Cultural relevance meets creative agility – PRESENCE Studios Founding Partners & Managing Directors Malte Bülskämper & Lucas Schneider on culture, their fascinating advisory board and David+Martin
PRESENCE Studios is a young and innovative creative studio that was founded in Berlin and New York as a spin-off of David+Martin – with the proclaimed goal of fusing pop culture and advertising. Particular focus of the studio is on disciplines such as art and music – ensuring utmost authenticity and relevance of its endeavors in these areas.
Under the executive of Dina Dedić, Fanny Riegel, Lucas Schneider, and Malte Bülskämper, the studio has quickly gained traction. Plus, the PRESENCE Advisory Board is diversified and comprised of figures from the areas of art, culture and commerce. GoSee is delighted to introduce the creative studio PRESENCE with a new campaign and an interview with Founding Partners & Managing Directors Malte Bülskämper & Lucas Schneider.
PRESENCE was founded last year as a spin-off of David+Martin in Berlin and New York. What have you achieved since that time, and how does your work differ from that of a classic ad agency?
Malte & Lucas : At this very moment, while we are speaking, we are experiencing a very exciting time. No less than three of our campaigns have gone live these past few days. Our ‘The Unofficial Discipline’ initiative, which we have developed together with OTTOBOCK for the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, is extremely important to us and has caused a huge wave of positive reactions and support, which makes us so incredibly happy. At the same time, our work for the SNIPES brands K1X and KARL KANI is out, each with completely different facets of their own – demonstrating the broad bandwidth we cover.
The difference between us and a classic agency is our strong focus on the cultural relevance of our work and that we do a lot of things as a creative studio that agencies simply don’t do: we curate art exhibitions, organize film screenings, and then there’s ‘Outsights’, a series of observations of cultural phenomena we publish. Plus, the space we work in feels more like a gallery than the office of an ad agency.
How much Berlin and how much New York is there in Presence? And how big are you guys meanwhile?
Malte & Lucas : There are ten of us at the moment on our team in Berlin, and it feels right, only a year after we founded the company. As the year progresses, more reinforcements are coming. And with David+Martin, of course, we are backed by a powerhouse that supports us in so many ways – which in some cases means providing backup. It does help though that David+Martin also have an office in Berlin. Support we are certainly very grateful for. We can’t tell you all too much about the developments in New York just yet, except for: it has a lot to do with US clients, and having an office in the States is a big plus.
Your focus on disciplines such as art and music is a priority for you. Malte is working on the art project studio-talks.com (Insta: @studio__talks) next to what he does for the agency. And your advisory board is made up of well-known gatekeepers from the areas of art, culture and commerce, including gallery owner Bene Taschen, Herbert Hoffmann from Highsnobiety, actress Lary, or even Bernhard Mogk from the ESL Faceit Group. How do you manage to work together?
Malte & Lucas : We are in constant communication with the board, we visit one another and show each other what we’re working on at the moment. This usually reveals exciting collaborative potential resulting in plenty of strong synergies. We – and by that I mean the brands and companies we work for – benefit very much from the knowledge and the connections of our board members. That also includes contact to artists, access to communities, to events, as well as a deeper knowledge – which is crucial for credibility within the different cultural areas.
Since your successful pitch at the beginning of the year, you now have Jägermeister as a client, who would like to tap more and deeper into the culture, nightlife, and particularly, the music scene. Leading the charge is the zeitgeist-savvy mindset of PRESENCE that is to help Jägermeister identify the facets of the brand that give it credibility in subcultures. Do you benefit here from the greater agility you have as a young agency, enabling you to reach the right target groups for clients? Or what’s your secret sauce?
Malte & Lucas : There are certainly various factors that come into play. On the one hand, we have an agile team and do get around. On the other, we are surrounded by a strong network of people who know their communities and subcultures extremely well. Which is also one reason we have the advisory board you mentioned before: they have equity in the company because they hold real shares, so their commitment is genuine, and they bring expertise to the table from their individual cultural fields – expertise that ordinary advertising agencies simply do not have. And lastly, we have people on our team who are at home in the culture scene and bring plenty of diversity with them as well as lots of curiosity. It is a big advantage that they actually are Gen Z and not only trying to understand the generation. Basically, you can say we are not on the outside looking in, but a genuine part of different culture scenes.
News has it your parent company David+Martin has been restructuring. Does this affect you, or do such plans impact your agency or work in any way?
Malte & Lucas : David+Martin has always been known as a very dynamic company. It’s a big part of the corporate culture and in the DNA of the two founders David and Martin. The driving force behind their success. Observe, adapt, change, always progressive – and full steam ahead. Kept in the loop, we are always in the picture as early as possible, we discuss many issues together, and the two always have their minds set on making the group stronger. For which the culture lived and breathed within the company, the cooperation practiced, and behavior towards the team and the brands you work for are definitely the lynchpin. We also benefit from this new clearer profile at David+Martin, affirming it as a digital and technologically-driven creative agency with a defined mission at its core, rather than different variations depending on the location – because, as I have already described above, it enables us to focus on other areas and pass each other the ball now and then.
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