The Platinum Egg 1996: Lars Liljendahl.
He has always stood in dynamic balance, with one foot in the artworld and the other sunk deeply into various marketing plans. It is communication in the borderlands, this, a hybrid that both inspires and irritates. A long profile of Lasse Liljendahl in the leading Swedish daily’s culture section illustrates the phenomenon.... The journalist describes a TV spot for the car brand Hyundai. “The video begins with a man wearing a bowtie, with two television screens as a blindfold. It then follows a caravan along the edge of a precipice, Napoleon and two angelic 17th century Spanish girls, a man in the queen’s guard who has fainted, and so on and on.” These campaigns often yielded strong results. The artistic approach enabled them to become part of the public conversation and grow into pop cultural references – an impossible dream for most communicators. Viking Line’s cropped logo is a famous example. Or power company Vattenfall’s two holes in the wall campaign. There are many more. Lasse Liljendahl often came off like a rock star in a sea of consultants. When he describes himself, however, it’s as an ordinary guy from Hökarängen, an ordinary Stockholm suburb. A working-class kid who loves the craft of graphic art. Who loves his job. And who loves to win. The working-class kid from the suburbs helped found Rönnberg in the 1980s, and helped found OCH [and] in 1991. Two extremely successful agency projects that shook up the Swedish advertising industry, each in its own way. In 1996, he joined the Platinum Academy. The closing lines of the award announcement conclude this brief bio: “Lasse Liljendahl is something as unusual as a poet of sales. A man of his time – and always a little ahead of his time.”
After the Platinum Egg: Lasse doesn’t have time to start any more agencies, since he has to pick up his grandchildren from school every Thursday. But if the wind is blowing from the right direction, he may drift past his desk at La strada studio and turn out a provocative advertisement.