“No Swedish adman has meant so much internationally. He opened the door to a brand new kind of advertising – professional business-to-business advertising.” This was what Per Ehrenstråhle wrote when Bengt Anderson (born 1933) received his Platinum Egg. But early on, there was nothing that suggested this Latin student from tiny Västervik would become the grand old man of B2B advertising. After a few years working at the post office and as a lab assistant, he became a technical writer for Atlas Copco...Read more. This sparked an interest in industrial marketing, and he started systematically studying the subject. There was nothing to be found on the subject in Swedish, but he discovered a treasure trove of American books and magazines. Bengt Anderson took his first copywriting job at a little agency in Stockholm specializing in export advertising, as it was called at the time. There he met Rolf Lembke, a “radical and brilliant art director” who had just returned from a few years in New York. In 1963, they founded Anderson & Lembke, from the start an agency focusing on international B2B advertising. It was a rare skill at the time. The agency grew, opening offices in Gothenburg, Malmö and Helsingborg, and eventually in Helsinki, Oslo, London and Paris. After 19 years as a CEO, project manager and copywriter, Bengt Anderson had had enough, and moved to New York to work as an employee, starting an American Anderson & Lembke with Steve Trygg as the lead figure. It was the first Swedish agency to make a name for itself in the US. “B2B is all I know,” says Bengt Anderson. Colleagues describe him as a philosopher of the industry: “He always read everything there was to read. Then he would process it, and out came ideas that were brand new.” After receiving the Platinum Egg, Bengt Anderson continued working as a freelance copywriter, first in the US and later in Sweden, fulltime until he was 75, then more sporadically.

– B.E.