This month, it will be ten years since we started StrawberryFrog in the Netherlands. It's not easy being the ECD of an independent agency, you wear many hats. And in the early days my creative team and I did a lot of multi-tasking. It was amazing the sheer quantity of multi-disciplined creative work (ads/digital/brandPR) that we produced and got out the door and into many different countries.
Looking back on all the global campaigns we developed over the years, Onitsuka Tiger is one of the brands that I am proud to have been a part of re-building from scratch out of our StrawberryFrog offices in Amsterdam.
In 2000, Mark Chalmers (now CD of Perfect Fools Amsterdam) and Dylan Ingham (who runs his own shop in Amsterdam) were then associate CDs at StrawberryFrog. The agency was an incredible creative hothouse. So much energy and enthusiasm. Together with the account lead Heather Fullerton (who moved with me to start StrawberryFrog in NYC and remains a partner today), we met Mr Onitsuka and other top management from Asics and presented them with a plan to rebuild their legendary brand. The rest is history.
In the first few years, the campaigns were produced out of our StrawberryFrog offices on Tesselshadestraat in Amsterdam, and ran in the Benelux countries, Italy and then later Germany and then the UK, and then globally. We produced more and more work. Over the years the brand grew, mostly due to the unconventional work and hardest working digital and guerrilla marketing campaign known to man.
In those days it would be hard to imagine how successful Onitsuka Tiger would become for Asics.
Looking back after ten years, here are a few of the my favorite OT campaigns from the early days.
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