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When Andreas Dannenberg shows up half an hour late for our meeting, he doesn't stride into the room with a prepared excuse. He makes his entrance with the new Tokyo Michelin guidebook tucked under his arm and a look of deep satisfaction on his face.
Andreas Dannenberg, founder and head of the Ad-comm Group of media and public relations firms, sits in his office in Hiroo, Tokyo. (Louis Templado/ Staff photographer)
"I've just come from a very long lunch,' he says by way of a greeting, and plops into a reclining chair in his dimly lit office.
"I wanted to see for myself how accurate this guide is. It confirms what we who live here already know--Tokyo is the best city in the world for food. I love it here. I absolutely love it."
As he well should. In a dark suit of distinct quality and unannounced brand, Dannenberg is a regular figure at some of the town's most glittery happenings. Champagne revelries, celeb-studded launch parties for the latest luxury brands to grace Japan--name it and odds are that Dannenberg, a strapping German with a fluent command of Japanese, will be there, chatting and patting the good and the great.
Dannenberg isn't there as a guest, however. He's there to orchestrate the affair as the head of the Ad-comm Group--eight specialized media and public relations firms for clients offering luxury goods from automobiles and alcohol to apparel and jewelry.
To outsiders it may seem a world of aspirations, appearances and free-flowing bubbly. From Dannenberg's vantage point, however, it's a set piece where positioning, communication and crisis management all come into play and coalesce. When done well, the affairs are the very picture of luxury in one of the world's most brand-conscious cities.
"You have to develop an eye and learn how to conceive an image in a viewfinder,' Dannenberg says. "And you need to be very fast. You have to know what you want and recognize it when it appears in front of you. When you trip the shutter, the result has to be technically perfect or the closest you can get to it."
Dannenberg is talking photography--or rather, how the lessons of the art still apply to his current role as a luxury impresario.
Originally from Munich, Dannenberg first came to Tokyo in 1984 to make his name from behind a camera. Japan's economic bubble had yet to peak, and Dannenberg was soon selling his images to publications such as Stern and Newsweek. Within three years of arrival, however, he realized that his dream went beyond his art.
"As a photographer, my method was to master one style and then move on to the next,' Dannenberg says.
"I realized that what I learned was applicable somewhere else."
That elsewhere was advertising. Borrowing $200,000 from friends and acquaintances, Dannenberg put down 18 months of rent on a flashy new steel and glass office in the center of Tokyo's Shibuya.
Never mind that he spoke no Japanese at the time, the plan was for Dannenberg to bring in the clients while his business partner--a Japanese art director moonlighting from a major ad agency--would handle the creative side.
"Even if it's hard and expensive, you have set the standard high," Dannenberg explains."Being in a beautiful office doesn't make you a great designer, true. But working in the sort of place where the copy machine is in the bathroom by the slippers puts your mind in a small box. You won't create a design that will change the world. You end up designing bathroom slippers."
Dannenberg was bouncing around when he scored his first client--a Danish firm wanting to bring its goose down to Japan. But within a month of setting up shop, his partner dropped a bomb.
There is, Dannenberg says, something he calls the "pregnancy look.' In the 20 years he's been running Ad-comm, he's seen it about 40 times on the faces of female staffers as they reluctantly resign. The first time he saw it was on the face of his original business partner --a male.
"I told him that we needed to get serious--that he should quit his other job and work with me full time, and he agreed,' Dannenberg says. The next morning, though, he came in with his face as white as a sheet. "His wife called her father and they threatened to disown him. They said he was crazy for wanting to leave a good job to work with a foreigner. In the end my partner gave in--his wife had more money than me."
Instead of running for Narita Airport, Dannenberg decided to stay the course. He hung on to the cavernous office, returning to his camera to pay the bills. Soon he found a new art director (with whom he still works today), and luxury naturally came his way, he says.
"It's all about refusing to compromise," says Dannenberg, who draws a parallel between himself and the young Louis Vuitton, who legend has it was booted out by his mother-in-law. "That's where the idea of luxury started.'
But what exactly does it mean? In Dannenberg's worldview it's summed up by the Japanese word kodawari.
"It is the idea that if you buy only one thing in your life, it must be the best, because only the best is good enough," he continues. "But unfortunately, today it's come to mean the rich spending meaninglessly--that whatever is expensive is good. But that's not my definition."
Nor is it Dannenberg's clients'.
Tokyo and other world capitals, Dannenberg believes, are already saturated with luxury. So much so that brands that live and die by their aura of exclusivity now need to create a stratus of refinement beyond even luxury.
"Luxury as a qualifier is now just a commodity--and not a special one at that,' Dannenberg says. "It's experienced by maybe one percent of the world. But even that means tens of millions of people."
The solution, says the scene-maker, is to disconnect the idea of luxury from crude cash--by providing the sort of experience that money can't buy, such as private clubs and the sort of A-list happenings that keep Ad-comm busy and brighten Tokyo nights.
Money won't necessarily earn you an invite, Dannenberg says, nor will all that agonizing about your ripped jeans.
"Luxury," he says, "should belong to those people that polish and educate themselves enough to be allowed to enjoy it."
(IHT/Asahi: December 29,2007)