The Platinum Egg 2002: Filip Nilsson.
Filip Nilsson, the boy who came, changed Swedish advertising forever, then disappeared, was born in Gothenburg in 1965. When his Frödinge ostkaka advert won a Golden Egg in 1989, even the Stockholm agencies were giddy about it. Who’d ever seen anything like this? And from Gothenburg! Fresh, daring, unexpected, old-fashioned and classic all at once. Behind the campaign was a recent graduate of the Stockholm School of Economics with brand new ideas about how things ought to be done.... Selling ostkaka, a regional culinary speciality, was just the start. More importantly, Filip established a new kind of agency culture, pursuing a different type of process and resting on different values. This was the start of a second wave for Forsman & Bodenfors, which would define not just the agency but all of Swedish advertising for the next quarter century, a wave that put the collective first. With strong views on the role of advertising in society, regarding it as a kind of ever-present virtual architecture, and a powerful undertone of humanism, Forsman & Bodenfors shifted the very foundations of Swedish advertising. Under Filip’s creative direction, for the first time leadership of the Swedish advertising industry shifted from the finest addresses in central Stockholm to Östra Hamngatan 42 in Gothenburg. As a result, after graduating from schools in Stockholm, a whole generation of advertising creatives hopped on the X2000 train to Gothenburg. With their work for clients like Volvo, IKEA, H&M, SVT and a dozen others, Forsman & Bodenfors, under Filip’s enigmatic leadership, won more international competitions than any other Swedish agency.
After the Platinum Egg: Filip abruptly resigned from F&B in 2013. He worked as creative director at BETC in Paris for four years, and has been a successful director of video spots. For several years, in collaboration with Tove Langseth, he also had the ambition of revolutionizing the women’s underwear business.