The Better Mousetrap

BRANDS AS TRANSMEDIA PORTALS -

WHERE ENTERTAINMENT MEETS MARKETING

 (Picture: The DB10, on location in Rome.)

 

None of us should be satisfied with what we believe brands to be capable of.

Whatever we believe that capability, it can be more.

When Henry Jenkins first introduced Transmedia in his treatise, Convergence Culture (2006), he spoke of ‘media formats’ as ‘entrypoints into a story world’.

Jenkins talked not of brands but of ‘media’ as a story-telling tool.

On April 6^th, 2010, the Producers Guild of America announced the addition of ‘Transmedia Producer’ to the Producers Code of Credits. A big deal (that some termed ‘unprecedented’), it marked the first time in the guild’s 60-year history that a new credit had been added to the list.

At the time, no one was thinking of a Transmedia Producer as anything other than a person - and certainly no one was thinking about brands.

Five years on... and it is high-time we consider the greater potential for brands as ‘story-world entrypoints’ and transmedia producers.

Simply, we need to think differently - more ambitiously - about what can happen when you bring together the worlds of entertainment and marketing.

We need to shrug off near-ancient, limiting definitions like “product placement” and “commercial interruption”, because these definitions hinder new ways of approaching the creation and funding of entertainment.

We’ve come a long from Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, mugging ironically as he flips the lid on a delivery from Pizza Hut.

Rather than brands as jarring interlopers within a story, we must explore how they can facilitate the creation of entertainment, and even enhance the content being made.

When director James Cameron wanted to explore the Mariana Trench (and document the expedition as an independent movie), he turned to Rolex.

In Deepsea Challenge 3D (2014), Rolex effectively serves as co-producer in the film’s funding, with logo presence on the final theatrical poster, side by side with National Geographic and Disruptive LA.

Rolex subsequently released the Rolex Deepsea with D-Blue dial. Watch buffs could barely find words to express how radical an act this was for Rolex, suggesting the luxury brand paragon to be breaking and beginning a very different commercial and creative direction to its past.

When director Sam Mendes took to the Pinewood stage on December 4^th last year, announcing the 24^th Bond movie to be Spectre, he also lifted the veil on the new Aston Martin DB10. No one groaned. No one derided the moment as gratuitous product placement. Rather, flashbulbs popped and a delighted Andy Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin, emphasised:

“In the same year that we celebrate our 50-year relationship with 007, it seems doubly fitting that we unveil this wonderful new sports car created especially for James Bond.”

In reality, Aston Martin will use Spectre as the platform for what will not be a one-off sports car, but the design direction of their remodelled Vantage. In 2017, anticipate straplines to the effect, “Built for James Bond. And now for you.”

Land Rover/Jaguar are also keenly in on the act, Spectre becoming the latest instalment in their ongoing brand renaissance. The Range Rover Sport SVR and Defender Big Foot will grab precious screen time, while Jaguar’s web site proudly spoiler-alerts, “The C-X75 will feature in a spectacular car chase sequence through Rome alongside the Aston Martin DB10”.

To label Aston Martin and Jaguar as mere product placements in Spectre is to miss the bigger picture. These are partnerships: brand integrations that add further layers upon the narrative world.

This year’s Kingsman, from 20^th Century Fox, is a positive roll call of Cool Britannia brands. Think: Turnbull & Asser, Deakin & Francis, Drake, George Cleverley, Cutler & Gross, Smythson, and Bremont.

Under the banner of ‘Curated British Luxury’, men’s style destination MR PORTER invites us to dress like a Kingsman, offering a 60 piece collection.

Across their own digital and social graphs, 8 eight brands (9 when you include Mr Porter) all excitedly promote Kingman (and their “hand-picked collaboration” with the movie), so driving trailer views and product purchase.

Once upon a time, this might have been called merchandising - but it surely becomes something far more sophisticated when it loops in director Matthew Vaughn and costume designer Arianne Phillips at the pre-production stage.

Kingsman effectively presents retail brands as Transmedia entrypoints, fuelling movie anticipation, but more interestingly offering us the physical and mental props to get us in-character and wish-fulfilling.

It is clear that the entertainment business is learning the language of brands (and marketing) - and it will arguably do so faster than the agency world can learn how to make legitimate and singularly entertaining content.

Directors like James Cameron, Sam Mendes and Matthew Vaughn are showing us what the intersection of entertainment and marketing can look like: where brands can become buzz builders and movie co-producers, where they can become wish-fulfilment props and Transmedia portals.

