Above: the view outside Nokia House. Below: the view inside.

On Thursday evening we flew to Finland for the briefing on the Nokia global pitch. This was slightly unusual in that all six agencies who have made it through to this stage were briefed together.

Those six are BBH, DDB, JWT, Mother, a WPP combo team billed as Bates/Grey/Y&R/RKCR and your very own Wieden + Kennedy. Grey is the incumbent in the western world and Bates currently has the business in Asia. We recently won from Grey the brief to support the launch of Nokia’s flagship stores worldwide. The others have no Nokia business but lots of telecoms experience. (Confused? You will be.) BBH used to have one2one, now has the Vodafone business and recently resigned Sony Ericsson. Mother still has some of Orange (they used to have it all in the UK)and used to have Siemens, I think. JWT used to have Vodafone till BBH won it from them. RKCR has the Virgin Mobile business. And that’s all just in London. W+K Amsterdam used to have Siemens and Vodafone and W+K London works with Orange in Romania. And I’m sure DDB has some telecoms experience, possibly even with Nokia, somewhere.

Lots to play for on this one – not only a huge piece of business but also an exciting brief and an opportunity to do some great work. A very significant win for any of the agencies on the list. So, no pressure there, then.

Each agency was limited to four attendees. W+K team was Dave Luhr, Tony Davidson, Simon Summerscales and Neil Christie.

Above: Luhr and Tony.

The briefing, which was led by Jo Harlow of Nokia, was pretty comprehensive, as you might expect for a review of this size. But unlike many of these things it was actually pretty inspiring. No, really. Must be fascinating to be on the client side of a pitch like this and see what all the agencies make of it.

First part of the day – the main briefing – took place at Nokia House in Espoo, then after a tasty lunch of local delicacies like reindeer and cloudberries, we moved to a Nokia villa/chalet place by a frozen lake for Q&A sessions.

As one might have expected, it’s fairly snowy in Finland at this time of year.

Above: Simon. Below: Neil.

The W+K team made a quick dash into Helsinki to visit the Nokia flagship store…

…then it was back to the villa for ‘informal drinks’ – vodka and cranberry cocktails with the clients and all the agencies before a bus to the airport to catch the last flights out on friday evening.

By the side of the frozen lake we had noticed the remains of some Finnish creature. A rabbit? Significant symbol of something or other. Maybe.

We have a lot of work to do on this one. Next stage meetings in a couple of weeks.

There’s a big crane hoisting stuff onto the roof of our offices at the moment. This is good because, blissfully, it means the builders have had to stop drilling for a bit.

If you get onto the roof of the building opposite, you can see that the structure of our extension – the ‘eyrie’, as our architect Josephine calls it –  is now taking shape. Exciting.