AdPeople Copenhagen gets top three placing in image analysis
Bureaubiz – the Danish ad and media agency journal – has published their results of this years’ image analysis. Now in its fourth year, the survey is the largest conducted in Denmark. The results are based on the responses of 384 marketing executives across the industry.
In the category which rates an agency’s ability to integrate communications channels, AdPeople’s top three placing is a sure indication that last year’s intensive focus on integration has paid off.

 
Bureaubiz.dk 16-01-2012

Global CFO

Before joining the global team, Adam served most recently as Y&R Brands CFO for Australia and New Zealand. As Global CFO, his responsibilities include managing the company’s financial condition, global client contracts and negotiations, as well as financial strategy and forecasting.

With over 15 years’ experience across the Y&R family, Adam has helped guide companies through industry challenges and changes, including mergers, acquisitions and restructurings. His understanding of advertising and efficiency goes well beyond finance. Throughout his career, he has worked closely with all aspects of operations including human resources, corporate governance and information technology.

Adam has a track record of bringing efficiencies to companies, such as converting the finance, IT, production and related software at Y&R Brands Australia & New Zealand to one consistent platform, and taking the Y&R Sydney office from losses to profit in 1 year.

AdPeople Worldwide has won the 2011 Reklame for Alvor Award with a campaign for Livslinien, a suicide helpline
for men.

Reklame for Alvor is one of Denmark’s most prestigious annual advertising awards, involving the country’s best communication agencies and is normally for a charitable cause with the agency, media houses and agency suppliers all providing their services for free.

The AdPeople Worldwide campaign titled “Suicide Note” was selected out of 23 entries from Denmark’s top advertising agencies and will run during the month of March in local and national press as well as on national television, outdoor and online media.

Using real suicide notes as the main campaign messaging, the communication aims to raise awareness among the general public on the painful subject of suicide. It positions Livslinien as “the other way out” when suicide is imminent. No headlines are used in the ads to distract the reader. All they see are the notes themselves.

Described as “honest, surprising, heartbreaking and courageous” by the Reklame for Alvor jury, the suicide notes are shown against ordinary household surfaces for realism, as that’s where they would be found.

“Brutally honest,” said one of the jury members Nicolai Stahl, Creative Director of Hjaltelin Stahl & Co.. “Real suicide letters are a very sad and frank pieces of communication. AdPeople’s solution was the best.”
Another jury member, Anne Glad, a partner in Sunrise, said:
“What can be said about the winning campaign is that it was deeply moving. Not least because they are real suicide notes. The winning campaign was clearly the most relevant. There was no trick to it or complex language. It will be noticed at every level as it’s hard to ignore the letters. They will be read.”

The campaign was the work of Søren Møller and Jonathon Taylor, who collected the award from Livslinien CEO Morten Thomsen on Friday 13th of January at a ceremony held at Huset Markedsføring’s offices in Frederiksberg.

Read the press release (danish)

Read article from Huset Markedsføring (danish)

Read what the judges said (danish)

The Danish paint goods company Flügger is getting ready to be proactive about its brand. But in Flügger’s world, this means some moves that break with its own past practice, as well as with trends seen many other places.

The company has decided to outsource the advertising part of its marketing department and ally itself to an agency. Which means they’re going against a trend that sees advertisers wanting, and being able, to do more for themselves, while cooperation with agencies has become more and more project oriented.
For many years, Flügger has not been in the habit of using agencies except for ad-hoc projects like the production of individual commercials. For this they’ve worked with, among others, Wibroe, Duckert & Partners and Propaganda. But the company has also had its own creative staff.

The change in its approach to agencies, however, started four years ago when the company began to work with AdPeople for production at the agency’s office in Bangladesh.

That collaboration is now being expanded. Flügger is dismantling its in-house agency, and simply put, AdPeople is taking over Flügger’s advertising. They’re entering what’s being called a strategic alliance with global perspective.
Flügger is growing markedly beyond Scandinavia – with revenue growth in markets outside the region in the past business year amounting to 44% of total growth – and therefore want marketing on both the domestic front and in the central European and Asian markets.
“We are on track to go global in earnest, so are now thinking through our brand in a new way, with a solid external partner. AdPeople will act as a consultant to our marketing organization and help us with the right strategic focus for our communications,” says Director of Business Development, Kasper Søvsø.

There are significant differences their target markets, so customer insight plays a crucial role for Flügger.

“Our new setup must put much more focus on marketing as a discipline in our organization and thus more focus on our customers. In short, we must get to know our customers much better and to know the differences in consumer behavior from country to country,” says Søvsø.

He continues, “In China, we tell the story of Eco-Label, which means a huge amount to consumers out there. At home it doesn’t mean quite as much because all our competitors have eco-labeled paint. Here it’s our quality and durability – combined with the possibilities of online inspiration via web channels and mobile applications – that make us special. ”

In addition to outsourcing its advertising, Flügger has combined marketing and e-commerce.
While some chains are experiencing cannibalization of their physical business, Flügger is seeing additional sales (especially of wallpaper) and increased brand awareness in Norway and Sweden. By combining e-commerce and marketing in the same organization under the same leadership, they’re counting on achieving even closer coordination of messaging and even greater synergy.

Kasper Søvsø will be responsible for the combined organization. He previously had responsibility for e-commerce, and now covers marketing as well.

The marketing department in the new organization consists of five people with marketing manager Merete Skov Kristensen in the lead.