I’m reminded of a scene from Robert Altman’s The Player (1992).

Griffin Mill: It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.

June: What elements?

Griffin Mill: Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.

June: What about reality?

Reality notwithstanding, to Griffin’s list I wonder, can we add ‘brands’?

SP.

Article as also appears in BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post and Business 2 Community.

WHILE IT MIGHT LOOK A LITTLE LIKE A DUCK

The ad model changed. An unintended consequence of Tim Berners-Lee sending an html missive, and the butterfly effect of digital revolution that followed.

 

Technology evolved ‘media’, and turned a portable telephone into a pocket-able, indispensable screen and ‘Reality Augmenter’. The list of consequences doesn’t end there, of course, but the long-short: old ways are being replaced by new necessities. Former ‘proven conventions’ have become broken records, so many ‘established paradigms’ sinking like heavy-weight dinosaurs in an unforgiving bath of tar.

 

Specifically, for the world of brands and agencies, this Star Date 2014 of ours is a bright and shiny frontier – bold new ways to do things, exciting places for brands to explore – but with more than a few frisky and fast-moving meteor fields to also contend.

 

Back in the analogue days of happy dinosaurs and no meteor fields, ad agency swagger could write the kind of cheques its ego could indeed cash. You had Maurice and Charles Saatchi, drunk on ‘Nothing is Impossible’ Thatcherism even try and buy a bank, the Midland Bank. Has balls-out hubris ever soared to greater heights than an ad agency wanting to offer banking loans to its clients, so that they might then be able to cover the costs of the fees they’re being charged?

 

In 1987, Saatchi’s attempts to buy Britain’s fourth largest bank (with assets to the tune of $77bn) failed dismally, but the money in making ads remained for a good 15 or so more years. Right up to the early noughties, the Saatchi employee car park still looked like a Park Lane dealership, chock full of high-end autos of Italian, German and British persuasion. Walk around that same car park today and it’s a ghostly affair, a kind of paradise (make that: prestige marque) lost - and I paint the picture because it’s so very telling of a very simple truth: you can’t make ads the same way anymore.

 

In our here and now, few brand-builders would dispute the new manifesto theory of advertising – where PUSH messaging and audience INTRUSION is replaced with PULL messages and the call to create content of inherent audience appeal. It’s sense of the wonderfully common kind. Sensible in a way we can all prefix with ‘infinitely’. It’s just, while very few brands (or their builders) would dispute the challenge to make ‘content’ that’s inherently appealing, fewer still have found their way into this new blue ocean.

 

It’s misguided to simply drop the word ‘advert’ from the marketing lexicon, replace it with ‘content’, and then progress in just the same way, producing something that’s as much a brand-centric message as it ever was. The undisputable, game-a-changing fact is this: all brands are now in the entertainment business.

 

And the step-up-to-mike response is not to apply old world thinking and create an open pipeline of ‘brand films’ that (a) don’t entertain, (b) come across like a social bore and (c) do nothing to earn or reward their audience’s attention. The role of a ‘brand film’ is not to simply bang on about the brand with all the same yesteryear car salesman hustle of a slightly longer TV ad.

 

The role of a brand film is to offer a ‘content gift’, something that charms or rewards, and in some small or more significant way, makes the viewer’s world that little bit better and more satisfying. Even if only for a moment. I still come back to the genius of Forsman & Bodenfors combining JCVD, Enya, and a desert sunset to illustrate “the precision and directional stability of Volvo Dynamic Steering.”

 

Brands are at their best when they are patrons and benefactors and investors in culture and creativity. They are at their best when their participation is self-evident but near silent. Brands become more appealing by saying less, and doing so with subtly and sincerity. Where brands are loud and brash, heavy-handed and charmless in their communications, and sincere in an estate agent kind of way, then they deserve all the derision and negative buzz they get, and all the views and likes they don’t.

 

I like what the Folio Society are up to. Their content gifts are arguably of niche appeal, but the Folio Society know their audience and reward accordingly, offering human narratives that complement the beautiful books they make and stories they sell. Three examples, niche as said, but still very nice: Ben Jones discussing his illustrations for A Clockwork Orange, The Art of Letterpress and The Art of Marbling.

