15. December 2021

35 years of follow red: The change

35 years of
follow red:
The change

Or: About principles that have remained unchanged even after 35 years.

In October 2021, follow red celebrated its 35th anniversary as an agency. A good time to look back on an exciting past and an even more exciting future. In the first part of our series on the anniversary year, founder Ulrich Roth reflects on the change since 1986 and how his agency has always proactively shaped it.

Founding of a sponsoringagency

The year is 1986. Two competitive athletes with a little previous training in advertising and marketing. Without customers, without employees, without graphic designers and copywriters – simply with what was in their heads. Is that enough as a basis of experience for founding an agency?

Yes, we thought to ourselves. If we are brave, if we are clever, if we manage to be special and different.

Günther Lohre was my founding partner. 18-time German champion in pole vault. Trained advertising salesman and a creative, critical spirit. Spokesman for the German Athletics Association, prominent victim of the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

I myself was a passable hockey player and already had professional experience in marketing and sales.

With this experience package, we were able to walk through the doors that opened thanks to our network during the months of our young entrepreneurship. And so we founded Roth & Lohre Sports Communication , a sponsoring agency. The popularity of my co-partner was particularly helpful. He was the visionary, I was the doer. He is the creative one, I am the businessman. To make Günther’s ideas work and turn them into commissions was my role in the founding years.

Our first experiences were diverse. According to the method of trial and error, we tackled many things and led some things to success. We had to find our way first, but at least we were one of the first agencies to deal with sponsorship and thus had a unique selling point.

Sponsorship – In 1986, this communication discipline was still in its infancy and was defined at best by jersey or perimeter advertising in football. For us, sponsorship was much more than that and we saw our mission in developing sponsorship into a relevant communication discipline.

If you consider how many companies and brands, how many artists, athletes, clubs and associations come into contact with sponsorship today, we had the right nose for a world, a range of topics, a genre that offered us many opportunities for realization.

Since our founding, sponsorship has developed into a billion-dollar market. Positive things are transferred from the sponsorship recipient and on the credit side of the sponsoring provider (our customers) this results in image improvements in dimensions such as dynamics, success, happiness, security and much more. In return, the sponsoring provider provides money, benefits in kind and know-how. The successful connection between sponsorship provider and sponsorship recipient is the secret. If this partnership is designed empathetically, both sides win.

Designing win-win situations, moderating them and developing them on an ongoing basis was then and still is an important motivation and an important basic principle for me. This applies to sponsorship as well as to the employment relationship or agency-client relationship. Win-Win stands for an attitude that I live and convey every day and that has certainly had a decisive influence on the follow red agency over the past 35 years.

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Win-win as an attitude

Ulrich Roth

Encounters

It goes without saying that sponsorship is far more than just one of many communication disciplines. Sponsorship creates encounters and content.

People come to sports and cultural events because they are looking for the authentic experience. They want to be there live to see their team win. They want to experience and feel the performance of their idols up close. They are looking for the kick, the moment of happiness, the intensity, the authenticity.

By dealing with sponsorship, the examination of encounter and encounter communication quickly became another additional element of our work. Hospitality areas, accompanying events for our customers, the organisation of entire sporting events, media events, corporate events, roadshows, promotions and much more are still designed and organised by us today. We added all of this to our existing capabilities over the years. Incidentally, this was also favored by Rolf Lorenz, who joined us as a further shareholder in January 1991. Rolf came from a large event agency and so we were able to benefit from his experience in agency management as a fast-growing company.

It was Coca-Cola, one of our first sponsorship customers, who asked us in the mid-90s if we could bring the trucks of the annual Coca-Cola Christmas campaign live to the people. This has developed into the Coca-Cola Christmas Tour. To this day, it is the mother of all consumer roadshows and has reached and delighted millions of Germans of all ages. For decades, the Coca-Cola Christmas Tour was the most important Christmas campaign in Germany. We have been doing this for 20 years, i.e. developing, holistically developing, digitizing, scaling and – by the way – the Tour has made us known as an agency brand beyond the borders of Stuttgart. Even today, people name the Coke truck first when asked what image they have in mind in connection with the Coca-Cola brand.

Events create impact. Very well-designed events create a lasting effect. The latter has always been our claim. No sensationalism, no fairy dust, but really make a lasting difference. Arousing people’s curiosity, retaining customers, changing behaviour and attitudes.

This is how the agency developed and changed. In the mid-1990s, a top-positioned sponsorship agency became Roth & Lorenz, an agency for marketing communications with a focus on sponsorship and live marketing.

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Even today, the Coke truck is synonymous with the Coca-Cola brand.

Ulrich Roth

As described above, successful live marketing thrives on the sensations experienced by its participants. Companies meet their customers there, brands meet consumers. It is always people who meet and exchange ideas. Messages and emotions are conveyed in equal measure, and our promise to our customers is to capture this in terms of content. The media preparation and duplication of the resulting content from sponsoring and live marketing describes the logical further development of our agency. “New German” is what you would call content marketing.

So we brought PR experts on board. After all, the public is interested when, for example, a Coke truck comes into town. However, successful public relations is defined far more comprehensively than just the PR activation of events. For us, public relations is the design of the communicative interface of our customers internally and externally. And so we also offer a comprehensive range of services in this field by preparing content and developing information, images, films, press events, social media posts and much more from it.

Contemporary agency model witha holisticunderstanding of consulting

In 2015, we decided to change our name to follow red. With the following motivation: to give advice and orientation, to design the common thread with a holistic approach, to develop authentic messages and to design and successfully implement all of this in a contemporary way. That’s how I would describe our positioning to this day. Our claim sums it up: Authentic brand experiences promise physical or digital brand experiences in every dimension.

One more word about digitalization: Since our founding in 1986, we have experienced an exponential increase in possibilities year after year due to digitalization. Looking back on 35 years in the creative industries, it is hard to describe how the world of communication has changed and continues to change with great dynamism every day. Media, social media, algorithms, data, devices, UI/UX – we receive information and entertainment in an unprecedented diversity. With an impact on our concepts, on our knowledge, on our work, on our employee profiles. Digitization defines the challenges that we have to face today as an agency. Digitization is accelerating change. For follow red , the bar is high: Staying up to date and offering a consistently high quality of work both in creation and implementation requires curious employees who are willing to learn. We have to look for and find them, bind them to us and motivate them continuously. At the moment, this is certainly the biggest challenge for successful agency management.

I have been facing this and other challenges for 35 years and for almost three years now I have been doing this with my co-partner Sebastian Wiese. I have remained true to my leadership principle of bringing up and living the necessary willingness to change every day.

Together with Sebastian, I manage change day by day.