15. December 2021

35 Years of follow red: The Transformation

35 Years of ”
” Follow red:
The Transformation

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

In October 2021, follow red celebrated its 35th anniversary. It’s a great time to look back on an exciting past and an even more exciting future. In the first part of our anniversary series, founder Ulrich Roth reflects on the changes since 1986 and how his agency has consistently taken a proactive approach to shaping them.

Establishment of aSponsorship Agency

The year is 1986. Two competitive athletes with a little background in advertising and marketing. No clients, no employees, no graphic designers, and no copywriters—just what was in their heads. Is that enough experience to start an agency?

Yeah, that’s what we thought. If we’re brave, if we’re smart, if we can manage to be special and different.

Günther Lohre was my founding partner. An 18-time German champion in the pole vault. A trained advertising executive and a creative, critical thinker. Athletes’ spokesperson for the German Athletics Association and a prominent victim of the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

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

With this wealth of experience, we were able to walk through the doors that opened for us thanks to our network during our early months as entrepreneurs. And so we founded Roth & Lohre Sports Communication, a sponsorship agency. My business partner’s name recognition was particularly helpful in this regard. He was the visionary; I was the doer. He was the creative one; I was the businessman. My role in those early years was to bring Günther’s ideas to life and turn them into contracts.

Our early experiences were varied. Using trial-and-error, we tackled many things and achieved success in some areas. We had to find our own way at first, but after all, we were one of the first agencies to focus on sponsorship, which gave us a unique selling point.

Sponsorship – In 1986, this field of communication was still in its infancy and was defined, at best, by jersey or perimeter advertising in soccer. For us, sponsorship was much more than that, and we saw it as our mission to develop sponsorship into a relevant field of communication.

When you consider how many companies and brands, how many artists, athletes, clubs, and associations are involved in sponsorship today, it’s clear that back then we had a good nose for a world, a range of topics, and a genre that offered us countless opportunities to make our vision a reality.

Since our founding, sponsorship has grown into a billion-dollar market. The sponsored party conveys a positive image, and on the sponsor’s (our clients’) side, this results in image enhancements in areas such as dynamism, success, happiness, security, and much more. In return, the sponsor provides money, in-kind contributions, and expertise. The key lies in successfully connecting the sponsor and the sponsored party. When this partnership is built on empathy, both sides benefit.

Creating win-win situations, facilitating them, and continually developing them was then—and remains today—an important motivation and a fundamental principle for me. This applies just as much to sponsorship as it does to employment relationships or the agency-client relationship. “Win-win” represents an attitude that I live by and promote every day—and one that has undoubtedly played a decisive role in shaping the agency follow red over the past 35 years.

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A Win-Win Mindset

Ulrich Roth

Encounters

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

People attend sports and cultural events because they’re looking for an authentic experience. They want to be there in person to see their team win. They want to experience and feel their idols’ performances up close. They’re looking for the thrill, the moment of joy, the intensity, and the authenticity.

As we delved into sponsorship, exploring the concepts of interaction and communication in such settings quickly became another key aspect of our work. To this day, we continue to conceptualize and organize hospitality areas, accompanying events for our clients, the organization of entire sporting events, media events, corporate events, roadshows, promotions, and much more. Over the years, we’ve added all of this to our existing capabilities. This was also made possible by Rolf Lorenz, who joined us as an additional partner in January 1991. Rolf came from a large event agency, and as a rapidly growing company, we were able to benefit from his experience in agency management as well.

It was Coca-Cola, one of our first sponsorship clients, that asked us in the mid-1990s if we could bring the trucks from the annual Coca-Cola Christmas campaign directly to the people. This evolved into the Coca-Cola Christmas Tour. To this day, it remains 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 significant Christmas campaign in Germany. We did this for 20 years—that is, we developed it, holistically refined it, digitized it, scaled it, and—incidentally—the tour made us known as an agency brand far beyond the borders of Stuttgart. Even today, when asked what image comes to mind in connection with the Coca-Cola brand, people still mention the Coke truck first.

Events make an impact. Very well-designed events create a lasting impact. The latter has always been our goal. No gimmicks, no magic dust—just making a real, lasting difference. Sparking people’s curiosity, building customer loyalty, and changing behaviors and attitudes.

This is how the agency evolved and changed. In the mid-1990s, what had started as a highly specialized sponsorship agency became Roth & Lorenz, a marketing communications agency focusing on sponsorship and live marketing.

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

Ulrich Roth

As described earlier, successful live marketing thrives on the experiences participants have there. Companies connect with their customers there; brands meet consumers. It is always people who come together and interact. Messages and emotions are conveyed in equal measure, and our promise to our clients is to capture this in content. The media production and distribution of the content generated through sponsorship and live marketing represent the logical next step in our agency’s development. In modern parlance, this would be called “content marketing.”

So we brought PR experts on board. After all, the public takes an interest when, for example, a Coke truck comes to town. However, successful public relations is defined in a much broader sense than simply through PR campaigns for specific events. For us, public relations is about shaping our clients’ communication channels—both internally and externally. And so we offer a comprehensive range of services in this field as well, by curating content and using it to develop information, images, videos, press events, social media posts, and much more.

A modern agency model witha holisticapproach to consulting

In 2015, we decided to rebrand as follow red. Our motivation was as follows: to provide advice and guidance, to design a unifying theme with a holistic approach, to develop authentic messages, and to shape and successfully implement all of this in a contemporary way. That’s how I would describe our positioning to this day. Our tagline sums it up: “Authentic Brand Experiences” promise physical or digital brand experiences in every dimension.

One more word on digitalization: Since our founding in 1986, digitalization has brought us an exponential increase in opportunities year after year. Looking back on 35 years in the creative industry, it’s hard to describe just how much the world of communication has changed—and continues to change at a rapid pace every day. Media, social media, algorithms, data, devices, UI/UX—we consume information and entertainment in an unprecedented variety of ways. This has an impact on our concepts, our knowledge, our work, and the profiles of our employees. Digital transformation defines the challenges we face today as an agency. Digitalization is accelerating this transformation. For follow red, the bar is set high: staying current and delivering consistently high-quality work—both in creation and execution—requires employees who are curious and eager to learn. We must seek them out, find them, retain them, and keep them motivated. Currently, this is certainly the greatest challenge for successful agency management.

For 35 years, I have been taking on these and other challenges, and for just under three years now, I have been doing so in a leadership role alongside my co-partner, Sebastian Wiese. I have remained true to my leadership principle of demonstrating and embodying the willingness to embrace change that this requires every day.

Together with Sebastian, I manage the transition day by day.

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We are proud to have built follow red into a successful agency with a first-rate team of motivated employees. May it remain that way for a long time to come.

Ulrich Roth in December 2021 on 35 Years of Change