 

Often curious how fine a line it can be between something working… and simply not working. The same tone and ‘human interest’ angle as used by the Folio Society is applied by M&S here in their Best of British SS14 Collection – and yet, as a viewer it leaves me cold and bored. I just don’t care. And I wager that very few ever would. It’s a sorry example of ticking off the needs of a client brief (we want to talk about provenance and quality and craftsmanship) with a painfully literal, brand-centric solution. In contrast, consider the content delight of M&S Food’s ‘Adventures in Imagination’. Because of course, really great ads are actually just great content. Though this thought is one Chivas appear to be wrestling with, ‘uploading and hoping’ with a diverse range of output that misses more than it hits.

 

First, a modest hit: Chivas’s ‘Story of Craftsmanship’ (honouring a partnership with British watchmaker Bremont) is a simple idea. Mostly split screens uniting lots of circles, it’s very nicely executed, though not a patch on what I suspect was its inspiration - the very brilliant ‘Symmetry’ short.

 

In contrast, Chivas’ content output struggles to know what it is when you then consider it’s ‘Win the right way’ platform, recruiting Hollywood high-brow-and-hot talent like Oscar Issac and Chiwetel Ejiofor to misapply stylised gloss to a CSR message. While start-ups able to generate social as well as commercial capital is a big-idea-into-ideal worthy of loud applause, I’m not buying into Chivas as its sincere champion. The Issac and Ejiofor executions feel like ads striving to be something else, when they’d have been better off just being better ads.

 

If Chivas had absolute commitment to the cause, taking ‘Win the right way’ truly to their DNA, they’d stop feeling a need to still make the kind of throw-back work (check out: Charles Dance as bar man and brand archetype) reminiscent of a time where the epitome of cool was regarded by some as Crockett and Tubbs cruising South Beach in a white Testarossa.

 

It’s not that I mean to pick on Chivas. It’s just their content output illustrates the blue oceans and meteor fields all brands presently face. Brands have permission like never before, to make ‘content’ that is sincere and that audiences have always naturally craved. While on the downside, ‘bad advertising’ is arguably more found out than it ever was, its underlying urge to sell laid wholly bare.

 

The entertainment business is fundamentally about entertaining, about making money by being very good at entertaining, at rewarding and satisfying audiences. The lesson for brands is that pseudo imitation of the bona fide entertainment industry can lead to content-sins worthy of a Dr Frankenstein. It’s all well and good casting Hollywood talent, but making something that looks a little like a duck and walks a little like a duck is no guarantee of a winning quack or waddle. And while a masquerading platypus with a knack for impersonation might be rather entertaining, anything less literal and similarly false is likely to falter.

SP.

Article as also appears on BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post, Medium and Business 2 Community.

THAT FIRST KISS

 

“That first kiss, that pause, just before, that pause spilling with expectation and possibility. Eyes. Mouth. Parting lips. Anticipation. Closer. Yes. Complicity. A submission, a moment shared in time and trust, a kiss offered, a kiss taken; a first intimacy. Kissing is The Business.”

Remember to Breathe: A novel (2012)

 

It feels like about once a quarter, a new viral ‘pheno-meme’ storms out across the internet. Each example makes it ever-clearer that all content is far from equal. The short form ‘video’ that goes stellar is fast becoming the ‘new broadcast’, not reaching everyone all at once in a single Super Bowl spot buy, but rather multiple millions in an ever skyward arc over a week or two.

Content that gets to 300+ views is an achievement. The 1,000 view marker is wholly kudos deserving as milestone’s go. 1m views? Well, that’s the super leagues, think segments from US chat shows like ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jimmy Fallon. Fallon’s lip sync battle with Paul Rudd – very funny – is clocking close on 8m views. And I still grin when I think of the little ditty Sarah Silverman put together in duet with Matt Damon: 5.9 views.

But the stuff that goes into the tens of millions – wtf, how many views?! – well, that’s simply epic, MASSIVE, a bona fide juddering of the zeitgeist.

The latest content ‘Must See’ is ‘First Kiss’, which I first saw early last week, when it was at around 20m views. Me = late to the party. As you read this, it’ll be north of 60m.

First Kiss got me wondering, why do I like it? Why does it work? What can we learn from it? Why has it caught the touch paper that is cyberspace?

