The Platinum Egg 2024: Martin Ringqvist.
Martin Ringqvist was going to be a trumpet player. At first, classical music was his thing, but while studying music at the Sankt Petri School in Malmö, he discovered jazz. Goodbye Mozart, hello Miles Davis, late-night socializing and an illegal jazz club in the school attic. The club was a big success until the police arrived, and the story ended with the headmaster expelling Martin from school.... He started booking acts at “Jazz i Malmö”, then started writing their program notes and filling in as a writer for the Malmö daily Sydsvenskan. There, somebody suggested that he might like to be a copywriter – a profession Martin had never heard of before. Following a stint of adult education to acquire a school leaving certificate and a brief turn as a pastry packer at the Pågen Bakery, Martin started at Berghs School of Communication, where Filip Nilsson was his mentor. This led to a job at Forsman & Bodenfors in Gothenburg, where he immediately set to work with Staffan Forsman and Björn Engström for GP, the main Gothenburg daily newspaper. In short order, he won a Chicken Scholarship, pitched and won Comviq as a new client and won a Golden Egg for Lotto-Åke, one of the most attention-grabbing commercials of the 1990s. From project manager Erik Sollenberg, Martin learned that he needed to know more about his clients’ business than the clients themselves, an insight that benefited him on every subsequent account, from Volvo Trucks to Tele2, and especially when Oatly came to the agency in 2014. At the time, they were a small oat drink company with big ambitions, but they looked like a big company with small ambitions. Martin and art director Lars Elfman identified the packaging as Oatly’s best communicator and proceeded to break all the rules. The rest is advertising history. In 2015, Martin started as creative director at 72andSunny in Los Angeles, but didn’t enjoy their hierarchical approach. He wanted to do the work, not just direct it. And thus, within a year, he was back home at F&B again. The Oatly account started taking up more and more of Martin’s time, and in 2019, he started working for them full-time. Most attractive to him was the opportunity to influence every aspect of the brand, from the product range to the sponsorship strategy. The latter choice was easy: the local football club, Malmö FF.