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Global culture: how Amsterdam helps us avoid killing it with advertising

Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam

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October 1, 2015 | 5 min read

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Global advertising has a Jekyll and Hyde duality. From a positive standpoint, it is exciting to be able to bring the world closer together. Global markets provide growth opportunities that are necessary to keep the world economy afloat. The unfavorable results are that it can make the world more homogenous with places losing their distinctive character and small, local businesses being displaced by global corporations.

The challenge for marketers is to create global advertising that does not descend into blandness by offending no one, but to aim to excite and challenge a worldwide audience. Amsterdam is a city that is uniquely qualified to meet that challenge.

With its distinctive canals lined with improbably narrow historic townhouses, Amsterdam carefully guards its unique sense of place. 50 per cent of the population are not Dutch, with innumerable nationalities represented. People in Amsterdam, while diverse, are bound by their passion for art and culture. There are over 400 museums and art galleries in a small city of about 800,000 inhabitants. The work-life balance of the city’s inhabitants skews heavily in the direction of living. Those qualities plus famous open and tolerant culture and a favorable business environment are the reasons why so many creative companies and creative people choose to settle in the city. The city of Amsterdam describes itself as “an international hotspot for the creative industries”, and a number of the creative companies in Amsterdam are in the advertising and marketing space.

So how do these seemingly opposite forces of a love of culture, and advertising’s corporate homogenisation comfortably coexist in Amsterdam? The truth is that commerce and art have always coexisted here, and although the Amsterdam ad scene has blossomed over the past 20 years partly due to a welcoming business environment, it’s also partly because there’s a lot about the city that makes it a comfortable place for those working in a creative industry.

In contrast to the ad industry scenes of New York and London, there is no Wall Street or Square Mile cohabiting the city with us in Amsterdam, nor are there homegrown global media agencies. And until a safe way is invented for people to browse smartphones on bicycles, Amsterdam will continue to be less prone to the tethering of human beings to device screens as they move around the city.

This means that the ad scene in Amsterdam is much more focused on branding and creative output, and those of us that work in the ad industry here are incrementally more connected to culture, and incrementally less connected to the world of commerce than our peers in bigger cities. This disconnectedness from business-speak and ad-speak is part of what makes the place special. Two-thirds of Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam’s clients are global accounts, so we of course have to be able to navigate the world of modern business and brand building. Our real value, however, is our ability to help brands find their voice in the real world, in real culture where real people with real choices live their lives. Because we have a bit more of a foot in that world than we would do if we lived in a commercial capital, we are that bit more likely to want to put out work that we know people will be happy to live alongside.

With more and more companies growing based on advertising-supported business models, the world is unlikely to get rid of advertising any time soon. And with the world becoming more inter-connected and inter-dependent, we’re likely to see brands hitting global scale in ever-shorter timeframes. So the ad industry has a short window to figure out how to keep a focus on building brands in a way that is good/interesting/useful, and not to fill the world with bad ads that reduce cultural reference points to a lowest common denominator.

For that reason alone, I’m glad that there’s an open-minded city of open-minded people here in Amsterdam working in our industry and thinking about creativity. Because building a strong global brand shouldn’t just be about finding common ground that accommodates everyone; it should be about doing something interesting once you get there.

Blake Harrop, Managing Director, Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam

Tel: +31 (0)20 7126 500

Web: www.wkams.com

Twitter: @WKAmsterdam

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