Can viral video be deconstructed, the nature of its allure and communicability be some kind of calculation? Might there just be a genesis code upon which we can devise a circa three minute stream that games the online system? Or is every content pheno-meme something different, each its own exception to any governable rule, where the only thing we can really garner is that each is just bloody good and worth a watch in its own imaginative and inimitable way? I wondered. And I still wonder. And the thing with wondering is that it can easily lead to ‘listing’. Here are seven reasons why First Kiss works:

1. It feels real: ‘Authentic’ seems to be a word that never goes out of fashion in branding, advertising and film-making circles – and certainly, First Kiss doesn’t feel like fakery. It’s intimate, tender, very human; honest. It feels very real. The camera is openly capturing a genuine moment. No one is ‘acting’. And this is the really rather smart bit, because…

2. Its set-up makes it unique: For 99 folk out of 100, whacking a camera in their face changes their behaviour. They freeze, freak, act weird, turn odd. The camera is an invasion. Behaving ‘normally’ in front of a camera is actually abnormal. Curiously, in First Kiss, the camera ‘heightens’ the participant’s ‘naturalness’, first their awkwardness, then everything else. The camera’s presence actually makes the moment. Kissing a stranger is already weird. ‘The Camera’ compliments rather conflicts the weirdness. It adds to and captures and ‘gifts’ us a moment we otherwise would not have had the chance to see.

3. ‘The Familiar’ is flipped: It’s a great one-line concept, a ‘high concept’: “We asked 20 people to kiss for the first time.” But it’s not just 20 people, it’s 20 strangers. A first kiss is normally between two people who know one another on some level, human attraction established. First Kiss flips something universally familiar: make strangers kiss. The result is something awkward… But that’s not awkward. Because there’s consent and curiosity. And the casting of the ‘consentees’ is perfect. Everyone is appealing. They’re not airbrush beautiful. Nor are they ugly. They’re easy to look at.

4. Voyeuristic Permission: The digital age invites us to watch. In the ‘content game’, there is no game if there are no watchers, but understanding the emotional role of the online viewer is key. In Red Bull Stratos: we watch in awe. If watching live: awe and apprehension (will he make it, will he die?). With Epic Split: it’s a retro-rebooted slice of “did he really do that?” With First Kiss, how will they, will they kiss the way they look, what will happen then?

5. It’s ‘Happy-Making’: Human nature is portrayed as we hope, believe and want it to be. People kiss. No one’s hurting anyone. In fact, a few are really getting into it. Afterwards, they’re still goofy, but they’re also closer, different, relieved, relaxed, the intimacy has created something new which we’ve bared witness to. We have witnessed something transformative.

6. It’s nicely done: First Kiss is all very well judged. The emotional tone is just right. The production values are spot on. The monochrome really adds. The soundtrack ‘We Might be Dead Tomorrow’ perfectly complements, as does the absence of any over indulgent graphics or preachy final message. Nothing is heavy-handed.

7. It’s vicarious & prompting: I was having a drink with a film director buddy, recently single, who said it made him want to kiss a stranger, or kiss someone new, or do both. First Kiss is very relatable, emotionally accessible; easy to empathise with and get on the inside of. Even if you don’t want to kiss a stranger, everyone’s got a string of first kisses in their memory vault.

Content that makes us feel better about ourselves, about life, about what it is to be human – this, we are going to be interested in and drawn to.

Whether viewers know it or not, First Kiss was made by 3-employee US fashion brand, Wren. But not knowing doesn’t suddenly make First Kiss less. The film is deliberately, shrewdly, unbranded. To be judged in its own right.

As Melissa Coker, founder of Wren, points out, “It’s a very noisy world out there.” By filming strangers kissing, she has our attention.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall, Yahoo Business Advisor and Business 2 Community.

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GREAT BRAND THEORY, INVISIBLE DESIGN & NODDY HOLDER

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?”

 

Some men are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. Slightly abridged, but you’ll recognize the line: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, passing comment on how our natures and our circumstances influence how we step figuratively up to the plate. Philosophically speaking, provocatively speaking, the line is also a bit of cheat in that it mashes together opposing schools of thought.  

 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle proposed ‘Great Man Theory’. Carlyle’s thinking was that greatness is the stuff of nature, leadership a slug of DNA code sitting snuggly (or absently) in the double helix. Great men are born that way. That was Carlyle’s reckoning.

 

Tolsty (he of War & Peace and seriously impressive beard) sat on the other side of the debating chamber. Leo argued man’s moments of greatness to ‘zeitgeist theory’, to the times we pass through and how we take whatever slings and arrows on the chin. Context makes us great.

