Promoting Germany as „The Land of Ideas"
June 1 , 2007
by Jeralee Shotkoski
Friday morning we met with one of the most successful advertising agencies in Berlin, Scholz & Friends. This agency has both local and international clients such as Deutsche Bank, Mercedes, Siemens, and many local and national governmental agencies and politicians. The agency is very strategy focused with its tagline being "The Orchestra of Ideas." Its strategic plan is based on how an orchestra is set up with each department in the agency as a section of an orchestra. With this plan, both the clients and agency are able to see how the departments work together in an organized way to create a campaign for the client.
This agency is able to operate in this way because it consists of many different divisions to assist in dividing up the campaign work and creating an effective message for the client. For example, they have a department called Sensai, which focuses on architectural design of business lobbies and offices, grand opening set-ups, and statues and large graphic pieces used in campaigns throughout the world. Another department that works closely with their public affairs division, is Brand Affairs. This department is in charge of organizing grand openings and political rallies for their clients and making sure that each client maintains their brand style in each event they host or participate in.
After learning how the agency works together, we were given the task of brainstorming a way to market the country of Germany to the rest of the world. The agency itself was given this task last year, but wanted to challenge us and see what ideas we would have before showing us what they created for their country. Our group divided into two groups of three people each. We came up with an umbrella idea of diversity and one group worked on focusing the idea to visitors and tourists, while the other group focused on business-type people and investors. We used what we had thought about Germany before the trip and compared it to what we had learned in the nearly two weeks that we had been here to create a fun campaign for the country in the twenty minutes we had to come up with the idea.
When the brainstorming session was over, we travelled by subway to their main office. Here we were able to meet again in a bright conference room on the top of the building. We were able to see a beautiful skyline of the city, which was inspiring in itself. Each group presented their ideas to the company and then discussed with them the pros and cons of each way we were going to use the "Orchestra of Ideas" to get our message out to the masses. It was a great experience getting feedback from the employees and interesting to see how they would approach what we had designed as our message.
We were then able to see what the agency had come up with for their country. They entitled their campaign for Germany "The Land of Ideas." It was excellently launched during the FIFA World Cup last summer when Germany was a main focus in news and sports. The campaign was very public relations-based, with many opportunities for journalists from around the world to get interesting stories about Germany, besides just stories about soccer. They also erected giant statues around Berlin that portrayed interesting things about Germany, such as a giant soccer shoe, for the sport, the theory of relativity, for Albert Einstein attending one of the most famous universities in Berlin, and a giant aspirin® tablet to show the research and development the country emphasises on medical research. Scholz & Friends also created everything from tour guides, to fact books, to using Claudia Shiffer, the traditional idea of a beautiful German woman, to advertise to investors to invest in Germany. It was a great campaign that reached many different types of people and portrayed Germany in a wonderful and interesting way that many people might not have known of. The campaign is still continuing today and they are hoping to keep it running for many years to come.
We were amazed to learn about the effectiveness of the campaign and discussed it further over lunch with the employees we had been talking with. After lunch, we came back to the hotel to get ready to spend a few days with Kristen's friend Tina in the small town that she lives in. Tina picked us up and we went to her apartment in Neu Lübbenau. After unpacking our things at her cozy apartment, we went to her sister's house for dinner. Her sister and mother live about ten minutes away in another small town called Leibsh. It was a beautiful evening so we set up a dinner table on the back porch overlooking the field that surrounded the backyard. Here was had a wonderful, home-cooked dinner of roasted pork, white asparagus, many different cheeses and meats and strawberries with a white yogurt dip. After eating until we couldn't eat anymore we talked with Tina's family for a while and looked forward to spending the next day on a beautiful boat ride down the Spree River.
