Hello Avenue A | Razorfish

Not another blog.  Well… yes, but I’ll spare you lots of opinions.  No, the purpose of this blog is to share my experiences as I work with our people across Europe.

What you see is what you get

On Oct 30th, Clark and I flew into Madrid to welcome our new colleagues.  WYSIWYG — 50 strong.  Thursday was comprised of meeting a few of their clients to introduce Razorfish and then wait… wait… and wait for MS Treasury to wire the money… Around 9PM all was confirmed and we went for a celebratory dinner.

Dinner with WSYIWIG

This made me very happy, not only for adding a strong office in Europe but because they have the most amazing cured ham in Madrid and I had been craving it for 2 weeks.

Paris Auto Show

Last night, Mathieu (the President of our French office) and I went to the Paris Auto Show… naturally we went by scooter (what was I thinking getting a ride on the back of a scooter driven by a mad frenchman whipping through the streets of Paris during evening rush-hour.

We did survive, met some of our Nissan clients and enjoyed the show,

Matthieu and Darin on the scooter

Matthieu in front of my favorite Citroen

Matthieu in the 911 Targa 4S

A day in Frankfurt

From Berlin to Frankfurt today.  Arrived around 9AM.  It’s my second visit to the Frankfurt office.  There are almost 100 people here in Frankfurt, organized into two self-contained Business Units run by the Kai’s (Kai Platschke runs Frankfurt East and Kai Greib runs Frankfurt North).  Frankfurt is also the City that Andreas and Olaf call home – so I guess one could say it is the German headquarters.

Andreas - CEO of Neue Digitale

I’m here in Frankfurt today to do a series of press interviews and catch up with the team…

Herr Rösch - reporter for Horizont (AdAge of Germany)

Two reporters from Marketeers + Pioneers

Kai Paltschke and a few of his people are off to see Microsoft in Munich and pitch them on a strategy for one of their online services… wish them luck

Sally O'Dowd (US PR Director) with Kai and Ed

Once the interviews were over, I had a chance to spend some time with Sven Weisbrich, our new head of Media in Germany (although I encouraged him to broader than media — distribution or connections or whatever we will call it).  It is great to see the enthusiasm here in Europe to invent the digital future.

Sven Weisbrich - Media Guru

And got to catch up with Elke – CD extraordinaire and Tom, one of the several Brits in Germany

Elke and creative work

Tom Acland: Technology Leader

Ich bin ein Berliner

I spent the day in our Berlin office.  It’s located on the east side of the river (which used to be inside East Berlin).  The city has seen a great deal of change since I was here 18 years ago.

Stralauer Allee 2a

Neue Digitale Berlin

The office is 35 people strong and is doing great work for Audi, McDonalds and Telecom — and it was only created from scratch about 1 1/2 years

Sascha, Sven and Matthias

part of the PocketFrames team