 

As a formula for brands and advertising (and their potential role in culture), I think we can take sage instruction from Messrs.’ Carlyle and Tolstoy. Meaning, for one thing, that ‘the Bard of Avon’ would have also made a damnably shrewd brand builder.

 

I believe brands are made great. In making them great, I’d like to suggest that ‘Great Brand Theory’ is not in isolation and opposition to the zeitgeist. Rather, ‘Great Brand Theory’ is a brand intrinsically so designed that it’s open-minded and adaptive to change. A great brand is a flexible brand. It’s one that knows what to do with the opportunities, as and when they come knocking. Opportunities, of course, are the external factors, as determined by those Tolstoyan circs of the day.

 

The great brands have the skills to surf the zeitgeist’s swells and troughs. Ineffectual brands sink beneath them. With a final glug that’s equally ineffectual.

 

And in ensuring that brands surf rather than sink, a singularly simple question arises. What is our zeitgeist, ‘der Geist seiner Zeit’ (as Gerg Hegel phrased it back in 1848), this spirit of our 2014 times?

 

Certainly enough, it is a digital one. Meaning it is a technologically-empowered one. A creatively-enabled one. A ‘mobile computer in our pocket that connects us to the world’ one. By consequence, it is a liberated one, in that the Digital Age gives all voice and invites us all to like/comment/share and tweet/post/upload.

 

Our zeitgeist is not one where anyone’s role is that of passive and mute witness. Our zeitgeist is one of being actively invited to get stuck in and a play a part. And this all has huge implications for how brands can make themselves great, and how advertising must consider the role it gives people. Which brings me to Noddy Holder (and isn’t the non sequitur it may appear).

 

You may well be as familiar with the work of Slade as you are with the frequently quoted lines of Shakespeare. And even if you’re not so au fait with the former, I’d wager you could sing along to ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’, a track that first entered the UK charts at number 1 back in February 1973. It stayed there throughout March, selling half million copies in its first 3 weeks. It is said that the factory couldn’t press the vinyl’s quickly enough. Ten years later, US heavy metal group Quiet Riot achieved massive success, sold 6 million copies of their cover version, and then in 1996, UK pub rockers Oasis paid homage with their own take.

 

‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ might be a seriously good tune to mosh or jog to, but I also believe its success is due to what it’s about. I think it resonates with audiences, because it’s about them.

 

‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ saw Slade attempt to “recreate and write about the atmosphere at their gigs”. Front man Noddy Holder recalled it as, "how I had felt the sound of the crowd pounding in my chest". Co-writer Jim Lea added, “I thought — why not write the crowd into the songs.” (Source: Wikipedia)

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?” I love this sentiment. I love the acknowledgement that a moment is defined by its audience, that they make it what it is. Without the audience, Holder & Co were just a group of crazy-haired guys up on a stage performing to an empty room.

 

Why not write the consumer into the campaign? Of course, this is what ‘Great Brands’ do. In our connected and converged age, great brands ensure their audience feels the noise by making them the centerpiece of the campaign moment. Great brands acknowledge that it is the contribution, energy and participation of the audience that defines the advertising, so making it a moment full of both noise and feeling. Campaigns that embrace the zeitgeist are campaigns that invite consumers to play their part. Great brands put consumers not just in control but ‘in character’.

 

Bud Light’s 2014 Super Bowl spot, ‘Ian Up For Whatever’ is a perfect example of a brand putting ‘The Consumer’ in character, of literally writing them into the campaign.

 

'Ian Up For Whatever' - Bud Light 2014 Super Bowl (#UpForWhatever)

 

The ad might center on Ian Rappaport, but we enjoy his adventures vicariously, our delight in watching turning the third person narrative into a first person experience. 

 

The Heist, Zombie Run and Tough Mudder are recent additions to this burgeoning cultural trend in “first person/in character/’gamefied’ experiences. We now live in an age where we can hire zombies to chase us, and pay for the pleasure of tackling obstacle courses that electrocute us, while giving us permission to get as muddy as 5 year olds.

 

These very physical experiences reflect what has already taken place online, of the shift from ‘passive observer to active participant’.

 

Culturally, significantly, we’re moving more and more from ‘See it’ to ‘Live it’, meaning the designing of ad campaigns has become the designing of human experiences, of brands creating something for us all to live through.

