20th birthday: Achtung! steps it up a notch with diversification and a new image
We are turning 20, so to celebrate we’ll be unveiling a brand new image. We’ll also make sure we stay on our growth path by continually adding to our skillset. And so we set the course for the next phase of our 20-year, as-yet uninterrupted track record. This begins with migration to a new corporate design, developed by Mutabor. One aspect of our mission – as one of Germany’s ten largest owner-operated agencies today – is to focus on new services in Hamburg, the city of startups. Here’s where the new data-driven creative agency Achtung! Neo just recently went live. Another aim over the coming months is to work together with co-founders on the Startup Platform launching other specialist agencies. This approach recently saw the launch and growing success of Achtung! Mary with its managing partner Babette Kemper in Düsseldorf, Achtung! Broadcast with Felicia Mutterer in Berlin and Achtung! Alive with Tim Voigt in Cologne. “In this anniversary year we are looking energetically to the future,” says Mirko Kaminski, CEO at Achtung! “Achtung! has a fresh new look and we want to grow in a variety of ways. We are committed to expanding our services and underpinning this diversity with more agency startups. What unifies us all is the drive to create something really remarkable for our clients.” Our business has been growing for some years now, with the Group’s course again set for significant expansion in this anniversary year.
Now a creative communications agency with PR in its DNA
Though started in 2001 as a PR agency, we see ourselves now as a creative agency group with PR-DNA. We deliver what used to be labelled separately as ‘advertising’, ‘digital marketing’, ‘social media’, ‘content marketing’, ‘influencer marketing’ and ‘PR’, except now we use joined-up thinking. With this approach we are now the lead agency for clients such as Barclays in Germany and Siemens company health insurance SBK, as well as the lead agency in the global campaign marking the 120th anniversary of the sanitary fittings manufacturer Hansgrohe Group. In addition to this, we work as an agency group to handle global communications for clients such as the Lufthansa Group and the Elbphilharmonie (for its launch) using made-to-measure international agency networks. In the last five years alone we have doubled our gross income and now rank among the most highly decorated agencies with PR-DNA.
“If you want to create something remarkable, then you need to collaborate with other remarkable agencies and people,” says Max Ströbel, CSO at Achtung! “That’s the kind of partnership we’re looking for. It’s why we see ourselves as a collaborative agency, perhaps even one of the most collaborative agencies in Germany.” Our benchmark, to create something remarkable for clients, is set just as high for us. Hence the new ventures we are always embarking on, whether it’s the DIGITAL KINDERGARTEN or our Startup Platform, and the Achtung! Forest we initiated. The agency group steadily invests 10 per cent of its yearly profits into buying up land and reforesting it with mixed woodland.
Achtung! now in a new look
Our new corporate design was developed at the agency Mutabor by a team working under its director Heinrich Paravicini. “We always aim to bring together the best minds for our clients,” says Michael Ohanian, CCO at Achtung! “We differ from other agencies in that we didn’t create our CD ourselves, but instead asked Mutabor to take it on for us – in my mind, they’re one of the best agencies in the field. We are really excited about the result.” The new corporate design has been stripped down massively, yet still supports a variety of content. “The new Achtung! CD reflects a general trend in design. Given the very specific challenges set by social media, designers are going back to old-school use of logos, colour and text. It’s back to basics!” says Heinrich Paravicini, founder and CEO of Mutabor, who oversaw the new corporate design for the Achtung! Group. The Mutabor team were determined to find a remarkable typographic aesthetic for this, and to make the Achtung! logo really unique. They took the exclamation mark, which until then came after the lower-case ‘achtung’, and tucked it in the ‘A’. Heinrich Paravicini: “The Amazon logo suggests a smile, the FedEx logo has a hidden arrow. Achtung! now has the enclosed exclamation mark. But even more important than this is that the CD is modular. The different elements can be combined and recombined ad infinitum – to present diversity and to look diverse. The team and I had loads of fun developing this.”
