On a recent evening, after a very long day defending the creative idea underpinning a new international ad campaign, I was ready to do something I hadn't done since my college days visit to Amsterdam.


Namely, to head for a coffee shop and call Uli Wiesendanger, top creative mind and co-founder of TBWA - one of the world's most respected and creatively awarded major advertising agencies.

You see, Uli is now Chairman of StrawberryFrog and its sister guerrilla agency, BlueberryFrog. I wanted to ask him if the ad business had always been so demanding.

The phone call went something like this: "Um, hi it's Scott. Hey Uli, it's late in the evening, I know, but would you like to talk about advertising tonight?"

Silence on the other end.

Me again: "What makes you like it, what pains you about it? How was it in the old days? What do you think about today?"

Scott, this is our predicament; we might as well decide to enjoy it. In 1998 an era ended. (The founders of TBWA left -- hee, hee, hee.) Possibly more important: All of sudden, millions of people across the world were connected. Damn, if we only could start an agency now! Soon, the need for huge and centrally controlled international agencies with lots of offices and structures and thousands of people will disappear.

Today's generation can set up shop wherever it wants and work with whomever it wants, wherever it wants, via the Internet. It can send work around the world in seconds to appear hours later wherever it needs to appear. It can draw on talent from all around the world.

All that's needed is a small core group, not more than a dozen people in one place. Must be a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary bunch. Everybody else can work wherever they want to. And above all, everything can now happen with tremendous speed. Working from a distance obliges you to think fast and well. You communicate in writing, not in chattering. Day and night people are working; it's always morning somewhere. Speed is good for creating good work.

In the old system hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people were sitting together in the same, comfortable place. Campaigns took six to nine months to prepare. Beethoven would have written two symphonies in the same amount of time. Mozart probably six. Shakespeare at least three plays.

You didn't have to be that good. You had time, you had supervisors, plansboards. You knew that 50 percent of your effort would never reach the client. Eighty percent would never be approved. Agencies created enormous amounts of expensive waste.

Okay, clients were more patient. They and their competitors worked in protected environments, new products came in slowly. It's different today. Client companies face threats from fast startups from all over the world, which seize the technology quicker than they do. IBM even collapsed under its top-down structure. Like a number of big advertising agencies that had to run for the protection of an even bigger holding company -- not solving the problem, but compounding it.

Whatever they had of company spirit before went out the window of cost reduction, along with fun and courage. And fear came in through the other window, the biggest threat to good work.

Advertising was never meant to be a large production business. It was meant to be a craft -- like architecture or film making, where teams are assembled and dissembled project by project.

It was meant to be light, intelligent, entertaining, exactly like selling has been since the bazaars of the Fertile Crescent, six thousand years ago. It doesn't need to prove, supported by arguments of a heaviness that would put a 19th century German philosopher to shame. It needs to seduce and - yes - scandalize with the spirit of the spur of the moment. It needs the attitude of rebellion.

So, I see small, rebellious Internet-connected advertising groups springing up all over the world. Working with the rest of the world. Why shouldn't we learn from Chinese writing? Their poems are considerably shorter and often more beautiful than other peoples'. Their taste in calligraphy is superb, too. There is a hilarity in Thai humor other parts of the world would wildly enjoy. And so on, and so on.

We can be pirates; we don't have to belong to The Navy. And we can sail across the seven seas as we please. It should make us stronger and better at our work.

But the best part of all that is: Small agencies springing up all over the world will rattle the Western way of thinking and shake its hold around the globe. And invigorate it at the same time.

I have another hunch: Until now, we at classical agencies didn't think very much of the idea of free-lancers. We thought that was cheating. The creative product had to be originated in-house, by family members. It was our most important product after all. Anything that was produced within our walls had by definition to be better than what was produced outside. Our best talent had to believe in and to adhere to the company spirit. It would foster and protect and spoil them. It would gave them security.

However hard we worked on this, and however well we meant, it only worked for a tiny percentage of our staff. An agency is a football team at war, not an elementary school choir where everybody gets to sing, however deaf and atonal they have become. Inevitably and sadly, so many ended up disillusioned, and some of us, those who had written enthusiastically about our values in our agency brochures (me, for instance), felt like hypocrites.

Today, technology has freed us from the physical belonging and depending of an organization. We all can do what my father told me 45 years ago, when he heard to his consternation that I risked to become the employee of somebody else for the rest of my life: Never think of yourself as depending on somebody else. Always think of yourself as a one-man-company. Consider your monthly salary as the monthly fee you charge for your service.

It's possible now. We can all be independent entrepreneurs. All we need is a computer, an Internet-link and a table. We can be pirates; we don't have to belong to The Navy. And we can sail across the seven seas as we please. It should make us stronger and better at our work.

The amounts of fun being had working this way I expect to be enormous. The amounts of fun being had by those who watch the advertising, produced by free and independent people, should be equally huge, and more effective than anything else produced before. Who wants a communication environment controlled by 3 or 4 worldwide networks, by unwieldy dinosaurs?

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Scott Goodson is co-founder and creative partner of StrawberryFrog, an independent ad agency that specializes in building brands for international clients from its office in Amsterdam. Since its launch in March 1999, StrawberryFrog has worked on multi-country assignments for Levi Strauss & Co., Sprint, Nokia, Pfizer, United Pan Communications, Credit Suisse, Ford Motor Co., Microsoft Corp., Smart Car, Xerox and Motorola.