Sascha Schulz is a writer and photographer. For three decades he has worked where media, marketing and technology meet, usually a little earlier than was comfortable. This is the long version.
The dream of an eleven-year-old
At eleven he wanted to become a great publisher, in the manner of Murdoch or Maxwell. (Ambitions, one learns later, need editing too.) A school scholarship at IBM put him in front of Windows, desktop publishing 1.0 and a great many other programs, at a time when the internet had not yet been invented. From then on he was part of the digitisation of that world, and spared himself years of rub-down lettering, scalpels and paste-up.
A magazine before the final exams
In the years that followed he founded a city magazine and was rewarded with prizes from Deutsche Lufthansa and the German Savings Banks Association, for the two passions that have stayed with him ever since: writing and photography. Before his final school exams he sold the magazine to a major publisher, co-founded his first company in campus marketing, wrote for Germany’s largest university magazine and helped companies such as Bose and Club Med, and personalities such as Carsten Maschmeyer, to reach high potentials among students. Alongside all this he studied business administration in Düsseldorf and Hagen.
Microsoft, Quelle, Condé Nast
After an apprenticeship year as personal assistant to the advertising veteran Werner Herrwerth in Munich (BMW Motorrad, Ikea, the Bavarian Border Police, Senior Club Deutschland) and a formative spell in an agency producing inserts for a textile discounter, the childhood dream arrived in adult form. At 23 he became budget director for the direct marketing of Microsoft, the Quelle mail order house and Condé Nast (Vogue, GQ, AD Architectural Digest). With a fine team he produced advertisements, mailings, city light posters and sales promotions for them and other clients.
A digital agency in 1996
After the first small digital projects on CompuServe, he founded the online department of a leading German dialogue marketing agency in 1996. Within five years it grew into a digital agency of eighty people. The work included the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, the Hamburger Morgenpost, the first website of German GQ, the digitisation of building societies, online banking for brokers, banks and savings banks, the first browser-based online game for Deutsche Telekom, the first online auctions for T-Mobile VIP customers, e-commerce for Velux and B2B concepts for Opel commercial vehicles.
He sold the agency to a company listed on the Neuer Markt, where he marketed early AI-based search technology and learned from executives of the SAP group how the software business works from the supplier’s side.
Better together
Perhaps because his own talent was encouraged early, he has always passed knowledge on. For many years he taught at the German Direct Marketing Academy and the Academy for Design. In the German Dialogue Marketing Association and in FEDMA, the European federation of the trade, he founded and supported the departments for e-commerce and online marketing. He lectured internationally for Deutsche Post and the software maker Intershop, helped founders find their own way into digital marketing and, with agency owners in Paris and London, built a European network for digital dialogue marketing.
Interim CEO for digital start-ups
After some turbulent years in the same boat as the Neuer Markt generation, he turned to innovation for established companies. For the Swiss holiday home provider Interhome he developed the first database-driven printed travel catalogue, with remarkable response rates and a good deal of praise at ITB. A social network for the travel industry followed, and then, on behalf of investors, the growth, restructuring or reorganisation of start-ups: data hygiene, consumer voucher platforms, mobile city guides, inbound marketing.
A sabbatical and an academy
After a sabbatical, with a great deal of time for photography, he co-founded Germany’s first academy for influencer marketing in Berlin. It was about authenticity, the power of recommendation and the then new idea that anyone can be their own broadcaster.
Now
Today Sascha Schulz writes about what comes next: a future you can live with, money without shame, machines and the people beside them, culture and well-made things. This almanac is the place for it. Rethink Future was once a company name. Now it is simply an instruction.
Not finished yet.