The man for difficult jobs
Arne Völker came to Zurich solely for love. Now he is the CD and a member of Blue Spirit's executive board.
Arne Völker came to Zurich just for love. Now he is a CD and a member of the management team at Blue Spirit.a poster with the sloggy graces hangs outside his office. The much-discussed eye-catcher was created before Arne Völker joined Blue Spirit. Nevertheless, he is happy to enter into a discussion about this type of advertising right away. Of course he likes the girls: "That's the kind of advertising I like," explains the new CD at Blue Spirit. And specifies: "Advertising does not have to please everyone. The main thing is that it has an extremely strong effect on many for it." The fact that the Sloggy posters "polarized a lot" in this sense has just been confirmed to Blue Spirit by APG in a study. Since Sloggy comes from Triumph, Blue Spirit is now to conjure up another campaign "with a similarly large PR impact" for this label. A tempting challenge for Arne Völker. They are already well on the way with proposals and are waiting for feedback, he says and reveals: "We are again working with key stimuli, extremely consistently implemented and not very artificial.
The allure of the new
However, advertising with key incentives has so far been the exception rather than the rule in the career of the career changer from Berlin. "I like working for clients who are not very risk-averse." Above all, he says, the conservative tasks offer him a great opportunity for satisfaction, "for example, when you have to find a creative solution for a bank despite a lot of restrictive specifications." Arne Völker conceived such intelligent advertising, which "can also stage a message without suckiness," at Publicis in Zurich, for example, before joining Blue Spirit. "I had the pleasure of working for clients like UBS or Nestlé, where many people say: there's really not much you can do here."
He was entrusted with these tasks because Völker once studied economics in his younger years and is therefore quick to find the right words when briefing demanding customers from the business world.
"My only talent is curiosity," he says modestly. After graduating from high school, this openness, almost greed for new things, first led the Berliner to the School of Journalism in Munich. Later, he attended a writing course at the Cologne Film School. Back in Berlin, he then "immediately dreamed of entering the top tier." The freshly trained screenwriter immediately wanted to sell his own sitcom, but with his "typical impatience" he earned nothing, instead "just paying a pile of apprenticeship money".
More concrete opportunities opened up for him as a journalist for a local newspaper, as well as in television as a reporter for the Abendschau and finally as an editor for the talk show "Doppelpunkt" on ZDF. Later, he spent two years writing scripts for soaps, for example "Verbotene Liebe" or "Mallorca - Suche nach dem Paradies" on Pro 7.
"It was a bread-and-butter job," he comments on this phase as a freelance dialog author today. You get the story outline with the plot on Friday evening, and a week later you have to deliver a dialogized book. "That's when I missed the exchange with life and real problems," Völker says. You have to make up stories about the lives of characters "and you don't really participate in their lives.
Love story with moving date
That was the point where something new was called for again. Völker traveled to the Locarno Film Festival. There, however, he did not meet a producer who saved him from the soaps, but his future wife. The "Forbidden Love" became real, as Völker moved from Berlin to Zurich. "We had been tugging at each other for half a year about who would get whom in whose city." Since wife Katja Richard had better job opportunities as a lifestyle editor at Blick in Zurich, Völker finally looked for a job in Zurich as well. A new direction and a new start in the field of communication lured him: as a copywriter at the Pucci Sulzer agency.
Völker's search for paradise was over. In advertising, he has since been able to live out his "love-hate relationship with marketing strategies" in addition to his enjoyment of copywriting. A love-hate relationship because the subject was taught in textbook form at university back then in a way that was so simplistic that it has long since been impossible to approach it in reality. Today, he loves dealing with complex marketing issues. "I'm not the wild-eyed creative, but the one who weighs things up and thinks analytically."
Arne Völker is convinced that at Blue Spirit, together with Gerry Flückiger, he can implement his idea of advertising in the best possible way: "Here, they cultivate a campaign mindset." For him as a CD, this means that many things that would make a nice individual subject or a nice film are not done "because they can't be declined down to the last detail at the point of sale." Völker, in other words, loves tasks "that are a round more difficult."
