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In the 10 years I’ve been shooting commercials as a director, “the customer” has always been the unknown entity. In the advertising world, contact with the customer only takes place in “guided tours” by the advertising agency, which has already sold the customer a finished concept and wants to avoid questioning even one iota of this painstakingly created concept. This fear is so great that before the all-important meeting before the shoot, the “pre-production meeting” (PPM), in which the agency, production company and director finalize everything with the client, a pre-PPM is held without the client in order to prepare the PPM as the perfect show for the client. The more important the client, the more detailed the preparation and so I ended up having three pre-PPMs on a shoot for McDonald’s, with the result that the client complained in the main PPM that he couldn’t decide on anything.
When our little one was on the way last fall and I wanted a permanent job to bring a little more calm into the restless household – at least for the time being – I started applying for copywriting jobs. But not for advertising agencies – but directly with the industry, with the legendary “customer”. My first application went to Free2Move, a Berlin-based company that has set itself the task of cleaning up the fragmented and diverse car sharing market and offering everyone easy access to all car sharing vehicles in their area.
Ever since my beloved Volvo 480 left this world with a veritable engine failure and was transported to the eternal Volvo hunting grounds by the ADAC at the Frankenwald service area, we no longer had a car and slowly began to conquer the Berlin car sharing offer for ourselves and realized that the offer is as huge as it is confusing. I became really curious in the summer when the electric scooters from COUP suddenly appeared everywhere in the city and have been whizzing around our neighborhood ever since. Silent scooters that don’t emit any dirt, that are also great fun, that you can hop on spontaneously and park them on the corner where you finished your ride – good for the environment, good for the neighborhood, good for you. If that’s not a convincing new technology! At the time of my job interview at Free2Move, I had over 20 different car sharing apps on my cell phone and had long been hooked on the idea. And since the Free2Movers had previously written everything themselves, they were urgently looking for someone with a background in storytelling and advertising to do it for them. We liked each other very much right from our first conversation and we got started in September.
Over the next 8 months, I ended up writing all the texts for Free2Move. From CRM campaigns in German & English, advertising campaigns, social media content for Google, Facebook & Twitter, team stories for Instagram to all texts in the app, the app stores, the website, press releases, everything. I wrote all the new texts and polished the old ones and brought them up to date. I’ve never written as much as in these 8 months and even though I didn’t get to write a single line of a script, I enjoyed going to the office every morning. The team was great and after all the years of writing alone at my desk, I really enjoyed working with the code wizards and marketing professionals. The app is great, by the way. Available for iOS and Android.
