The strawberry poison-dart frog measures an inch or so. Red body. Blue legs. Favours rain forests.
Attributes: Territorial. Agile as hell.
For ad industry outsiders, the strawberry frog may merely be a curiosity of nature.
For industry insiders, StrawberryFrog is the nimble New York-based advertising agency founded by Canadian Scott Goodson, who at this moment is nestled into a hotel lobby bar, sipping a glass of white wine, pondering globality.
Scott Goodson
"The world today," he says, "travels on the currents of opportunity."
That's a commonplace observation. But Mr. Goodson, raised in Montreal and educated at the University of Western Ontario, is about to open an office in Mumbai, hitched to his agency being awarded the U.S. marketing launch for Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. pickup trucks and SUVs.
The world - or at least the North American world - is just coming to associate the name Mahindra with auto manufacture. For more than a decade the company has been selling tractors in the United States under the Mahindra name, but thus far the company's pickups and its Scorpio SUVs have only gradually gone global.
That will change in 2009, with, first, the introduction of two-door and four-door pickups into the U.S. market.
For Mr. Goodson, the creative slate is appealingly, refreshingly, blank. "They don't have a history of brand building," he says of the company's U.S. foray. "They're going to compete on soft tissue. On charisma. On culture. ... That's what we're hired for."
Since its inception, StrawberryFrog has marketed itself as an inciter of cultural movements, with Mr. Goodson bringing a peripatetic world view to the enterprise. Peripatetic is what you get when you think you're going to be a lawyer, switch to advertising, work on the Ericsson account in Sweden, take it global (Thailand, Australia, Greece, etc.), return to Canada for an ill-fated creative sojourn with J. Walter Thompson Co. Ltd., and then leap back across the Atlantic to open a weirdly named boutique in Amsterdam called StrawberryFrog in 1999.
It's fast, it's rare and it has blue legs. The frog that is. "It's a rebel in blue jeans," says Mr. Goodson, in defence of the corporate name.
He adds that the frog is poisonous only if you lick it.
Mr. Goodson set out to prove that a boutique firm could deliver brand benefits to advertisers conventionally serviced by lumbering agency giants fattened on the revenue of television commercials.
From its first base in Amsterdam, StrawberryFrog won plaudits for its campaign work for a roster that grew to include such marquee names as Credit Suisse Group, IKEA AB and Heineken NV.
For IT consultancy Capgemini the agency unveiled teaser billboards throughout Europe issuing a warning: "There will be no laughing in the workplace for the foreseeable future. Thank you. The economy." Two weeks later the follow-up billboard message emerged: Defy the economy through Capgemini.
In winning Heineken, StrawberryFrog beat out McCann-Erickson London, proving Mr. Goodson's thesis that global work could be won by small shops. In 2004, StrawberryFrog opened its New York chapter, and, latterly, another in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where clients include the cosmetics line Natura along with PepsiCo Inc.
If this story were endlessly sunny, it wouldn't be about advertising. Clients come and clients go. StrawberryFrog ran with Heineken for four years, only to lose it last year.
"It's obviously disappointing to stop working with a client," Mr. Goodson says. "But that's the reality of our world today."
Mr. Goodson puts the account loss down to corporate changes at Heineken. But it started to look as though the frog was losing its footing. Rumours ran through the industry that Mr. Goodson was interested in selling out. He confirms that he "talked to different people" but says he ultimately remained determined to build an independent shop.
There was, however, a change in how StrawberryFrog is constituted. Earlier this year the company's Amsterdam office was rebranded as Amsterdam Worldwide after Mr. Goodson sold his interest in that office to onetime partner Brian Elliott.
Today the heart of StrawberryFrog is its penthouse premises on Madison Avenue. From that perch Mr. Goodson is eyeing new markets: Brazil and India being two.
Xavier Beguiristain is vice-president, marketing, at Global Vehicles U.S.A. Inc., in Alpharetta, Ga. Global has the exclusive distributorship for Mahindra vehicles, excluding tractors, throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Mr. Beguiristain says he turned to StrawberryFrog for the advertising launch because "we wanted to do things a bit differently than what some of the other automotive companies have done."
Unburdened by a brand legacy, Mr. Beguiristain is counting on StrawberryFrog to create "advocates and evangelists" who will carry the Mahindra flag.
Ethnographic studies conducted by the ad agency have led to some interesting findings. "One of the things we found is, if you say the name India your mind kind of goes all over the place," says Mr. Beguiristain. "But if I tell you this vehicle is built by a country that graduates more engineers than the U.S. does, your mind goes to a very different place."
For StrawberryFrog, the estimated $60-million (U.S.) marketing launch will be key to proving to skeptics that the firm hasn't lost its mojo.
Eighteen months ago, the agency was in the running for the Hyundai account, 10 times the size of Mahindra. StrawberryFrog lost that race to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Mr. Goodson speaks wistfully about the "beautiful" ads his team did for the South Korean car company.
"I think that would have been a cultural movement," he says. In losing, Mr. Goodson classily ran an advertisement in Advertising Age congratulating the winning agency.
The Goodby-Hyundai relationship didn't last. The agency and the car company have since parted ways. "That's the marketing world today," says Mr. Goodson. "In and out."
He's focused on making the Mahindra name very in, on creating a cultural event, a moment.
