Germany: Serviceplan Group

A product of his parents’ blend of Teutonic pragmatism and Latin American creativity, Alexander Schill has fulfilled his own ‘crazy’ mission statements to grow Serviceplan from a safe, award-less agency to a global gong-laden concern bursting with new ideas.

Alexander Schill has a habit of building empires. During Berlin’s hedonistic early-90s nights, while most students were happy enough going to nightclubs he was busy running one. In more recent years he’s taken a safe, ‘boring’, award-less, single-office agency, Serviceplan, to 28 countries and second in the Cannes independent agency rankings.

He was born to a mother from Quito, Ecuador, who grew up in Canada and a father who was “swabian”, meaning he came from a part of Germany near Stuttgart where people are considered to be hard-working and financially risk-averse. Schill describes it as “the most German area in Germany because it’s very strict about earning money and being conservative,” and he believes his parents’ radically different backgrounds created in their son an almost creative/sensible split personality.

Like many who make it to the industry’s peak, the 44 year old didn’t really want to get into advertising when he was younger and after finishing school he secured a place to study medicine in a quiet town called Giessen. But before he was due to move there, in early 1990, he received an invitation to study at the High School of Fine Arts in Berlin.

“I still wanted to be a doctor but I thought, ‘this is crazy shit; to study in Berlin after the wall came down’, and it definitely was. The four years I spent there was the most crazy time of my life. I opened an illegal nightclub in an old slaughterhouse with some friends. In the beginning we had 20 people, then 100, then it got too big to handle. We were afraid because it had just one staircase and we were worried what would happen in a panic. Maybe my father’s side in me was saying, ‘no it’s getting too big and strange people are coming in’. So we shut it down.”

The club was just around the corner from the Serviceplan office that Schill has since opened in Berlin, one of many places around the world that the agency has branched out to under his guidance. But why did he change his mind about his career path?

“The school brought a lot of advertising people in to teach us and without thinking too much about it I got a contract from the former hot shop, Springer & Jacoby, in Hamburg a year before I was finished with my studies, so I signed that and I went there to do advertising for Mercedes in 1994, the day after I finished school. I wasn’t really passionate about doing advertising but there were a lot of crazy people there and we had a lot of fun, so I just kept on running. I got deeper into it and kept thinking, ‘I’m going to become creative director, I’m going to become the best at this’.”

By 2003, Schill had become CCO at the agency and 2005 was the most successful in its history. The following year he was recruited as global chief creative officer, board member and associate partner at Serviceplan Group. At the time, the agency, which was founded in 1970, had a strong, financially successful background but was known as the place to go for safe advertising. It had never won a creative award.

“When I met Florian Haller, who was the CEO of the group and the son of one of the founders, Dr Peter Haller, we were both completely aware that until then Serviceplan did not really invest a lot in creativity. It was successful as a business agency so he didn’t need to take a creative approach. I could easily have gone to any other agency that was known to be very creative – but we thought, ‘let’s try it and see what happens’ and we both thought it was kind of an experiment. 

Exporting German reliability

Schill began by opening Serviceplan’s first office outside its Munich home, in his beloved Hamburg, taking seven members of staff from Springer & Jacoby with him. From then on he set out to transform the agency into a creative, global, independent network.

“There was no global agency group with German roots. We’re kind of proud to have German roots, which in these insecure times are a good thing to take abroad. We recognise that not everybody likes the Germans when you go on holiday, but when it comes to work I think that many people around the world appreciate the reliability of Germans and so we started to turn the agency to the direction of creativity, because, of course, it’s very obvious that you sell more products if you do it with creative advertising.”

Now the biggest independent agency in Europe – employing 1,500 people at 28 offices in nine countries around the world and topping the German creative rankings as well as coming second and third respectively in this and last year’s Cannes’ global indie agency table – it seems that the mission is going pretty well. How did they initially turn it around though? By headhunting the best creatives in Germany?