His creative goal is "small things that have a big impact". On the one hand, he is challenged to do so by the framework conditions of the assignments at Blue Spirit. On the other hand, he enjoys the freedom "that the management is open to allocating more personnel budget in order to be able to realize the necessary quality". With 25 employees, the agency in Schlieren, which was founded in 1999 and admitted to the BSW in 2003, is now one of the big players for the first time.
Arne Völker likes conservative clients and constricting specifications: "My creative goal is small things with big impact."
Andreas Panzeri
The allure of the new
However, advertising with key incentives has so far been the exception rather than the rule in the career of the career changer from Berlin. "I like working for clients who are not very risk-averse." Above all, he says, the conservative tasks offer him a great opportunity for satisfaction, "for example, when you have to find a creative solution for a bank despite a lot of restrictive specifications." Arne Völker conceived such intelligent advertising, which "can also stage a message without suckiness," at Publicis in Zurich, for example, before joining Blue Spirit. "I had the pleasure of working for clients like UBS or Nestlé, where many people say: there's really not much you can do here."
He was entrusted with these tasks because Völker once studied economics in his younger years and is therefore quick to find the right words when briefing demanding customers from the business world.
"My only talent is curiosity," he says modestly. After graduating from high school, this openness, almost greed for new things, first led the Berliner to the School of Journalism in Munich. Later, he attended a writing course at the Cologne Film School. Back in Berlin, he then "immediately dreamed of entering the top tier." The freshly trained screenwriter immediately wanted to sell his own sitcom, but with his "typical impatience" he earned nothing, instead "just paying a pile of apprenticeship money".
More concrete opportunities opened up for him as a journalist for a local newspaper, as well as in television as a reporter for the Abendschau and finally as an editor for the talk show "Doppelpunkt" on ZDF. Later, he spent two years writing scripts for soaps, for example "Verbotene Liebe" or "Mallorca - Suche nach dem Paradies" on Pro 7.
"It was a bread-and-butter job," he comments on this phase as a freelance dialog author today. You get the story outline with the plot on Friday evening, and a week later you have to deliver a dialogized book. "That's when I missed the exchange with life and real problems," Völker says. You have to make up stories about the lives of characters "and you don't really participate in their lives.
Love story with moving date
That was the point where something new was called for again. Völker traveled to the Locarno Film Festival. There, however, he did not meet a producer who saved him from the soaps, but his future wife. The "Forbidden Love" became real, as Völker moved from Berlin to Zurich. "We had been tugging at each other for half a year about who would get whom in whose city." Since wife Katja Richard had better job opportunities as a lifestyle editor at Blick in Zurich, Völker finally looked for a job in Zurich as well. A new direction and a new start in the field of communication lured him: as a copywriter at the Pucci Sulzer agency.
Völker's search for paradise was over. In advertising, he has since been able to live out his "love-hate relationship with marketing strategies" in addition to his enjoyment of copywriting. A love-hate relationship because the subject was taught in textbook form at university back then in a way that was so simplistic that it has long since been impossible to approach it in reality. Today, he loves dealing with complex marketing issues. "I'm not the wild-eyed creative, but the one who weighs things up and thinks analytically."
Arne Völker is convinced that at Blue Spirit, together with Gerry Flückiger, he can implement his idea of advertising in the best possible way: "Here, they cultivate a campaign mindset." For him as a CD, this means that many things that would make a nice individual subject or a nice film are not done "because they can't be declined down to the last detail at the point of sale." Völker, in other words, loves tasks "that are a round more difficult."
His creative goal is "small things that have a big impact". On the one hand, he is challenged to do so by the framework conditions of the assignments at Blue Spirit. On the other hand, he enjoys the freedom "that the management is open to allocating more personnel budget in order to be able to realize the necessary quality". With 25 employees, the agency in Schlieren, which was founded in 1999 and admitted to the BSW in 2003, is now one of the big players for the first time.
Arne Völker likes conservative clients and constricting specifications: "My creative goal is small things with big impact."
Andreas Panzeri
