In This Macho World, Only Character Can Keep A Woman At The Top Of The Industry, according to Manuela Villegas of the Si Señor Agency

The passion Manuela Vargas feels for knowledge and innovation keeps growing. She is the founder and CEO of Si Señor, an agency focused on growth marketing based on lean startups and scientific projections, with such fundamental pillars as research, experiments and validated studies. The Si Señor Agency, based in Bogota, Colombia, is a part of NUMATEC, a fast-growing holding of technological firms specializing in digital marketing in 22 countries worldwide, which actively seeks new opportunities to serve companies in the media and MarTech (marketing technology) industries, and in that way build the world’s first network of digital service providers for brands and advertisers on a global scale. Villegas began her career in digital marketing as a boot camp manager, the reason she specializes in creating educational groups as the core of her business while applying her other areas of expertise. As for the challenges facing a woman in the MarTech field, she said that since she was in at the start of digital marketing back around 2011 when very few others were, she has never encountered many difficulties. Nonetheless, when she moved on to become a creative director, it all became more complex. “When as a female digital creative director you run a much larger performance group that is all men, you find they’re not used to having a woman as their boss,” she said. These days Villegas likes taking radical positions on ethics and values, and knows that having solid arguments to back her decisions is a must for a woman in the profession. “In such a macho world, only character can keep a woman at the top of the industry,” she added. With the importance she gives to knowledge, from her Si Señor Agency she struck a deal with the Platzi platform so that members of her team have access to those study programs on digital platforms. “What we’re looking for at Si Señor is that everyone learns as fast and logically as possible. “ She also said that mental health is one of the basic pillars and something that CEOs should be looking out for among their employees because of the pandemic. As for the opportunities offered by the industry as a result of the changes in the world over the past year, the CEO noted all the technological transformations that different professional sectors are going through, such as the tech platforms being developed in Latin America for the diversification of employment, “so people don’t have to work for just one agency but are capable of doing a number of things to have both passive and active sources of income.” Villegas added that she is looking for work diversification, an understanding of the different forms it might take, and a deeper knowledge of what people are looking for in their lives. Finally, and looking toward the future, Villegas said “I see a 100 percent transformation of digital products to suit their users…with an understanding that users are real people, not just a bunch of IDs or cookies, but real users, and as such, have at their command all the changing practices of digital marketing.”