The Tastemakers Society

Scott Goodson may or may not have an obsession with frogs, and yes before you begin to wikipedia or google ’strawberryfrog’ they do really exist. I may not ever know the connection between Scott and frogs but I did figure out his connection to the world of marketing and how he’s trying to mix things up. Now Goodson is leaping all over the place using his red and blue frog as his messanger.  

Name, age, location

Scott Goodson, 44, New York City

Can you give some background on yourself, childhood, the blurniess that was college, and the pusuing aftermath, all nicely wrapped up into making who you are today?

I was born in Montreal, Canada to a father who owned victoria press, a pulishing and printing company and a mother who was a model and then creative director of morgans, an elegant canadian department store, now she is a painter and a poet. I was the only boy with 4 sisters. I was very interested in sports like ice hockey, kayaking, hiking surfing but also realy into painting and art. My childhood memories are full of evenings in the art studio of my father’s company, taking all the pen caps off and drawing with the largest collection of colors every child would drool over. I went to Bishops college school, a boarding school in Lennoxville, Canada from 1977 to 1981. Then it was off to the University of Western Ontario, four years later I graduated with honors. I then decided to travel the world and work as an english teacher in Japan. During the trip I met my wife - who is orginally from sweden - in Greece.

Then after working in Canada for my father’s firm, we moved to Sweden. I started working as a copywriter for an ad agency called Sjoldebrand and Sjogren on the Bjorn Borg fashion account. Then it was at adaptus where I worked on Ericsson. Then I got a call from an agency called Welinder to help them win the Ericsson cell phone account. I went to work for them and started to work on most of the Ericsson business. I was asked to be on their board at 25. And ended up becoming co-owner of the 55 man agency when I was 28. After 10 years I decided to leave Sweden to return to Canada to be with my family as my father was ill. I was headhunted to the position of ECD of JWT Canada who had several offices with the mandate to turn the company around. I had two amazing years with my father and family in Canada, and after my father died, I started Strawberry Frog in Amsterdam working with clients I had previously worked with in Sweden such as Olof Stenhammer of OM Group and Swatch. We started the agency with an idea to challenge the huge corporate agencies that dominate and control the ad industry. 9 years later we have offices in New York with a staff of 70, San Paulo Brazil and Amsterdam. I moved to NYC (3 years ago in February) to start StrawberryFrog NYC from scratch.

What pushed your interest in marketing, did you ever want to try another career path?

I hated marketing growing up. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to do something constructive for the world. But in my last year of University, a very good friend of mine wanted to run for University President. An important paying job which until then went to sons of Canadian industry. My friend was a woman. She was black. And she was the daughter of a carpenter in Trinidad. Plus she was both intelligent and good looking. Instinctively I said I would be her campaign manager and we set off to win the 3 month election. The first week the school newspaper didn’t even write about her because they felt she had no chance. She won 68% of the vote and I learned a lesson about the power of communications. My first job was writing application letters for the graduating engineering class.

When you created StrawberryFrog, what was the moment when you realized you needed to sleep out on your own and do this?

StrawberryFrog is one word. I had been co-owner of Welinder advertising in Stockholm, and I was confident that model we have invented in Sweden would work well on the world stage, but based more centraly in Europe. I never thought twice about not working for myself. My father was an excellent role model. As is Uli Wiesendanger, the founder of TBWA who has been my mentor for many years.

And is their any story any specific meaning behind the name StrawberryFrog?

It is a living breathing frog in the amazon delta. It has a red body and blue legs. So it’s a rebel with jeans. Don’t lick the strawberryfrog because it is highly poisionous, and I like to think highly effective!

What’s StrawberryFrog’s approach to stay innovative, creative, original and just out right different from the so many marketing/branding/communications companies out there?

We do not believe traditional advertising works as well today. Consumers are switching between different media like texting, TV, email, web in 3 second intervals… so we invested the frog model. We spark cultural movements for brands. It’s like putting a surf board on a wave and riding social phenomena. We do this using a process called froglogic, which creates a bluprint for change for clients. It’s a simple 3 step process to define the idea on the rise to define culture, then we develop hypothesis and build generative concepts. We use all the disiplines to bring it to life.

