Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [108]
It doesn’t help that the epicenter of what’s next, the home of Fahrenheit 212—part ad agency, part consulting firm, part product design laboratory—is above a discount sneaker shop in a hundred-year-old office building.
But once I’m on the inside of Fahrenheit 212, a company barely two years removed from gaining its independence from the global ad giant Saatchi & Saatchi, a strange phenomenon occurred. I forgot about the foul weather, the god-awful traffic, and the world’s slowest elevator, and I began to grasp why companies like Samsung, Warner Music, Hershey’s, NBC, and Gucci had been tapping the eclectic band of entrepreneurial mercenaries of F-212 to generate disruptive ideas and invent products and services that can impact their brands with the force of defibrillator paddles.
And the reason wasn’t F-212’s all-white decor, state-of-the-art AV toys, or Amy Winehouse’s unconvincing take on rehab seemingly looped on the sound system. It’s because—and this became apparent even before I met the designer, who had a proclivity for tattooing samples of his favorite projects onto his body—there’s something Wonka-ish about the place.
As a result, the more time I spent there, the more I found myself getting excited about some of the weirdest shit, from the grandiose to the seemingly quotidian. The bottled water in my hand? Geoff Vuleta, the CEO, wasted no time in describing some of the killer innovations they have in the works for a client in that category. The cup of coffee I just declined? Get ready for an impassioned narrative about the worldwide coffee market, the preferences of the Japanese and female demographics, and how F-212 is sitting on a line of products that will forever change our relationship with a cup of joe.
Even the piece I’m thinking of writing about them, they had some thoughts about this, too. From basic art direction and sidebar suggestions to a radical new take on nothing less than the entire eye-to-paper reading experience. Some might call this type of visionary pathos bold, or obnoxious, but what it really is, is inspired. And bold. And obnoxious. Because when it comes to ideas, the eighteen-person staff at F-212 can’t help themselves.
At F-212 everything is an idea. Or at least one waiting to happen.
Vuleta’s tales are peppered with prefab pearls of bizdom like “identification of transformational vectors” or the observation, pronounced with less than convincing spontaneity, that 212 degrees Fahrenheit (water’s boiling point, for those not in science class that day) is also “the point at which one degree of change can make a profound difference.” But as he walked me through one top secret project after another (an unfortunate thing about capitalism is that everything’s confidential until it’s in your shopping cart), I saw that there is substance behind the stratspeak, and they have identified some pretty damned impressive vectors.
This is why Craig Kallman, CEO of Atlantic Records, had no reservations about enlisting F-212 to help solve Atlantic’s—and by association the entire music industry’s—seemingly insurmountable strategic problems, most notably how an industry that for generations made its money on records, tapes, and CDs can thrive in a download world. “They had such an obvious grasp of strategy, the proven ability to execute an idea and at the same time be wildly creative and innovative,” Kallman told me. “We’re fighting wars on so many fronts it made sense to step outside and get the perspective of someone who can force us to look at things differently and see what’s possible. So we basically said, ‘Here’s how we do things. Get under our hood, look inside, and go get creative.’”
Vuleta wasn’t particularly keen on discussing F-212’s ad agency roots or biting at my numerous suggestions that a lot of what they are doing for clients now is what agencies used to do for clients in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, clients and agencies were marketing partners in every sense. It wasn’t uncommon then for agencies to suggest the introduction of a line extension for a product, or