“It wasn’t about hiring good people because, to be honest, nobody was really interested in working with Serviceplan for the creativity. I remember my first Christmas party here, where I announced that we wanted to be among the top ten creative agencies in the world. I was standing on the stage and nobody was listening and those who were listening were thinking, ‘what’s going on? It’s just completely crazy. It’ll never ever happen’. But in the first year we won three or four Lions and people started to believe we could do it. The next year I said I wanted to be in the top five and they said, ‘well fuck, last year he said top ten and it worked out, now he says top five, maybe it’ll work’, and so they got more and more into it and when I eventually said I wanted to be number one… To be honest, I don’t know if I had one of the ideas that won a Lion in the end myself. It’s all about motivation and a strong belief. It’s all about getting the crowd to run.”

When Serviceplan opens a new office it appoints local founding members not just as employees, but as shareholders, too. Someone is sent from Germany to help inject the spirit of the company and video screens show live feeds from all of the offices. Every year the whole network comes together in Austria for the huge Christmas party at Wolfgangsee lake, where Schill makes his ‘crazy’ mission statements. All of these measures are designed to create a feeling of independence yet community within the group.

“It’s vital for us to keep the group together. We’re very selective about who we do business with. We don’t open an office because we have business there, we open an office where we think we have the right people. In Beijing we opened with no accounts – we don’t have a client there – but we believe in the people.”

Wherever Serviceplan operates it follows a ‘three-column’ format with Serviceplan (classical advertising), Plan.Net (online and digital) and MediaPlus (media buying). Each has many smaller, specialised companies working under it, like Serviceplan Sponsoring and Rights, Serviceplan PR, etc. and this allows the group to conduct everything in-house by collaborating between offices.

“We go with the three ‘columns’ because we strongly believe that you need an idea, the technology and the right media. There’s no point having great technology if there’s no great creative idea behind it or if it cannot be done with the right media placement. If I need to program a website I can do it in-house, if I need to do some mobile application, I get it within two days from my own people. We help each other, which makes it much easier and much faster. So I never work with external experts for anything.”

Partying with the big Schill

With global clients including BMW, Lufthansa, KFC and O2, Serviceplan has created some fantastic campaigns in recent years, including the Selfscan Report for supermarket Auchan. Receipts carried a barcode that could be scanned by smartphones to display the retailer’s sustainability report, reducing paper usage by 99 per cent. It won the agency’s second consecutive Design Grand Prix at Cannes this year. Other notable works include The Daily Abuse for Innocence in Danger, a classically designed newspaper whose text was entirely made up of 240,000 children’s names to highlight the number of minors subjected to abuse daily. On the International Day for Prevention of Child Abuse, 720,000 copies were distributed in 23 cities around the world. It’s ideas like those, which utilise media in new ways, that excite Schill. 

“I really like [the Auchan campaign] because it combines technology, an idea and the first mobile sustainability report. In our presentations we always use cases combining the three ‘columns’.”

The tech revolution is also responsible for keeping Schill in the industry, he explains.

“If advertising had not changed within the last [several] years and was still just print ads and TVCs, I probably would have left, but every time I think I’ve had enough of advertising it changes again and I see there are possibilities to do things that change the world, so I keep on running. If one day advertising stops changing, maybe I’ll leave it.”

Having achieved so much at Serviceplan in the last seven years, what is Schill most proud of?

“It’s not only me who achieved it, but I’m proud that creative people are now proud to work here. At the beginning, they were all laughing at us. You know the quote from Gandhi? ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win’.” 

Does he feel like he’s won?

“I guess we’ve had our little victory, at least some people around the world today know the name Serviceplan, even if everybody says it’s a fucking uncool name. But I’m wary about saying that we’ve won because things can change in a day in advertising. We have nothing but the people and an idea where we want to be tomorrow. If we lose the people or our vision, we are nothing.”

Just like that illegal Berlin club, in Serviceplan Schill has created a party that everyone wants to go to; only this time it’s global and there’s no chance of him shutting it down.