Rafael Washington.

Seven stops, one road, two rails.

The career runs on the main line; the music runs on the B-side rail beneath it, the whole way. Read it as a story here — or take the PDF from the counter and read it as bullet points on the train.

1. Stop 01 · Rio de Janeiro · where the road starts

   The advertiser.

   Picture a kid in Rio who genuinely believes the greatest job on earth is thirty seconds of film and one headline. Reader: he was right. I enrolled in Communications at the Pontifical Catholic University and spent my twenties learning a craft where you get applause for cutting a word.

   Then the big agency floors — Publicis among them — and years in media, which is basically the engine room of a very glamorous ship. You buy attention by the second, so you learn to make every second count. Best training I ever had, and I still catch myself editing sentences down to their bones. Like that one.

   Schooling

   Bachelor of Communications, Advertising — Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro

   The floors

   Big-agency and media years — campaigns, media plans, and deadlines that taught the craft

2. Stop 02 · Rio → Sydney · the crossing

   Fourteen thousand kilometres to study English.

   The official plan was six months in Australia to sharpen my English. I packed like someone coming back. The English showed up on schedule — and then, unscheduled, so did a business diploma, a marketing certificate, a favourite coffee place, and the dawning suspicion that I lived here now.

   Fourteen thousand kilometres is a long way to go for a language course and end up with a whole second country. Ten out of ten, would emigrate again.

   14,000 kmone-way ticket

   Schooling, part two

   Diploma of Business & Certificate IV in Marketing — Australian Pacific College, Sydney

   Languages carried

   Portuguese (native) · English (fluent) · Spanish (elementary)

3. Stop 03 · Sydney · the education years

   The whole funnel on one desk.

   My first Australian chapters were in education: acquisition, brand and student lifecycle, with actual enrolment targets attached. Nobody impulse-buys a two-year course, which makes it a wonderful place to learn the trade — you cannot charm anyone into it, you can only be so genuinely useful that they talk themselves into it. Turns out that works on almost everything.

   Later, between the two Oracle chapters, it came round again as Marketing Manager at Linx Institute. Strategy, stack and results, all on one desk, all mine. Terrifying for about a week. After that, the best kind of fun: every idea I had could be tested by Friday.

   The lesson

   Owning the whole funnel — when acquisition, lifecycle and reporting share one desk, excuses stop working

   Linx Institute · Marketing Manager · 2017 – 2019

4. Stop 04 · Oracle Marketing Cloud · two chapters

   Following the wires.

   Then somebody left the door to the engine room open, and I have never really come back out. Oracle Marketing Cloud, twice — 2014 to 2017, then 2019 to 2023 — as Technical Solution Lead and Project Manager. I went in for the marketing and fell completely in love with the machinery. The thing has wires coming out of the back! Nobody tells you that at advertising school.

   And it was enormous. Responsys and Eloqua for Coles, Kmart and Woolworths: roadmaps, solutioning, stakeholders, programs measured in quarters. Sending to millions of people is a properly good time, mostly because it is completely unforgiving — the machine either purrs on a Tuesday morning without you, or it does not. I got quite addicted to making it purr.

   2chapters — 2014–17 & 2019–233of Australia’s biggest retailers

   Scale

   Hyper-personalised omnichannel programs for some of Australia’s largest retailers

   Product leadership

   B2C and B2B stacks — Responsys, Eloqua, BlueKai, Unity, Infinity — aligned to commercial growth

   Shipped for · Coles · Kmart · Woolworths · Catch

5. Stop 05 · SafetyCulture · 2023

   Making the instruments agree.

   A short, sharp residency at SafetyCulture as Marketing Technology Manager. Six platforms — Segment, Braze, Salesforce, Amplitude, Tableau, Google — every one of them working perfectly and all six cheerfully disagreeing about who the customer was. A six-piece band where everybody is in a different key and nobody has noticed.

   So: tune the room. Once they agreed, the lifecycle team could actually play — B2B onboarding, adoption, retention, and an MQL handoff that reached sales fully intact instead of quietly evaporating in the pipe. Not glamorous. Enormously satisfying. Same feeling as a band finally locking in.

   6platforms, one truthful view

   The fix

   Unified customer data, automated governance and reporting — faster campaign readiness, cleaner handoffs

6. Stop 06 · Prezzee · 2024 – present

   The machines learn the melody.

   The current chapter, at Prezzee, is where both rails of this map finally cross. We built Santa AI — an AI gifting experience that ran at full Christmas scale and came home with three awards. I will absolutely take the trophies. But the bit I actually grin about is behind the curtain.

   There are agentic operators back there now, taking a campaign from Figma all the way to Braze on their own. Ninety per cent of execution runs itself; a week of production became about four hours. Everyone assumes the win was speed. The real win is that the boring ninety per cent was never the job — it was the toll you paid to reach the ten per cent that needs actual taste. So: give the robots the toll booth, keep the taste.

   90%execution automated4 hrsfrom a week of production+23%mobile activation+17%retention, year on year

   The stack

   Segment, Redshift, Braze and MCPs — identity-resolved profiles and real-time lifecycle analytics

   • AMI Excellence Award winner, 2025
   • Best Use of Marketing AI — Martech APAC
   • Bronze — The Drum APAC, 2025

   Read the Santa AI story→See the Figma-to-Braze pipeline→

7. Stop 07 · The village · now

   The depot, and what leaves it.

   Which brings the road here. I could have written all this in a slide deck. Instead I built an entire village, which tells you most of what you need to know about me.

   Every shop on it is a real project wearing a little apron, and this depot is where the paperwork lives. Go and poke something — open a bay in the garage, pull a lever in the data cellar, argue with the analytics shop. It is all clickable, and it is all real.

   19 yrson the road, still touring

   The garage job cards→Below the floorboards→The curiosity shop→