In the 10 years that I have been directing commercials, “the client” has always been the unknown entity. In the world of advertising, contact with the customer only takes place in “guided tours” through the advertising agency, which has already sold the customer a finished concept and wants to avoid questioning even one iota of this laboriously created concept. This fear is so great that before the decisive meeting before the shoot, the “Pre Production Meeting” in short PPM, in which agency, production company and director finally coordinate everything with the client, a Pre-PPM is organized without the customer in order to prepare the PPM as a perfect show for the customer. The more important the customer, the more detailed the preparation and so I had three pre-PPMs during a shoot for McDonald’s, with the success that the customer complained in the main PPM that he could no longer decide anything.

Last autumn, when our little boy was on his way and I wanted a permanent job to bring – at least for the first time – a little more peace into the restless household, I started to apply as a copywriter. But not for advertising agencies – but directly at the industry, at the legendary “customer”. My first application went to Free2Move a Berlin-based startup dedicated to clearing up the fragmented and diverse car sharing market and giving everyone easy access to all car sharing vehicles in their area.

Since my beloved Volvo 480 left this world with a veritable engine failure and was transported by the ADAC to the eternal Volvo hunting grounds at the Frankenwald service station, we no longer had a car and slowly began to conquer the Berlin car sharing offer for us and realized that the offer was so huge, how unclear. I became really curious in summer, when suddenly the electric scooters of COUP appeared everywhere in the city, which have been hissing all over the neighbourhood ever since. Silent scooters that don’t emit any dirt, and they’re great fun to climb on, and you can 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 interview at Free2Move, over 20 different car sharing apps had accumulated on my mobile phone and I was already fixed on the idea. And after Free2Movers had written everything themselves, they were urgently looking for someone with a background in storytelling and advertising to do it for them. Already during our first conversation we were very sympathetic and in September we started.

Over the next 8 months I finally wrote all copy 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 new texts and polished and updated the old ones. I’ve never written as much as I did in these 8 months and although 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 I wrote here 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.