One time Apple design agency, Frog, opens in Oz after five years of stealth
Frog, the agency which helped design the Sony Walkman, before being tapped by Apple to help chart its course has opened its doors officially in Australia after five years of covert operations.
Frog has emerged from hiding in the Australian market
The agency which began as a product design specialist in Germany before branching out into strategy, has been working as a silent partners with a number of major brands in Australia including Optus, the Commonwealth Bank, the ABC, Melbourne Airport and AGL.
Frog creative director Tim Paciolla
Creative director, Tim Paciolla, said the timing for the agency opening up an Australian office was, in part, driven by the Federal government’s support for innovation, a space in which he believes the agency will be able to offer a differentiated approach for business.
“With some of the changes we are seeing in Australia around innovation in general and some of the focus from the government around innovation and some of the questions we hear out current clients asking, the time just felt right to put a permanent presence here,” Paciolla said.
He said many companies were being forced by global shifts and the arrival of companies such as Netflix with different type of user experience to ask questions of themselves and the Frog’s design and technology led philosophy was resonating with them.
“It’s true around banks, it’s true around energy companies, it’s true around insurance companies, all those types of companies, their customers are starting to expect that sort of experience.”
While Frog has been operating in Australia remotely for five years, Paciolla said that its influence on the brands it has worked with may not be easily visible to consumers, while other work is in development stage.
“We’re not here to just come in and do work and go home at the end of the night, we’re here to become a larger part of the community,” he said.
Since it was first formed, Frog has evolved as a business and Kevin Rogers, executive director of technology, said it had developed a model that had a different approach to traditional ad agencies.
Frog executive director of technology Kevin Rogers
“We started as a traditional product design and mechanical engineering firm and, over the past 30 years or so, have morphed into products, digital strategy consulting firm,” Rogers said.
He said that a potential area for expansion would be in retail, with Amazon Go is poised to shake up the way people experience shopping.
“There is probably going to be a pretty significant amount of change coming in retail in Australia in the next couple of years when you have players like Amazon coming into the market,” Rogers said.
“There are going to be established players who are going to have to adapt, there are going to be new players in the market who are looking to figure out how they are going to do things in Australia.”
One element the company has developed is a collection of platforms that range from providing venture design to start-ups through Frogventures to in-house training for businesses through Frogcamps.
“Frogcamp came out of the fact we had so many of our clients asking us to come in and develop these sorts of skills internally,” Rogers said.
The agency uses GE as an example where after using Frogcamp, the company reduced its reliance on the agency.
“GE was probably Frog’s biggest client for well over a decade… and eventually we helped them build out internally what’s called the UX Centre of Excellence because they had had Frog come in and work on so programs, they asked for us to show can you you help us internalise this practice.”
He said while the move had come at the cost of losing some work, it helped GE become a better marketer.
Roger said that Frogventures could also become a local partners with start ups as the company became more established in Australia.
The agency has been active in the region for several years with offices in Shanghai and Singapore, which have been used to support the virtual Australian operations until now. The Sydney office is expected to play a key role in the regional network.
