A year in the life of Advance
Here’s CEO Jens Krog with a quick review of the year just gone.
2011 was a tough year for the economy and a tougher one for the industry but I’m proud to say that we’ve come out the other side a wiser and even a bigger agency. As I write, most forecasts indicate another challenging year ahead and we’re focused on making sure we continue to evolve our offering.
Clients need agency partners to work faster, smarter and cheaper. These pressures are not new but have been accelerating in recent years to the point that the industry is barely recognisable from just ten years ago.
The digital transformation is the most obvious change but while we’re retooling to ensure we up our online skills, we’re just as interested in the way the contract between advertisers and consumers is being transformed. We’ve always said the best communication is a great product or service and this simple saying is truer today than it’s ever been.
We’re intrigued to see how the relationship between brands and people continues to evolve in the months and years ahead. We hope and believe the transparency of the Internet will continue to push companies towards more responsible practices and we think more of our time will be spent helping clients stay on top of societal changes, as well as those affecting the way brands communicate.
Anyway, here’s a quick look back at some of our 2011 highlights as an agency, and here’s to a great 2012.
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Our LEGO team had another busy year with the launch of LEGO Friends on December 26 the culmination of several years of intense work. We’re proud of our contribution to what was one of the company’s most important launches for some years.
The LEGO Universe experience was bittersweet. We invested a great deal of energy in this project and we can be proud of what we achieved. We were deeply saddened when LEGO decided to close the game but our time on the project made us smarter and strengthened our gaming credentials.
One of our most high-profile projects was our Caroline Wozniacki campaign for COMPEED. The partnership has helped the brand re-establish its athletic heritage and given it an injection of star quality.
Our campaign for Øresundsbroen was hugely effective with over 35,000 motorists signing up for the half-price bridge pass in the first few weeks alone.
Elsewhere, we’re continuing to do interesting work with Coloplast. The company is on a mission to be more customer-focused in its communication and this has led to some powerfully compelling work with the voice of the user increasingly central.
Customer insights are also at the core of our thinking behind the creation of the Bloom retail brand for Widex. This was an extremely challenging project that involved the creation of a brand for over 500 retail shops around the world in a very tight timescale. Hearing loss is daunting and complicated – our goal was to create a brand that made it seem less so. We’re still on the journey but we can be proud of what we’ve achieved so far.
I was also proud of the work we did in helping P2 communicate its switch to digital. We made a great little short film with a limited budget and in rapid time.
We also had a solid year in terms of new-biz, being awarded the business for two global product launches from Nycomed (now a Takeda company) and winning CoRo Foods in a pitch. Perhaps more significantly we didn’t lose any business, a plus in a year when many agencies lost clients or closed altogether.
On a personal note, my highlight of the year was our agency masterclass at Hyper Island. The three days we spent there gave us a massive energy boost and brought us closer together. We came back full of hope for the future and full of ideas about how to work smarter and more creatively. It was a great way to end the year.
LEGO – Blast From the Past
A while back we stumbled across an archive of VHS tapes that had been locked up in a cupboard and forgotten about. We had them digitized and, to our delight, they turned out to hold many of the old LEGO commercials we’ve made over the years.
We got in touch with the Brothers Brick – one of the best LEGO fan sites around – and they agreed to serialise the commercials on the blog together with the exclusive backstories of how they were made. For many of these old commercials, it’s their online debut! So if you’re a fan of vintage LEGO, keep an eye on the Brothers Brick over the next few months.
To give people a chance to see all the videos in one place, we’re also gradually posting them in a special Blast from the past playlist on our YouTube channel.
Hyper Island moments
Some nice shots from the weekend’s masterclass up at Hyper Island:
Around the agency
We’ve been back from our summer holidays for a week or two now and we’re well and truly back in the swing. While we were away Sune had a lovely baby girl called Noor – he looks a natural:
In other news, planners Stine and Niels shared a birthday last week and treated the rest of us to cider and nuts:
And somebody made some cutting edge modifications to Carsten’s bike:
Business as usual.
A planner writes…
We’re big fans of Richard Huntington’s adliterate blog. I almost always share his thoughtful, provocative posts with my colleagues and a debate rapidly ensues. But his recent piece on whether planning was beset by crisis led to a lively exchange among our planners.
After the dust had settled a little, Sofie, our head of strategic planning, collected her thoughts and wrote a response which I reprint here.
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My initial reaction was ‘what crisis’? After a week where Stine, Niels and I literally haven’t seen each other or been in the office together, the crisis has definitely not hit Advance planning if we measure it in terms of demand for our presence with clients and teams.
But then again… of course the article leads to some further reflections than this spontaneous and somewhat arrogant response! So a number of reflections:
“And its often planning that gets compromised first in the desire to descope the agency offering to match the figure procurement has plucked out of the air”.
