GOAFEST SHOULD AIM TO BE BIGGER THAN CANNES
Scott Goodson, founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog, is an expert in using a unique mix of ideas, research and technology to concoct path-breaking advertising. On the sidelines of Goafest, Goodson spoke with DNA
Money’s Nirmal John.
Excerpts:
Tell us more about your plans for India...
We want to open our India office in 2009. It would be in Mumbai. This would be an office looking not just at India, but also the rest of Asia.
At StrawberryFrog, we have a way of operating from offices, which will service not just the country but an entire region. This is how we work everywhere, be it United States, Europe or Latin America.
You cannot look at the world from the traditional perspective. These days, the global marketing directors for many companies in the US are Indian while their Asia head could be say Polish. Also, Indians are as good as anybody else in the world and they are intellectual and open minded and can do advertising for other cultures.
How does StrawberryFrog differ from other agencies?
The kind of advertising we develop is a technology, and not mere advertising. You have Facebook for example. I was asking around here and everybody seems to be on Facebook. These kind of trends in culture bind a lot of people together.
At StrawberryFrog, we tap into these and create what we call cultural movement strategies. This is our DNA. These come from the ethnographic studies and the research which we do. We then use these cultural movement strategies to create involvement.
This is then amplified to attract similarly minded people to the brand. I think this is a new model of advertising that is being invented in the United States. In its earlier days, advertising was about lying. That is not the case anymore.
You have been to a large number of advertising festivals around the world? What is your take on Goafest?
You can improve by inviting advertising associations from other countries also to participate. That is how you change from being a national advertising festival to an international one.
Cannes is the French national advertising festival, which has become huge due to the involvement from so many other countries.
I heard a lot of people here talking about how they want Goafest to become like Cannes. Why do you want to be like Cannes? You should aim to be bigger than Cannes. To start with, you can invite industry associations from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.
Mahindra is your client in the US. How are you launching the brand there and what are the challenges?
Right now nobody in America knows who Mahindra is. People would be saying right now that I can buy three hundred other brands. I can buy a Honda, a Mitsubishi or whatever.
What we need to do is to create stickiness for the brand. Creating that stickiness is really important, it leads to momentum. Obama is a good example. He was an outsider earlier but now he has created stickiness and through that he has momentum. He has been able to bring like-minded people together and work for him. What we are trying with Mahindra is just that.
Your agency has quite a distinctive name…
Well, The StrawberryFrog is a species of frogs in the Amazon. It is red in colour and has blue legs. It is the rarest frog in the world and is extremely poisonous. It is extremely agile and always on the move. When we started the agency, that is what we were looking at... to be agile.
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