Hailing from Mexico City, Ariadna Madrid is just the ambitious champion of sustainability that this planet needs to survive. She currently resides in Brooklyn and works at Publicis’ midtown office, with the bustling theatre district buzzing right outside her door. Publicis is one of the largest advertising and PR companies in the world, and Madrid is a producer/creator for the Hispanic Division. “For a long time I’d been working at film festivals, supporting the vision of film directors, and then I was working as a producer at production companies,” she says. “I landed an interview in this agency back in Mexico City, I didn’t know anything about it, and I said to them, ‘It just sounds so good,’ because they were a huge company. I said, ‘That’s not real,’” she admits with a laugh. “‘Just give me a contract, if it’s real, then I’ll sign it.’ It was real, and now here I am, almost seven years later.” Compared to Mexico City, NYC is minuscule, Madrid feeling that anything is possible here— especially with her passion and tenacity.
“There is hope, and the hope is that there are around 120 million environmentally-conscious consumers, meaning that we’re entering the early mainstream that is going to switch into mainstream. That’s going to change everything. It’s going to move the nation and the planet.”
Years went by, and Madrid felt she had hit a career wall, yearning for more and to chase after her larger dreams regarding the environment. A dream that had expanded when she watched Diamond’s talk. “I was ready to make my next move,” she explains, “I felt like I’d learned what I needed to learn, so I decided to follow my heart and do something with sustainability and protecting the planet. I felt that that was not happening within the company, so I found the right time, and I told my boss that I wanted to leave... I was giving him my two weeks notice, and he asked me not to do it and to come back with a proposal for my dream job. I thought that was extraordinary that he asked me to do that.”
“Something is going to happen. I want to prevent that from happening. Or if it happens I want to be ready for it and I want the people around me to be ready for it"
Madrid submitted a preliminary proposal for an environmentally-conscious internal department of Publicis and ended up receiving the most votes, emphasizing its efficacy and its importance to not just Madrid, but to several of her peers.
The next step was to make a video expressing her project’s mission—only a handful of winners would be chosen out of a whopping 3,500. “I didn’t know what was going to happen; I was ready to make a move, you know,” she says. “I was like, ‘if I don’t win, I’m going to continue to try to learn more about sustainability and try to help in other ways.’ I was lucky and, I won; as a result, I was able to go to Paris and receive this trophy in front of the CEO there, and the daughter of the founder and my parents... It was about the opportunity because they would give us 15 minutes with the CEO and his board to pitch our idea, and then they would invest in it if they thought it was worthwhile.” With a sabbatical to research and the funds to travel, Madrid left her apartment and set off to connect with owners of sustainable companies worldwide.
“So whatever you put out there in the world has to be healthy and positive. Always understand that we are in the presence of being better. Once you know yourself, speak your truth"
“I found that one of the common denominators out there is waste. It’s very much a cultural issue because when we throw something away it disappears, but actually that ‘away’ is a landfill or is the ocean. I became really passionate about waste.”
Madrid’s passion was evident. After chatting, she gave a tour of her office building and happened to notice containers of food littering the countertops. She lamented the waste and hoped the food would be saved and used come the end of the workday.
Following her extensive research and collection of feedback from company leaders, Madrid was ready to meet with Publicis heads again, this time with a solid, fleshed-out proposal. “I was able to come up with a department that I designed myself,” she says. “I built a proposal and got a meeting with the new CEO last April, and in the room, there were other CEOs—all these big leaders. I had ten minutes, and what I presented to them was something very simple. It had to be simple, fun, sexy, it had to be something that everyone understands, but so they don’t feel guilty, and want to be a part of it.”
Sitting with a sweeping view of the city, bright red carpet underfoot, Madrid smiles and dives into her green proposal that she pitched to the aforementioned CEOs, consisting of three pillars: operations, talent, and business.
Operations
This pillar is about action, Madrid and those working with her needed to “walk the walk” and alter the way things run in-house before expanding their mission. It upholds a few subgoals, including reducing their carbon footprint and becoming zero-waste. “NYC has a couple of aggressive goals,” Madrid notes. “The city wants to be a zero-waste city by 2030, meaning they want to do waste-diversion. The other one is to reduce the carbon footprint by 80%. This requires reducing traffic, by switching to electric cars—these are big challenges, and I think that it would be a great assignment for the rest of the country and the rest of the world. This is the city of the world, so I want to align this first pillar of operation to those goals.”
Talent
When talking about the talent portion of her proposal, Madrid describes it as putting “skin in the game.” It involves informing Publicis’ talent about the internal changes and the company’s push for sustainability. Barriers exist, such as the glaring lack of competence when it comes to proper waste disposal. “What happens often is that people don’t know how to separate trash, so they toss everything in one plastic bag, and at the end of the day they send it to a landfill,” Madrid says. “If we inform our talent about what’s going on and we make them be part of it, they can feel that they have a fingerprint on the process, and they can get really inspired. That’s the goal of the second pillar.”
Business
The third and final pillar is business. This pillar seeks to connect already environmentally-conscious events, such as zero-waste concerts, with environmentally-conscious clients of Publicis. Madrid wishes to influence other agencies this way, and facilitate good-for-the-earth events around the city. “It’s not about being competitive,” she says. “It’s about cooperation.” Teamwork is needed to spark the fire of change to have a positive impact.
“My dream is that one day we see Times Square lit up not only by clean energy but by clean ideas.”
Madrid’s loyalty to Mother Nature is inspiring and stems from more than just the TED Talk of which she speaks so highly of; it’s an innate instinct to protect her home. Madrid is cognizant of the urgency as our world is at risk. “I do feel that every year when something happens—like the fires and hurricanes and earthquakes—all of that is a warning sign, and is not a joke,” she says. “Something is going to happen. I want to prevent that from happening. Or if it happens, I want to be ready for it, and I want the people around me to be ready for it.” The next several years will be busy ones for Madrid, but her hours of dedication towards a cleaner future will benefit us all.
“This is my home, and my client is nature...I do whatever she asks me to do, and then once I feel like I’ve done something, then I can start doing other things, I want to shoot a film, I want to create sustainable communities in Mexico, but first I must take care of this, because I can and have been able to open the doors for myself by speaking my truth. It all started because I wanted to quit.”
As a businesswoman with no bounds to her perseverance and to the tireless effort she expends to inspire great change, Madrid is full of advice for go-getters like herself. “Sustainability, abundance, happiness... Everything starts in your head,” she says. “So whatever you put out there in the world has to be healthy and positive. Always understand that we are in the presence of being better. Once you know yourself, speak your truth. I’ve had this track record of following my dreams and making them come true, that’s why I’ve lived in so many countries, but I’d never tested the limits as I did now, where I’m like; ‘I know that I’m quitting a big job, it’s NYC, I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, but I don’t feel happy, and I know myself, and I’m not going to go through it. That was a big lesson. I’m still an immigrant, I’m a woman, Mexican, so it’s kind of against the odds, but I work for nature, and nature tells me I can do it. She gives me beautiful sunsets and beautiful lakes, birds, flowers, and I’ll do anything to protect her.”
WRITTEN BY
Ashley Myers