 

Once upon a time, advertising campaigns were all about visibility. They were messages piped to us through static media channels. A big poster on a big flat poster site. 2D, unmoving, changing every 2 weeks. There was a time when poster sites couldn’t change image in the blink of an eye, and that change could not be prompted by, say, the Sun coming out or the passing of a plane overhead. In our analogue past, ‘media’ was rather unremarkable and ‘The Campaign’ was obvious in intent, on the nose in message, all elements quite literal and clearly visible.

 

We’ve moved from using media that makes the brand message ‘Visible & Literal’ to something that is much more ‘Staged & Revelatory’. 21^st century advertising isn’t simply about the stuff that comes at you head on. It’s about the stuff that comes at you from the side, wraps round you, that creates a narrative context in which you have a role, with a desired emotion being all part of the plan.

 

Great brands are becoming cultural architects, their advertising becoming as much about the stuff you can’t see, constructs of ‘invisible design’, about the deliberate crafting of character-based first-person experiences.

 

Great men, great design, great bands, great brands, great experiences; none of these things happens by chance. In each case, our zeit invites it. But in making it so, we all have our parts to play.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall, Medium and Business 2 Community.

THE NEW GAME

 

 

Daniel Schorr (on TV): There's a tiny camera looking at you right now.
Nicholas van Orton: That's impossible.
Daniel Schorr: You're right, impossible. You're having a conversation with your television.

The Game (1997)

 

In David Fincher's 'The Game', Michael Douglas' over-achieving but bored-with-life banker, Nicholas van Orton, is either the centre of an insanely elaborate role play fantasy or he's the mark in an equally byzantine con designed to liberate him of his fortune and potentially his life. While we're left guessing right to the end, what's clear is that Nicholas can't even sit down and watch TV without it talking back at him.

 

Beyond being a 129 minute slice of fine entertainment, I think the campaign architects among us can learn something from 'The Game' - something about how to design better advertising, where campaigns are more akin to episodic, multi-layered and sensory 'real life' experiences that place the consumer in circumstances not so dissimilar to those of Mr Nicholas van Orton.

 

But let me back up a bit and start with what we first understood by the term 'consumer-centric'. The late 90s new breed Comms Planners cried, "Put the Consumer first!". It was a measured jab in the side of account planning, as born of the Stephen King/JWT School.

 

Account planning is too brand-centric declared the comms planners, meaning the brand shows too much ego and the manifestation is too likely a self-flattering TV ad, beamed intrusively into everyone's sitting rooms during those regulated bursts of interruption in between the actual TV shows we all chose and tuned in to watch.

 

This, you can appreciate, was all back in our analogue past when media channels were few, little more than delivery mechanisms - figurative postmen delivering the messages of the mad men - and when (in fairness) 'As seen on TV' still carried real cachet and clout.

 

But comms planning (circa. 1998) gave credence to the notion that everything communicates, every brand act, gesture and touch point. There may be a media channel hierarchy, but everything communicates a message to the consumer, from a bumper sticker to a TV ad break.

 

But why the potted ad-land history lesson of which so many of us are au fait? To steal a line from American author Bret Easton Ellis, because ours "is the game that turns as you play".

 

All that shake-up-the-system talk of becoming more consumer-centric now feels very consumer-centric 1.0. While the notion of an end game campaign that was channel agnostic and built on audience insight still makes cast-iron sense, it drops to its knees like a fallen warrior when the outcome remains a set of creative assets exhibited across a range of static media channels - the message still pushed and media's only charge, that of reaching eyeballs.

 

And yet perhaps this was the fated inevitability of a noble sentiment in an analogue world, where people were talking consumer-centric before the world became a digital one?

 

Now we're after, we're anno digital, meaning consumer-centric 2.0 (binary-assisted, with CES-style upgrades) is a very different box of delights with a very different set of implications.

 

Consider how technology has changed the nature of media; how it's made and will continue to make media consumer-centric and evermore social. Think: social TV (EPG meets Facebook), and social outdoor (digital posters as Twitter feeds).

 

At a $4 billion valuation, Spotify has shown music's worth in our digital age. I'd argue Spotify's success-formula is born of putting its listeners in the centre of its digital system, in allowing the creating and sharing of playlists.

 

Is Spotify a tech? Or a kind of app? A product or a piece of media? A brand, or a consumer-centric blend of all the above? From Nike+ to cycling apps like Strava, technology is allowing us to 'game-ify' our lives. Our pavements, cycle lanes and roads are being augmented, being re-imagined as bio and chrono-metric performance route maps that allow us to turn every A-to-B into a kind of personal hero's journey.

