THE NEW AD INDUSTRY - INNOVATING FOR NANIHI KALI

The old ad industry was about putting "everything under one roof" for the client. TV commercials, print ads, brochures and posters. Then in the 1980s came PR, DM and CRM...and the big agencies put them under the roof too. Heck it was a lot easier for clients to do one stop shopping. The big agencies got a lot bigger. You need a lot of people to help people organize when you've got everything under one roof. Then in the 1990s came ambient, guerrilla, events and digital. DIGITAL! Yikes that means something different. All that went under that same roof. Now it's ten years later. There's internet 2.0, wigets, mobility, service-tainment, branded utilities, communications products, social media...the list goes on and on. I think that roof is about as stretched as it can get.

So it makes a lot of sense to build a very different model for the client of today, taking into account the fact that you just cannot put it all under one roof anymore.

StrawberryFrog invented a model back in the 1990s called the lighthouse agency model, it's basically a general contractor model. We were the first agency in the world to go to clients and say, you don't need 1000 people to put in a light bulb. The most inventive and best work has always come from a small group of very smart, very experienced and very passionate people. When we set about to build StrawberryFrog we did not use the dinosaur agency as our model, we looked instead to how SKG Dreamworks set up it's business, how Rem Koolhaus the famous architect set up his business, how great universities bring researchers into projects from around the world.

We said StrawberryFrog should emulate these successful and efficient models from the entertainment and architecture fields. Because these models focused on innovation and quality thinking and not on all the other things that lead to bad work. And thus the "Lighthouse" agency model was born.

Nine years later our model enables us to reach into the far corners of the world and find the very best partners - subcontrators - who are elite experts in their fields.

Case in point. StrawberryFrog has been helping to build an underground social media movment for Nanhi Kali.

We scoured the world for the best innovative company out there that could help us build a state of the art branded utility, a internet 2.0 website for Nanhi Kali to help them build their community. We found an underground group called AlbertKen in Sweden (as in Albert Eienstien and Ken, Barbie's friend, as in brains and beauty, whatever...this is the business of magic). AK are some of the smartest people in this area. And we've been at work crafting this new innovative communications tool for NK. We expect the combined SF/AK labs to draw the curtain and roll out the NK device in about 3 weeks. Stay tuned...peace!