans. We understand the culture, and we are sensing the culture that is happening in [the] street,” he said. “There will always be a human element in it.”
For an industry that has spent decades explaining Puerto Rico to outside audiences in terms of tourism and tax incentives, a locally built agency beating out global networks for advertising’s most coveted prize — twice over, in two different registers of creative ambition — makes a different kind of case: that Puerto Rico’s creative sector isn’t a regional outpost of someone else’s industry, but a place capable of setting the agenda.
As Thompson put it, discussing what comes next: “It’s good to reach this high level, but it’s not the end. There are more mountains that we want to climb.”