 

Media continues to probe the fuzzy borders between delivering content and encouraging it. Next generation press formats are emerging where magazines become a live-feed blend of editorial comment and reader response. Where magazines once claimed to know their audience and write for them, tomorrow's magazines will see their readers contributing increasingly more than just a letter to a reader's page. Culture and media have never been more symbiotic and co-authored.

 

Technology is reshaping culture. We've not only all become technophiles, but we've all become tech-empowered. In an age where we've all now become so accustomed to having a voice, so accustomed to liking and tweeting and blogging and sharing, brand-centric campaigns are being humbled... but brand builders can slipstream the examples and fast apply the proof of concept.

 

Consumer-centric 2.0 is all about the consumer being the very human and beating heart of a brand campaign, where we each feel like we're being given centre stage, role and deed.

 

Because who wants to feel inert, a mere aggregate-adding member of the couch-bound majority? Who wants to be viewed as passively receiving the contents of a flickering screen, that chewing gum for the eyes that asks little of the mind?

 

Alternatively, who wants to feel like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts or Michael Douglas? Who wants to be the hero or heroine of the piece, in the middle of it all, senses alive? It's flattering to feel like the main attraction, being the one getting to roll the dice, with every suspicion that the entire game might be designed just for us.

 

Where the TV ad was once a brand's main event, it's now more akin to a movie trailer - the buzz-bomb prior to the feature-length campaign. And today's main campaign event - the big feature-length presentation - is not all about consumers watching the brand equivalent of Tom Cruise or Michael Douglas.

 

In our binary world, the TV ad sets the tone and possible theme, and then the campaign puts the audience front and centre. It casts the consumer as the hero and main protagonist. The consumer is no longer just the human insight trigger-pull to the subsequent brand campaigns we create.

 

21st century ad campaigns can crash first-person story-telling into digital media. A brand becomes the calling card that knocks at our door - a call to arms and action.

 

By extension of putting consumers in control, the new consideration should become how campaigns can put them in character. Beyond us asking, "What is the role for the brand?", we need to establish, "What is the heroic role we are giving the consumer?" A hero-in-waiting needs to be called upon to do more than just watch telly.

 

Unlike Nicholas van Orton, we can't yet have a conversation with our TV sets, but in building brands, we are playing a very new game.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Consumer, The Wall and MediaTel Newsline.

ADVERTISING, INTERRUPTED

From Don Draper & Magic Bullets to Don Simpson & Going Native

 

 

Last week, I spent more time than absolutely necessary discussing whether a lion could beat up a tiger. It's hard to put a billable ROI against that kind of agency chat.

During the week, I also read a very good article on ‘Native Advertising’, written by Greg Grimmer, an old friend who's never short on fresh thinking.

Lions and tigers, old friends and new views, I love how certain tangents collide.

Yet in truth, these tangents aren't such tangents.

First, ‘Native Advertising’: a tag initially applied to the evolution of ‘online display advertising’, where online display comes over as too ‘advertisingy’ (hence people ignore and resent it) and so the answer becomes advertising that’s less like ‘advertising’, that’s more like the actual editorial content we all consume by choice. 

The great danger in this is how former ‘offline’ attempts at ‘advertising as editorial’ have played out. Enter: ‘The advertorial’, that most insipid kind of masquerade.

Advertising that’s faking it, trying to mirror the ‘real content’, only where the quality isn’t there, the bias is, and there’s a headline at the top underlining the insincere sham of it all: ‘This is a Promotion’ - how was that ever going to be a great idea? Or an effective one? No points for guessing, I’ve never been a fan. But like discovering a brave new universe, born from the black hole of a previously bad idea, we now have a new and potentially inspired prefix to consider.

 

INTERRUPTION… OF THE WELCOME KIND

‘Online’ is a medium troubled by the same spectral dilemma that haunts the wider advertising community. Do people like advertising, or not, and given technology is bestowing upon us a surfeit of edit buttons, what is advertising’s future?

This was the topic of a Google Squared debate I took part in last week. I didn’t talk about lions fighting tigers (though I will shortly), but my debate does represent a third converging tangent in all of this. The panel included Rob Smith, MD of Ogilvy & Mather and Mike Burgess, Digital Director at BMB. Both Rob and Mike are the kind of industry brains who are going to get as close as anyone to establishing advertising’s future, and while we didn’t collectively crack it in a 1-hour chat, I left my swivel seat with one recurring word.

