The Platinum Egg 1991: Lars Wannberg.
Lars Wannberg was born in Malmö in 1931 and trained as a journalist. His easy-to-read, narrative style at the newspaper Kvällsposten caught the eye of Per-Henry Richter, who recruited him to be a copywriter at Svenska Telegrambyrån in Malmö in the early 1960s. Lars thus became part of a rebellious agency-within-the-agency that sat in its own section of what was then the most successful advertising firm in the country.... Besides Per-Henry Richter, his copywriting colleagues were Sören Blanking, Lennart Bengtsson and Leon Nordin. Working with art directors like Kurt Lundkvist, John Melin, Anders Österlin and Krister Appelfeldt, they made foundational changes to Swedish advertising. From Telegrambyrån, Lars moved on to Arbmans in Stockholm, where Leon Nordin had taken over the reins, becoming an important cog in what would soon become Sweden’s leading agency. Lars Wannberg stood out by writing in a way you wanted to read, telling stories that made you want to know more, and explaining things in a way a child could understand without seeming naive. He wrote reams of copy for the engineering company Åkerman’s customer magazine Kubik without talking about screws and performance. Instead, his stories focused on broader topics, like the significance of excavators for society at large. Lars Wannberg also did well-received work for Expressen, Schick, Gulf and Finans Scandic – typically with long, narrative copy that was built on what readers were interested in, not what the client wanted to say. After his years at Arbmans, Lars went to Falk & Pihl, later moving to Anderson & Lembke to devote himself to B2B advertising (“There’s so much to write about”). He died in 2019 at the age of 87.