KesselsKramer: Be daring or invisible

Graphis, Jan/Feb 2001 by Metz, Tracy

Known for their innovative and guerrilla-style marketing, KesselsKramer stands ready to reclaim the high ground, all in the name of good advertising. Entering the KesselsKramer studio makes lesser mortals feel terminally unhip. The hottest of the young Dutch ad agencies is housed in a former Catholic church, built in 1877, on one of Amsterdam's canals as part of a nunnery called Divine Providence. Under chartreuse vaults and gilded capitals the lofty space is filled with such unlikely objects as a fort of spiked logs, a wooden beach tower, a white picket fence along a plastic hedge, a boxing bag and plaster garden gnomes (many of which were beheaded during intra-office soccer games). The installation was designed by the English studio FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), and at the reception counter sporting a sign that reads "HELPDESK," two pretty girls welcome the visitor. We talk in the meeting room, where we sit at a picnic table with slices of tree trunk as stools and a view of the lifesize bucolic forest scene on the wallpaper.

So it comes as quite a surprise, when I discover that Erik Kessels (34) and Johan Kramer (35) are dead serious about their work and their ideas. Since they went into business in 1996, they have brought together a random assortment of twenty-five people, ten from outside the Netherlands, in what they call "organized chaos." Yet, despite its small staff, KesselsKramer has rapidly made a name for itself as one of the most innovative and unconventional companies in the Netherlands, with numerous high-profile clients that include Audi, Heineken, Nike, Levis, the English TV Channel-5, singer Tom Waits and the Dutch postal service. Earlier this year, they created a series of ten stamps on the theme "Congratulation" depicting ten hands with varying kinds of congratulations written on those hands. It's the first time they have done stamps and getting a commission to design a stamp has traditionally been a badge of honor for Dutch designers. They have also won numerous awards, and distinguished themselves by being the only advertising agency whose work was included in a major overview of graphic design in Holland's Stedelijk Museum. Together with Droog Design they have also exhibited at such ultrahip venues as Rem Koolhaas's KunstHal in Rotterdam and the gallery Colette in Paris.

KesselsKramer's campaigns are often funny and always imaginative, almost to the brink of becoming anti-advertising, or what some would call "guerrilla marketing." Part of the campaign for the mobile phone provider Ben, for example, was a TV-commercial that pointed out that one of the many things you can do with your phone is turn it off. And the Hans Brinker budget hotel campaign has the hotel promoting itself with slogans like: "Now even more dogshit in the main entrance!" or "Now even more noise!" This is the kind of wry, self-deprecating humor you would expect to find in England. "Humor is often said to be very culture-related," muses Kramer, "but apparently the irony in these 'slogans' is internationally recognizable for a generation that grew up with advertising and can see straight through it."

Obviously, then, not everybody can be a KesselsKramer client. Not only do clients expect a lot from them, they in turn expect just as much from their clients. "It has to be a two-way exchange that inspires us as well," Erik Kessels says. "Otherwise why would we bother?" Ideally their way of working brings disciplines together-- once an architect invited them to help think through the concept and the design of a new building. "We've made advertisements that became trams, designs that became the front pages of newspapers and then turned into outdoor posters, photography that turned into magazine articles. It's good to know where one discipline starts, but it's always better to ignore where it ends." One of the things they value most-and emphasized throughout our conversation-is freedom of thought.

In their campaign for the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool, KesselsKramer made novel use of the interaction between the internet and offline advertising. For a month, street posters were hung all over the city in which the paper asked Amsterdammers their opinions on six different hot issues. One showed a parking officer with one of the widely-detested yellow wheel clamps and the text "Money machine? React at www.parool.nl." Passers-by could also vent their feelings about possible candidates for mayor, the trainer of the local soccer team and the canalbikes. The reactions were published a few days later in a special internet supplement of the paper.

No wonder KesselsKramer says it deals in communication. That may mean advertising, but it can also be product development for CD-ROMs, films and books, or debates on the internet. "First we think about what we want to say-that's the strategy-and only then about how to say it-the form," says Kramer. "You have to know what you want to say before you can decide whether a billboard or a film or a box of matches is the best way to say it." He points out that the "guerrilla tactics" of their early years-making 1996 sound like decades ago-had largely to do with the small budget of a young agency. "Rather than putting up expensive billboards to advertise Nike's sponsorship of the Dutch national soccer team, we pasted the famous swoosh on more than a thousand yellow traffic lights all over Amsterdam."