SOY CARLI
UNNATURALLY BREWED
Paperboy. Mango salesman. Lifeguard. DJ. Investment banker for some reason. PR strategist. Digital builder. Video producer. Improviser. Brand creative. Marketing director. AI-wrangler.
Driven by curiosity, excited by the unknown, never a standard run-of-the-mill anything.
INGREDIENTS · VOLUMES
CURRENTLY FERMENTING · BATCH NO. 27
Batch 26 is bottled. As Marketing Director at axexo, a stablecoin network for prepaid mobile users that starts at the corner bodega, I ran marketing across Mexico, El Salvador, Panama and the United States. One week the work was onboarding shopkeepers in Iztapalapa. The next, it was deciding how many centimeters a counter sticker should be and getting it shipped from China before the launch did. It drew on everything from the last twenty years, the structure from banking and the nerve from improv, and turned into a job I couldn't have imagined. Batch 27 is in the vat. The ingredient I'm keeping is the know-how: running a whole marketing operation with AI as a working partner.
Inexhaustibly brewed. The next batch arrives when it arrives.
RECIPE HISTORY
A mercenary for ad agencies and clients.
Very big plans, coupled with a super limited budget.
Convincing traditional TV executives we had to aggressively evolve digitally to survive.
The first disciplined squeezing-of-my-creative-juices.
TASTING NOTES · APRIL '26
Don't know why you'd care, but here's 5,154 tweets →
"We all just want life to be as nice as the cold side of the pillow."
@carlosdavila · 2016
"When a customer calls your business, 'he's in the bathroom' is never the right answer."
@carlosdavila · 2010
POSTSCRIPT
STORYTELLING TIME
Pathological curiosity is its own diagnosis.
The symptoms: a death grip on a moto-uber driver's sweaty love handles, a woman grilling shrimp by candlelight outside her leaf-thatched hut at the foot of ten-story Brazilian dunes, a two-man skiff while one of them breathes through a hose to pry lobster off the seafloor… and careers you didn't plan.
Until, somehow, it all makes sense.
That funky wonky path started with me hawking Chiclets and mangoes by my mom's curb. It ran through investment banking at SG Cowen in New York (Gaming / Lodging / Leisure coverage), two digital platform launches in Puerto Rico (Wapa.tv, the country's #2 website, and Bumbia.com), and six years at a San Juan agency, going from consultant to CMO across 9+ simultaneous accounts in pharma, insurance, fintech, and economic development.
Which, in retrospect, is why axexo made sense: I led marketing across four markets for a stablecoin network built for prepaid mobile users, starting at the corner bodega.
Those banking years left their inheritance: the kind of attention to detail you develop when one smudged page could kill a million-dollar deal, and a due-diligence discipline that still shows up in everything I touch. I lead with the banking chapter not because it defines me (it's just one bit of my multitudes!) but because it explains why the rest of it works.
The curiosity also showed up sideways: two years of stand-up, a weekly satire column during the SG Cowen years, years of long-form improv with two troupes. Marketing in costume: build something coherent out of chaos, iterate against a live feedback loop, ship weekly. There's YouTube footage. Gulp.
Somehow I've ended up specializing in brands that are genuinely hard to explain: regulated industries, emerging tech, new market categories, anywhere audiences need to trust before they'll transact.
I keep my sanity by surfing and battling backyard weeds. Not simultaneously.
Want the longer story, with samples and links? → Creative Portfolio(ishness)