Creativity over Cash: a Kessels Kramer visit
Forest wallpaper and astroturf floors, a wooden fortress and a golden lifeguard tower, animals huddled atop a diving board. This surreal landscape is the last thing you might expect to find inside a refurbished 19th century church in the middle of Amsterdam. But then, these are the offices of Kessels Kramer (KK), an advertising agency that likes to explode expectations. With a workplace like this, perhaps it’s not that unbelievable that KK projects are so strikingly bold and original that the company has earned the admiration and envy of ad creators around the world as well as a list of clients that includes names like Nike Europe, Heineken and Diesel. It’s here that KK brews up ad campaigns that brim with irony, and gleam with media-pirate panache. They have the power to draw in customers, turn their worlds upside down, and keep them laughing the entire time.
KK was founded fourteen years ago by Erik Kessels and John Kramer as an “agency that would reinvent creativity and communication.” It has since developed into a mini multi-national, with a staff of roughly thirty hailing from fifteen different countries around the world. They contribute to the entire process of marketing, from strategy to product planning and development. KK also roduces television commercials, short films and video clips, publishes photo books and plans exhibitions. Thus it is that this crazy, cluttered space keeps churning out fresh perspectives on art and advertising, always, of course, with a twist.
KK’s philosophy has always been to use their brains instead of their pocketbooks. Their reluctance to hire big-name models is their thumbs-down to a industry that relies on money-making mugs to recycle advertising cliches. To promote a Dutch soccer team sponsored by Nike, KK stuck Nike logo stickers on orange signal lights all over Amsterdam (without permission, of course). Orange of course being the color of Holland’s national soccer team. With Audi, KK hired a bus to travel around the Netherlands and hunt down Audis. Whenever they found one parked on the street, they gave it a thorough washing and left a greeting card thanking the owners for their devotion. At the time, these scenes were filmed and turned into TV commercials. For a Dutch mobile telephone company, formerly known as Ben, the agency secured the cooperation of Salt Lake City-based journalist Ben Fulton to organize a huge party attended exclusively by people named Ben and timed it to coincide with the 2002 Winter Olympics.
KK’s first client, the Hans Brinker Hotel, is a budget hotel in Amsterdam catering mostly to backpackers. The hotel consists of rooms furnished with a bunk bed(s) and not much else. It’s fine if all you need is a cheap crash pad, but that doesn’t give much for the ad guys to work with. KK’s solution to the problem of selling the place was to commission a series of cheesy-looking illustrations accompanied by deprecatory copy. How about, “Now even more dogsh*t in the main entrance!” or, “Even less reasons to visit!” The campaign received a lot of media coverage, making the Hans Brinker famous, and attracting backpackers like flies to a soiled doorstep. Whatever you think of their methods, KK’s ad alchemy turned sh*t into gold.
Kessels Kramer retrospective text, 2 Kilos of Kessels Kramer, received a 2007 ‘Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt/Best Book Design award and was produced by publisher PIE Books, located here in Tokyo.
This excerpt originally appeared in Paper Sky No. 3 (The Netherlands, 2002).