A single Flügger graphic designer has started working at AdPeople, while the rest of the in-house agency has been let go. Flügger does not wish to disclose the number – but there will be more than 10 people linked to the account via AdPeople in Copenhagen and Bangladesh.

Bureaubiz 09-11-2011

In April 2011, we completed construction of a school for underprivileged kids in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. These children are living in extreme conditions, with little to no chance for any kind of education. The schools we provide give them a chance to break the cycle of poverty they grow within.

Located in the Korail Slum, the school was built from recycled steel, locally-available bamboo and recycled cardboard. Construction took about one month and completely transformed the area.

The Korail School currently has 80 students. The children are between 5 and 10 years old and are eager to learn.

We’ve now started constructing a second school building to accommodate more children next year and allow the current students to advance to a higher academic level. Our plan is to continue to build one new school building and bring in 80 more students every year.

From AdPeople’s location on the 5th, 6th and 7th floors of a stadium tower, you can see straight into the Danish national football team’s home field. On the other side, there’s a floor-to-ceiling view overlooking a huge green park.

In the offices and hallways you hear mostly English. It’s the corporate language because of the 20 different nationalities at the Copenhagen office – and because of the 8 offices around the world that are part of the AdPeople | Enfatico network. “As a Dane in the company, you quickly get used to speaking English all the time,” says Thomas Ladefoged, the General Manager of AdPeople in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). “You can easily stand over by the coffee machine and speak English with a Danish colleague, without any of us thinking about it.”

A melting pot with room for all
The many nationalities at the office in Copenhagen has made the company culture very mixed, where the starting point is Danish work culture, combined with other influences. “Every department is very conscious that there must be room for everyone. There is a difference between, for example, a German and an Italian, how tough they are, how much they say and how directly they say it. Our team leaders are very aware of this,” explains Ladefoged.

“Our employees are hired based on their skills and personality – their nationalities contribute new inspiration and that extra spice that challenges conventional thinking. Our people are good at taking the best from both sides of multicultural encounters. Non-Danes are influenced by the Danish way of working and thinking and vice versa. This includes acquiring good Danish values about balancing family and work,” he adds.

Service around the clock
Besides the office in Copenhagen, the AdPeople | Enfatico network has offices in New York, Austin, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangalore, Beijing, Bangladesh and Miami. These branches have joined as work with international clients and campaigns has become more widespread, explains Emre Gürsoy, Global COO for the entire AdPeople | Enfatico network.

He elaborates, “We won computer giant Dell as a client in Denmark 9 years ago. They grew substantially, and we grew substantially with them. They were quite happy with our services and our approach, and so we also became responsible for Scandinavia and Northern Europe. Then it was Asia, and then in the end we gained responsibility for all Dell campaigns globally.”

Dell is a huge client with a global presence. Other international customers have come to AdPeople as well. That’s why the agency has to be able to serve customers worldwide, which creates a lot of interaction among the 8 offices in the network.

“Altogether, there are about 500 people in the entire organization. Of those, there are very few people whose functions overlap, in the sense that it is a global company where people work together across borders and time zones. This means there are people here who work more closely with their colleagues in Austin than they do with the people who sit right next to them. This requires very close cooperation, where they talk together maybe 5 to 6 times a day by telephone or video conference and work together using a common software platform,” explains Gürsoy.

With the exception of one office, every location follows working hours in their own time zone, which means that there is always work going on somewhere in the AdPeople | Enfatico network.

Outsourced to Dhaka
The office in Bangladesh is the only one that doesn’t follow its own time zone. The office is divided into SoftwarePeople and GraphicPeople, which were both created in 2005 as part of a Danida project. The office is actually open 24 hours a day, where employees work in 3 shifts corresponding to the time zones the other offices work in. “This doesn’t mean that they are constantly off rhythm. Teams change regularly and they have very good working conditions. The businesses have actually been awarded ‘Best Employer’ in Bangladesh two times in a row,” says Gürsoy.

He continues, “The first two years there were people from AdPeople in Bangladesh to support our local director with technical aspects, education and training on AdPeople’s systems, values and mindset. But basically it is a locally managed entity, where the best Danish values come together with the best values from Bangladesh. There is a huge respect for each other because we work so closely with permanent teams in Bangladesh.”

Outsourcing offers more growth and jobs
Both SoftwarePeople and GraphicPeople have performed beyond all expectations in
Bangladesh, and together have around 200 employees who have also started to serve other advertising agencies. But even though large amounts of software development and production have been moved to Dhaka, this has not meant fewer jobs in Copenhagen.

“Actually, we have more employees today in our production department in Copenhagen than when we established the office in Dhaka. And we never intended to cut down on our Copenhagen production department – they just do different tasks now, so we get more value for work, both in Copenhagen and in Dhaka,” Gürsoy explains.

He is convinced that other Danish companies should look east for new inspiration. “We need to think differently and be open to new ways of working and more efficient processes. When you talk about outsourcing to the Far East, it’s always about job loss. But without the office in Bangladesh, we would not exist today. By outsourcing, we have created other jobs – both in Denmark and Bangladesh,” he adds.

Far East reminder
“Every time I travel to Europe or the U.S., things are just as they have been all along. I’m never surprised. There is nothing new in the way they work, the systems they work with, the technologies they use, or the way they act. But in the Far East, there’s a very different atmosphere. Every year 1 million students graduate in Bangladesh – every year! They are hungry for success, they are hungry for recognition, they are hungry to do things differently. And they think differently. They act differently, and I think it is pretty inspiring,” concludes Gürsoy.

CA nyt September 2011