It’s amazing and it’s radically changing the industry. During the New York Advertising Week on one side of town the traditional industry was celebrating Tony the Tiger and on the other side at OMMA there was an explosion of new technologies for the web and the digital universe and lots of micro companies owning or defining slice of the marketing world. It’s truly exhilirating and fun. Digital means freedom and creativity and pioneering spirit, while the traditional advertising is locked down by 60 years of how a TV spot should be done. I think digital creatives are by and large happier creatives. Another meta trend is the explosion of the bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) which I have been following thanks to Richard Monturo our head of strategy in Amsterdam, who is currrently writing a book on the subject. We are so fired up about our new agency in San Paulo. This is taking advantage of both the shrinking of the world through technology, it’s allowing us to use talent from abroad, and to connect with clients. All in all, it’s a small business person’s world verse years ago when the world was the oyster of the corporation. Now technology is opening it all up. Yes! It’s good to be a frog!

How much of an impact do you think your parents creative lifestyles helped mold your open/creative way of thinking and seeing things?

Back then I didn’t see it, but today I feel their hands guiding and influencing me in almost all my decisions and all my intuitions. My mother was part of a very respected modern painting collective back in 60’s, but decided to break out and have children… something professional artists back then did not do. She had a choice, motherhood or art. Many of her collective members went on to do famous modern art works that hang in museums and galleries around the world. My mothers paintings hang in her house and i the houses or her kids. All that energy and creativity had a huge influence on out lives through osmosis and also through her wild hippie lifestyle, which as opposed to my father who was extraordinarily creative but buttoned down, brought a lot of poets and writers and professors as well as art directors in our home. It was a wild childhood with lots of beans and other vegetarian food.

Did you ever fully give up painting and art, and how good at it were you?

I still paint when I can. But with small kids its not an easy task. It is my drug, the way I release stress and wander without going anywhere.

At 25 you were hoisted up into a very big league role, at that time how did you feel and handle it, and now looking back some 20 years later do you view that experience differently now then you did back then?

Back then I felt I deserved it because I had been instrumental in winning Ericsson and travelled the world with Jon Brannstrom the marketing director to launch Ericsson products from Australia to Mexico, from Athens to Thailand and all the points in between. It was the basis of the business model I established with Strawberry Frog and the mistakes I made back then taught me a lot of valuable lessons that I live by.

You say this age is built for the small business’, the individuals and companies more willing to dive into the changes and times the world is embracing, so if this is the age of the small what do you think will become of huge corporations over the next 5 to 10 years after having dominated the industry for decades up until now?

The huge burecratic advertising corporations will still exist. But they will exist beside established and credible alternative partners for major 100 million dollar clients. Now there is greater competition. Now there is greater competition. For years the corporate agencies referred to the smaller more creative agencies as mom and pop shops. These days the big corporate shops are taking on many of the values and methods of the smaller agency to compete with the new, more modern agency that is built for the client of today, not the clients of 25 years ago.  If you are good, its a good time to be an entrepreneur.

What is in the future for StrawberryFrog?

This is a very tough question. StrawberryFrog is an idea whose time has come. We started the agency in Amsterdam 9 years ago and it was a toddler and now its about to become a teenager. We’ve been through a lot and worked for some of the best brands in the world and most respected marketers such as Geoffrey Frost and Motorola, Ikea, Sony Ericsson, the Smart Car, Scion, Heinken, Fosters. We have been very fortunate, but we are still very young. Its only now that huge pieces of business is breaking free from the biggest clients such as P&G, Wall Mart, J&J, Miller Brewing. Things are changing fast and an agency, like StawberryFrog that lives in the outside lane is poised for wonderful things, especially here in the USA where the market is opening up at a blistering speed. We get 2 or 3 calls a day from major clients highly dissatisfied with their huge corporate agency partner. What we are doing may seem edgy, hard even, but its the complete opposite. We are building the truly modern agency. Frog is the leap of innovation. Agile. Independent, delivering strategic and creative excellence. I will remain a pirate on this pirate ship - together with Kevin McKeon our ECD, llana Bryant, our Chief Creative officer, Mike Lanzi our managing director and Tori Winn our ECD of digital - for as long as I can. I’m having a blast! 

strawberryfrog.com