Anderson & Lembke

Anderson & Lembke was started by Bengt Anderson and Rolf Lembke in Stockholm, 1963.[1][2] In their work at Atlas Copco, they realised how industrial goods were marketed using cheap black and white leaflets, while consumer goods marketers used high quality design, printing and attention-grabbing media advertising. Their business idea became to adapt techniques used in consumer marketing to products sold for professional use.[2] Anderson and Lembke realised that engineering-oriented business-to-business companies often lacked basic marketing planning skills, and made it part of their business idea to help their clients towards more professional marketing thinking.[3] Their new agency started to attract export-oriented Swedish manufacturers such as bearings giant SKF and welding equipment maker Esab.[4]

In the early 1970s, Anderson & Lembke started expanding outside Sweden by establishing an agency in Helsinki, Finland.[2][5] In 1979, Anderson & Lembke entered the UK market by opening an office in London.[6] Another A&L agency based in Stamford, Connecticut since 1982 became very successful in the North American market, winning creative awards and attracting major technology clients such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.[2]

By the year 1984, the A&L group included four companies in Stockholm and agencies in Gothenburg, Helsingborg, Helsinki, Oslo, London, and Stamford. Their combined personnel was 170 and annual sales around US$65 million.[4] The UK agency soon changed ownership through a management buyout and expanded into Basingstoke and Bristol[7] before being merged with McCann-Erickson in 2001.[6] Anderson & Lembke USA saw another management buyout in 1985 by the agency's top names Hans Ullmark and Steve Trygg, who soon sold their agency on to Chiat/Day/Mojo.[8] They expanded Anderson & Lembke Inc. into San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hongkong.[9][10] In 1992, Ullmark and Trygg bought the agency back from Chiat/Dayltä, and in 1995 Anderson & Lembke was sold to McCann Erickson.[11] The resulting agency became the fifth largest ad agency in San Francisco with some 340 employees.[10]

Independently from each other, and under separate ownerships, the A&L agencies in the United States and the UK were closed in 2001.[12] The Paris-based La Rochefoucauld, Anderson & Lembke was merged with Territoires, a Publicis group agency in 2000.[13] The Helsinki agency went bankrupt in 1991, but continued as A&L Advertising, then as A&L Grey until the late 1990s.