“#MadeInItaly, MTV-bred, and Asia-adopted, Livio is a metal rooster powered by pizza, music videos, and café sữa đá.” Livio Grossi is also a creative with a passion for craft, who says he leads a team of “fiercely opinionated creatives, chasing bold ideas and head-turning executions”.
He joined Dentsu Redder in Ho Chi Minh City in 2019 from MullenLowe and became group executive creative director in 2023, although his experience was formed in Europe. He spent nearly eight years in the industry in Italy before moving to Vietnam. Under Livio’s creative guidance in the past 2 years, Dentsu Redder has produced work for Vietnamese sneaker brand, BitisHunter, that not only created significant business growth, but helped shape the agency’s creative culture, elevated and inspired the local advertising industry while being recognised on global platforms.
If there was a MAD STARS All Time Greatest, what five campaigns would be on your list and why?
Livio Grossi: Brutal question! So many iconic ideas across formats, causes, and continents. I’ll just close my eyes and spitball the first five that come to mind:
My Japan Railway (by Dentsu Inc. Tokyo for JR Group)
Everything I envy in one campaign: a simple idea, massive reach, and obsessive craft. Pure love sweat and hard work.
Unlimited Stadium (by BBH Singapore for Nike)
Is it an activation? An experience? An installation? A real-life video game? Design? Tech? Not sure. It’s just brilliant.
Shellmet (by TBWA\Hakuhodo for Koushi Chemical Industry)
Sustainable design with actual desirability. Not preachy. Just stylish, useful, scalable. I want five. In different colours.
Gravity Cat (by Hakuhodo for Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Absurd in the best way. Wildly fantastical, wildly cinematic, but somehow real and practical too. Like everything Show Yanagisawa touches. I’m obsessed.
Unfiltered History Tour (by Dentsu Webchutney for VICE World News)
A masterclass in subversion. Using tech to tell a difficult truth with precision and poetry. Impossible to ignore.
And honestly, that’s just the start. There’s Life is Electric with its genius product-as-media twist. Brewtroleum, where environmental action met beer. Donation Dollar, Kami, or My Parent is a TikToker, which used humour to connect generations like only the Thais can do: flipping the script on parental cringe in the most unexpectedly charming way.
So yeah, impossible to name just five. But those are the ones still bouncing around in my brain.
You’ve worked in two quite different cultures, Vietnam and Italy. Please compare and contrast the industry and agency life (challenges, advantages and oddities) between them.
Livio Grossi: : Technically three (I also spent three years in Indonesia). By now, most of my working life has been in Southeast Asia. And here’s the truth: great ideas don’t carry passports. Just like great clients or terrible agency leaders. You find brilliance and dysfunction everywhere, in different languages.
That said, one real cultural difference is how people handle creative tension. In Italy, it’s all out in the open. People debate, argue, interrupt, but it’s never personal. The passion is the process, and everyone knows the fight is about the work.
In Southeast Asia, direct confrontation isn’t the norm. Reading the room is everything.Feedback is more layered, sometimes coded, and emotional intelligence becomes your main tool.
That’s the theory. I’m still figuring out how to translate Italian bluntness into Vietnamese tact.
But that code-switching is what makes it exciting. When different ways of thinking collide, better work happens. The more diversity you build into the team, the more original the output.
Otherwise we’re just hitting the repeat button: Same idea. Same execution. Same idea. Same execution. Same idea. Same execution…
What qualities (assets, skills, knowledge, personal traits…) do you believe are needed to step up to become ECD and higher?
Livio Grossi:
Taste. Clarity. Empathy. Guts. You’ve heard that before.
But here’s the real upgrade:
You need to get really good at losing. And not in a “motivational poster” kind of way.
You’ll lose pitches you thought you had in the bag.
You’ll lose talent you believed in.
You’ll lose battles over work you loved — to fear, to politics, to mediocrity, or just someone who didn’t get it. Or worse, didn’t care.
What matters is what those losses don’t take from you.
Don’t lose your optimism.
Don’t lose your curiosity.
Don’t lose your standards.
Because once those go, everything else follows.
And your team sees you bounce back after the seventh rejection,
when they watch you fight for better work even when no one’s asking,
that’s when belief spreads.
Leadership isn’t about always winning.
It’s about staying stubbornly, irrationally committed to the idea that better is always possible.
Even when everything around you suggests it’s not.
Dentsu Redder has an impressive creative reputation. What do you think an agency needs to produce great work?
Livio Grossi: You’re being generous. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we’re capable of. And truthfully, we still have a long way to go if we want to stand alongside the best in the region. But we’re getting closer to something real.
Some of the work is starting to feel less like advertising, and more like a reflection of us: grounded in Vietnam, but not trapped in cliché. Human. Current. Unfiltered.
That’s what I’m proud of.
Because great work doesn’t just need talent. It needs a point of view. A sense of place. And people who care more about the next idea than the last award.