It’s been an ongoing struggle since the birth of planning – is it a need-to-have or is it nice to have? Can we bill it directly to the client or is it an in- house service that we have to ‘hide’ in our internal billing systems?
My own experience is that the agencies that treat planning as a need-to-have and integrate it into all accounts, that get planners in front of clients and have planners that understand how to get their hands dirty, are usually the agencies with clients that see planning as a need-to-have as well. Planning is tied up with a lot of myth – basically it ain’t rocket science. Think of planning as ‘thinking ahead’ and thereby increasing the likelihood of success – what client wouldn’t want a share of that?
And luckily, despite experiencing the procurement battle, we don’t have clients who doubt the value of planning. None of our ‘suits’ are working on a retainer fee structure with our clients, but two of our planners are, reflecting an explicit understanding that planners add value to their business and that this value is needed on an ongoing basis, rather than just an ad hoc participation when procurement bless the projects with reasonable budgets. But we can definitely make the planning contribution more explicit to clients and get the more into the ‘planning black box’, thereby making doubly sure that we don’t end up in the wrong column of procurements Excel sheets.
“Clients are increasingly keen to absorb more of the planning function into their own headcount and marketing departments. And with those skills on board they feel less inclined to out-source them to their agencies.”
True. And in many ways, I think it’s a healthy development showing real guts from the client and a keen effort to take on the strategic responsibility for the company and its brands instead of outsourcing this to the agency. And it’s a privilege actually to work with clients who have hired in clever, strategic people since it demands us to be even smarter and focused on the communication task instead of spending much of our time trying to get the strategic basics right for the client, who probably could have done some of the homework a bit more thorougly before going to the agency.
One interesting observation is that when planners do go and work in-house, they often lose one of the prime competences of the planner – the bullshit detector instinct – simply because it’s difficult to keep those kind of instincts intact as an insider.
“With an entire group of people focused on communications effectiveness, account handlers have lost their strategic instincts and with creative departments offered much of the solution in the brief they have lost the salesmanship so beloved of Ogilvy and Abbott.”
Important point! It’s vital that planners continue to bridge the value chain from account to creatives instead of separating it.
“With a pool of diverse planning skills, including deep specialists and anchored by a core of generalists…”
To me, this is the most important point of the post. The days of generalists only are definitely over. But I don’t think it’s an issue isolated to planning. I think it goes for the entire industry. Generalists are necessary to achore the client and keep focus on the big picture – but when providing ‘content’ into projects and insights and solutions on specific challenges, one of the generalist’s prime skills will be to know how to find and orchestrate a number of specialists around them. Adding to that complexitiy is also the fact that the kind of specialists needed is changing all the time and from project to project, calling for a much more fluid, “open-source”, collaborative and dynamic structure than what probably characterizes most agencies today. And this is the real challenge going forward. And from the planner’s perspective; maybe it’s the end of strategic planning and the beginning of strategic orchestration.
Gaming Update – September
Our latest Gaming Update. As always, compiled by Jef. This month includes the latest on upcoming titles such as Duke Nukem Forever, The Bible Online and Gran Turismo 5. Check it:
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Keeping Denmark Moving
For the past year and a half, we’ve been working with ITD – the union of Danish goods transport associations – to help improve public perception of the work done by its lorry-driving members.
There are plenty of negative stereotypes around truckers but little thought is given to the indispensable work they do in keeping the country moving. That thought became the central premise of our ‘Holder Danmark Kørende‘ campaign as we attempted to get people to connect their need for fresh produce, new furniture, vital medicine etc with the job done by the drivers. In other words, without their hard work we wouldn’t get half the stuff we want.
The campaign culminated in a music video TVC starring drivers and logistic workers from the industry which went on air last week following a kick-off event at Copenhagen’s Town Hall Square:
There’s a few pics below taken at the event while the final image is of some of the press the campaign has generated to date:
Kings (and queen) of the mountains
RaceTeam Advance celebrated a momentous victory recently, triumphing in the Mixed Team cathegory at the Atea 12 mountain bike charity race. Hero of the day was Carsten, making up an impressive 70 seconds on the final lap. Well done to the whole team – Peter, Michael, Lina Maria, Carsten and John.
The race raised an impressive 264,000 Danish kroner for school projects in Burkina Faso organised by the children’s charity Børnefonden.
Farewell Christine
A sad day yesterday as we said goodbye to Christine after 10 years at the agency. Christine’s done pretty much every job going at Advance but now that her studies are finished, she feels the time is right to move on.
We’ll miss her hugely.
25 years for Sys!
We all gathered in the canteen yesterday to celebrate Sys Lindskov having been at the agency for an amazing 25 years.
Much like her husband Alex (26 years!), Sys has been a lynchpin of the agency for the past quarter of a century, managing our production department with an unrivalled eye for detail that has long ensured the quality of our output.