During my time at Jacobs Suchard, I had been disappointed by the advertising agencies I had seen. The branch offices of the global advertising networks were filled with mediocre people, who were just cutting and pasting material that was sent to them by their central offices in London, Paris or New York. And the local agencies were very local—they lacked an international outlook or a business approach, they were just creative hotspots without a commercial approach.

I reasoned that an ad agency that combined advertising skills with marketing know-how would be unique. And, I reasoned, there would be a big market for this kind of agency in Switzerland, where many companies didn’t have the size or resources to pay for both an ad agency and a large marketing team. I sat down and wrote a manifesto that explained how this new approach would revolutionise the Swiss advertising scene. The new agency, imaginatively called ‘Simko Communication & Marketing’, also included a novel way of handling creative work: it would all be outsourced. 

No one had ever heard of an ad agency that had no in-house creative personnel, since creative strength was considered the ad agency’s core business. We would be the first! Our theme was: à la carte creative services. You, dear client, don’t get served with the creative people we happen to have in our agency—we have the world open for you. We have a roster of dozens, no hundreds, of creative minds available, not just in Switzerland, but all over the world. We will include them on our team on a project-by-project basis. They will work on your business for as long as it makes sense, then they will leave, thereby reducing fees to only what was necessary. You don’t like the creative team we’re proposing? No problem, we’ll get you another one. The only constant will be the Simko people: seasoned account managers with significant advertising and marketing know-how.

I showed the manifesto to Josée and invited her to join me. We would be the two initial employees of Simko Communication & Marketing. We would start small and scale the business step by step. She agreed.

When we went to see Nico Issenmann, our boss at Jacobs Suchard, to tell him about our idea, he said: ‘Are you really sure? There are dozens, no hundreds, of ad agencies in Switzerland. It’s not an easy business to get into. And you have no agency or creative experience.’ But I was undaunted and enthusiastic.

So, we both resigned from Jacobs Suchard at the end of 1990 and started ‘Simko Communication & Marketing’ in January 1991. We moved to Geneva and rented a beautiful, luminous apartment in at the Place Reverdin, with great views of the Jura mountains. It would be the place where my sons Pablito and Nico would be born.

To launch the new agency we produced an elegant little brochure, with a very upmarket and conservative graphic design. I thought that a nicely bound hardcover booklet would be very distinctive, but in fact what we produced looked more like a brochure for a private bank than for a creative ad agency. It featured no creative work (we had none), it had no illustrations, it was just a few pages of text, a few diagrams, and two photos, one of me and one of ‘Mrs. Bélanger’ (I had thought it better if Josée’s maiden name appeared, I reasoned that it would look less like a ‘family business’ and more like a proper corporation).

The photos of us were very conventional, and I owe it to the photographer we hired that in my portrait I’m wearing a tie that at least gave the semblance of modernity. He couldn’t persuade me not to wear a tie, but at least he got me to wear one which he had brought along, that included a few large flowers and was from a hip Swiss German brand called Fabric Frontline, and not the dark blue tie I intended to use, which, he said, would be quite appropriate for a funeral but not for the launch of an ad agency! 

The brochure was uninspiring, but it turned out that the idea itself of the agency was off the mark too. There were few, if any, companies in Switzerland who were desperate to have an external support that combined advertising and marketing. Most small clients preferred to internalise marketing, even if it was with junior people. As for advertising support, they were quite happy with the local hotshops, even if these people lacked any business perspective or had international experience. Our idea of creating ‘à la carte’ external teams of creatives was seen as expensive and cumbersome; most clients asked themselves if, in the end, they wouldn’t be paying twice: once for the Simko team and a second time for those that the Simkos hired. And anyway, they thought, we can hire freelance creative teams ourselves and brief them, we don’t need Simko for that.

Nevertheless, we did succeed in acquiring a first client, with whom to open the agency. It was Chocolats Favarger. This very traditional manufacturer of chocolates had been founded in Geneva in 1826, the same year as Suchard, and had survived as an independent company for almost two centuries because it was run with a very cost-conscious mindset by generations of the Favarger family, who were devoted darbyists, members of a rather obscure and conservative Protestant church. 

In 1991, Favarger was still entirely in the hands of the family. It was managed by two elderly cousins and a young member of the next generation, who was in his early 20s. The young man, it was hoped, would lead the company into a bright future.

When I first met them, they were confused about my discourse on the ‘new kind of agency’ I was proposing, but saw in me a man who understood the chocolate business in Switzerland. They were also very impressed by the fact that until recently I was the marketing head of Jacobs Suchard, a company they greatly admired. They had never heard of P&G and couldn’t care less that I was a graduate of HBS, which was somewhere in America and, as far as they were concerned, irrelevant to Favarger.

For six weeks, I met the Favargers every Saturday morning for three to four-hour briefing sessions. It was the very first time since 1826 that they had spoken to an outsider about their business, they said, and there was a lot of knowledge they had to transmit to me.

By the time the briefings had ended, it became clear to me that Favarger did not have the means to significantly alter their business. I explained the different strategic options open to them and they chose the most cautious one (a bit of poster advertising, only in the French-speaking area of Switzerland). I then put together a creative team, which produced a few quite original ideas, but I watered them down until they were quite conservative. Of all the conservative ideas I presented, Favarger chose the most old-fashioned one.

The result of Simko’s first advertising campaign, which I proudly presented to the local advertising press, was…nothing. Nothing moved on Favarger’s business. Their sales didn’t improve, not even by a little. We then tried a second, a little more aggressive investment, with the same poster—why change? The creative design was so reassuringly conservative, perhaps not every consumer had gotten a chance to look at it attentively, the Favargers and I reasoned. Again, nothing moved. After about a year, Simko and the Favargers quietly parted ways. 

In the meantime, I had succeeded in acquiring a few additional clients. One of them was Alp Action, Prince Aga Khan’s foundation for the preservation of the Alps. Another was Banque Unigestion, a private bank in Geneva. We also did some strategic work for Newsweek and, towards the end of our first year, we started working for Jockey, a very traditional underwear and pyjama brand.