Swedish company: Perfect Fools

Perfect Fools, one of Sweden's most creative companies, has left behind the traditional world in which even the term ‘advertising’ is a dated one and is now leading the way in digital innovation.

While much of the advertising community has, over the last decade or so, fumbled somewhat uncomfortably with the dreaded ‘D’ word, Sweden has pretty much whispered sweet nothings into its ear, stroked its hair and held its hand while leading it confidently upstairs with the promise of a good time. Sweden has not been backwards in coming forwards when it comes to the digital world and has set the pace confidently and successfully for many years.

One Swedish company that has been at the heart of this digital dominance is Perfect Fools. Housed, rather aptly, in a converted cinema in Stockholm, Perfect Fools is the brainchild of chief executive officer Patrick Gardner, executive creative director Tony Högqvist and chief technology officer Tony Sajdak, who opened the doors of the company on 1 April 2002, hence, in part, the name.

According to Gardner, when they started up the company there was no one else doing what they did, i.e. to act as a production company to agencies but from a purely digital standpoint. “These days, that is a totally accepted concept,” he states, “but back then, in Sweden, there were no other companies that sold themselves that way. We very clearly said to ad agencies that we would work with them just like their film production company works with them, but for digital. And then we grew from there.”

Famous for such award-winning work as the Puma Index, Skittles’ Update the Rainbow/Dazzle the Rainbow projects, a host of Converse work and the digital elements of adidas’s 2010 World Cup campaign, Perfect Fools has proven time and again that it has both the creative vision and the technical know-how to compete, and win, on the world stage.

Sitting down with Gardner for an hour to talk about his company and about how the digital world is encroaching ever more rapidly on the traditional world is an eye-opening experience. The first thing that strikes home is that, instead of worrying that other companies and agencies are snapping at the heels of Perfect Fools, he welcomes the challenge and, even more so, welcomes the fact that it means more clients are, finally, realising the potential of digital.

“Things are happening now, and they are happening really fast,” says Gardner. “The whole world is really going digital and a lot of the biggest agencies in the world have now got this. They have realised that it is happening and they are running with it and putting it in place, so it is changing the picture. Maybe that is taking away, a little bit, from the sort of extreme head start that Sweden had, so the world is becoming a little more level, but that is not such a bad thing because it means that the types of things we want to do overall are more common now, and on a bigger scale.”

Government investment

Gardner explains that Sweden got such a head start in the digital arena over other countries after the Swedish government invested heavily in the communication infrastructure during the 80s and 90s. “All of the people out here grew up with high-speed broadband, even if they lived in a tiny town out in the woods,” he says. There was also a government-sponsored programme that subsidised the purchase of home computers for Swedish citizens. “So basically,” continues Gardner, “all those people with high-speed internet probably also had decent PCs at home while they were growing up.”

Gardner is not a Swedish native himself, having moved from Portland on the west coast of the US in the mid-90s while working for a language and travel company, but he has immense respect for Swedes, their creativity and their work ethic. “Sweden is very enterprising,” he says. “Swedes like to push the limits and there are these world-renowned brands that have come out of a country of 9 million people – brands such as Volvo, Saab, Ericsson, IKEA and Tetra-Pak. It’s kind of amazing.”

For a committed digital pioneer, Gardner is, unlike some of his peers, someone who does not blame brands and marketers for the relatively slow uptake of digital advertising. He understands that they are businesses and professionals and that, while the creative landscape of the digital world has been an exciting one for a long time, the promise of profit has not always matched.

“[Digital] needed to prove itself and there needed to be real ways that it could work for people,” adds Gardner. “It was partly about human behaviour changing. There was a big audience of early adopters around in the 90s and early 2000s, but not the kind of penetration that has happened now with, say, Facebook, where it is an everyday phenomenon for normal people in their normal walk of life. At the end of the day, if you are a marketing manager, you need results. It is not about an experiment. Your job is on the line and if you are going to take millions of dollars from your media budget and just stick it on the internet and it doesn’t work, you are fired.”

Changing attitudes

Now, though, attitudes and audiences are shifting and it’s time that brands and marketing managers realise that, while TV and print advertising will always have a place, the digital world has finally tipped over and merged, almost seamlessly, with what, up until now, has been called the traditional world. Gardner is passionate about the possibilities that digital advertising can offer, but stresses that people’s outlooks and habits have to change, even citing that the term ‘advertising’ seems out of date, symbolising “sort of posting a sign”.

“The old way of thinking was two smart guys with tremendous cultural insight lock themselves in a room and come up with an unbelievable idea,” says Gardner. “'Just Do It’, for example. And when you hear it you are like: ‘This is so cool I can’t believe I didn’t think of that’. Then they set about broadcasting that message out across the world, and the world is awed by it, and does what the brand wants. But it doesn’t work that way anymore because it is not enough just to broadcast things out. You have to understand how to have a conversation and listen and to take what you have heard, iterate that into your message and keep the conversation going. And I think that has been a stumbling point for some ‘traditional’ people, some of whom will never get past it because, really, they don’t want to listen; all they want to do is talk.”

He explains: “Digital isn’t about the ones and the zeros or about a channel; it is about an environment in which your audience is on a par with you and you are not broadcasting out to them anymore. You are having a conversation with them, and it has got to the point where that sounds like a cliché, but we have to say it that way because a lot of people still don’t get it. There is a conversation going on around every brand, whether the brand wants to admit it or not. The smart brands are participating in the conversation and having fun with it and reading it in an interesting way. Even if they hear something bad, the smart brands take that information and use it.”

So Perfect Fools will continue to do what it does best and lead the way in digital innovation from the little country of only 9 million people.

perfectfools.com