The campaign with which we won the Swiss Campaign of the Year Award in 2003 was for the beer brand, Cardinal. In Switzerland, most of the beer is consumed in the Swiss German part. Accordingly, almost all the best-known beer brands come from this part of the country. The French-speaking area is known for wines, not beer. So, the brand Cardinal, brewed in French-speaking Fribourg, was a big exception. We had been working on Cardinal for a while, when a new marketing director arrived. We wanted to impress him and I asked Olivier to think about a new campaign.

The day before our meeting, Olivier asked me to come by his office. He didn’t say a word, just pressed a button on a tape recorder and, while an incredibly catchy song started to play, he showed boards with illustrations, which told the story of two little animated owls. The message was: this is the beer for night owls. It was totally different from any other beer ad in Switzerland, it was charming and cheeky, and could only have been made by a brand from the French-speaking part of the country.

The next day, in the meeting with the new marketing director, I told him that we had a surprise for him. Then Olivier, again without saying a word, let the music play and the images tell the story he had in mind. The marketing manager stood up and said: ‘Produce the spot now!’ His team was totally taken aback, and protested that we should at least conduct a consumer check to test the new spot, but he overrode them.

The day after the spot was first aired, calls started arriving at Cardinal from bars and restaurants that stocked the brand. ‘These little owls, could you send us some of them?’ ‘What do you mean?’ the people from Cardinal asked. ‘Well, we have people coming in here, they want to know if the owls can be bought, they want to take them home with them.’

It took only a few days and the Cardinal owls were the talk of the town in Switzerland. I received calls from at least a dozen newspapers and magazines, and Olivier and I appeared several times on TV to comment about the ‘Cardinal craze’. When the time came for the annual award, the Cardinal ‘owls’ campaign was ranked first by consumers throughout the nation. And our client’s business had grown considerably.

We were now famous, and calls started to come in from Switzerland’s largest and most prestigious companies, asking to meet us. I started to receive dozens of letters a week from employees from other agencies, who wanted to know if there were opportunities at Simko.

This was all the more so, since word had gotten around that we treated our employees very well. We not only had a great atmosphere at the office, we also at least once a year invited the whole agency with their partners for a party weekend. Some of the years, we all travelled to the south of France. This of course came on top of the regular parties that took place in the parks around Geneva.

We became the darling of the press and for a while I was quoted at least once per week somewhere in the Swiss press. It came in handy that I was completely fluent in German, something that always surprised Swiss German reporters. I could also get by in Italian, which meant that I received frequent calls from the small, but nevertheless important Swiss Italian press outlets. In the French-speaking part of Switzerland, I was often interviewed on TV. Two or three times I was invited to the live transmissions of the evening news. The next morning, it was not infrequent for complete strangers to congratulate me on the street.

In my dealings with the press, I made sure that they would always receive quick and, as best as I could, objective information. I tried not to push our own agenda, and to be as fair as possible. This meant that, to the surprise of journalists, I frequently commented very positively on campaigns run by our competitors and always encouraged them to speak directly to the agencies who had created them. This meant that not only journalists came to see me as a reliable partner, but that our competitors started to really respect us.

On one occasion, we hired a young and very promising art director from a large and well-known competitive agency. The day after he arrived, I received a call from the agency’s CEO. He was very upset. ‘How can you just steal people like that?’ he fumed. ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘This art director, he just left and is now sitting in your agency! He has work to do here, it’s unacceptable.’ I called in the person in question and found out, to my dismay, that he had signed a contract with us two months before, but had failed to inform his employer that he was leaving. I picked up the phone, told the other agency CEO what I had found out and said to him that I was sending the employee back to finish the work at this agency. Plus, I offered to send additional people from my team, at my expense, to do whatever work was needed to finalise the projects my new art director should have completed and didn’t.

The CEO was totally surprised and said that he had already solved the problem, but could he invite me to lunch to thank me for the gesture, even though he now understood that what had happened was not at all my fault. I said no way, I would invite him and that I was sorry for the disruption caused by the art director. Over lunch, I promised the CEO that I would be happy to help on another occasion, and I did. When the occasion arose (the other agency was working on a major pitch and didn’t have sufficient resources), I sent in a team, and the agency won their pitch. The CEO not only thanked me profusely, but he leaked the story to the press and our image in Switzerland was further boosted.