‘Interruption.’

People invariably hate being interrupted, and the old model of advertising is based on this simple principle. No one welcomes that moment when the movie they’re watching on TV (live or recorded) is gate-crashed by a 3+ minute blast of snake-oil selling.

Ad agencies still sell clients TV work in darkened boardrooms full of nodding heads with the volume dialled to 11. Show that TV ad in the middle of Homeland, and I don’t feel quite the same way about it.

The Super bowl may indeed be the only TV watching exception, where the commercials co-define the pop cultural moment, but the Super bowl is that bold exception (because it’s so damn long and the structure of play so staccato) to an otherwise obvious truth.

The ‘obvious truth’ that interruption is seldom enjoyed prompts the spin-off question: Are there times when people enjoy being interrupted? Can advertising ever be a welcome interruption? Mike Burgess’s citing of style bibles like Vogue (where the advertising is intrinsic to the content, to what the magazine fundamentally is) serve as a glossy full colour affirmation that advertising can be positively received.

‘Welcome Interruption’ loops me back round to 'native', which I don’t think the online community should have all to themselves.

After all, those Prada and Jimmy Choo ads in Vogue are effectively ‘native’, given they complement, even improve, the overall media consumption moment. 

I like this word ‘Native’, and not just because it makes my Northern Hemisphere light-deprived sensibilities think of people wearing flip flops and sarongs and smelling of sun lotion.

I like the word because it posits a ‘new way of being’ for ‘advertising’, equipping brands with a new lingua franca or ‘second language’. In keeping step with these fast-moving times, advertising is being invited to shrug off its now outmoded garbs and blend in with all the indigenous stuff people naturally like and want. I wonder, is it now very possible for advertising to be "non-advertising advertising", no longer the unwelcome intruder, but rather the source of any manner of cool stuff that causes us to grin and declare feelings of awesomeness?  

 

HIGH CONCEPTS & BROWS: A NEW KIND OF MAGIC 

I’ve talked before about brands needing to be Power-Givers, to really bring it to the table, the party, to wherever and whomever. Having good chat (whether on a panel or at a party), rocking up with a metaphorically tidy ‘bottle of’, for brands, this is literally about creating very human experiences - encounters or interactions - that make life better somehow. Intrigue me. Inform me. Educate me. Entertain me. Where these experiences are brought to me BY A BRAND, is this still ‘advertising’?

Sixty years ago, ‘The Thirty Second Ad’ was a magic bullet that consistently hit its mark. Sixty years on and any suggestion that the same kind of advertising convention is going to be similarly effective is potty. Don Draper, and his output, was a product of its time. Today’s ‘Magic Bullet’ needs to look very different – and while no brand has yet landed on the absolute blend of sorcery and armoury, but some are getting closer.

Which brings me to ‘Lions & Tigers’. You see, if someone asks me whether a Lion can beat up a Tiger, I’m interested as hell, drawn close and want to know more. I don’t necessarily want to see 90 seconds of footage of a Tiger and a Lion going at it, but I’d very much like to see a short documentary funded by, say, Patagonia or Timberland, that explores the question (and ideally provides the answer).

If I say to you, as people have recently put to me, have you seen that mountain biker being hunted by a Peregrine Falcon, aren’t you immediately curious how that worked out for rider and bird, and to click HERE if you don’t know?

If I tell you someone, a 'Big Black Little Bit Crazy Woman' called GloZell, is willing to film herself eating a ladle of cinnamon (these kind of antics have earned her 2.25m You Tube subscribers), you might just click HERE to see the faces and noises she makes after ingesting.

While this might sound a bit inane, I’m not suggesting we only interpret ‘native’ as dumbed-down ‘High Concept’, in the Simpson-Bruckheimer ‘One Sentence Pitch’ sense.

In a separate corner of this same native universe, consider Marriot hotels interpretation of ‘Sponsored Content’; a partnership with Fast Company where they’ve created the TravelBrilliantly series, corralling some very clever people to explore and explain what travel might mean these digital days.

Sure, #TravelBrilliantly is 'branded content' because it’s content that the Mariott brand has made happen, but it’s also just plain-and-simple content that I naturally love and gravitate towards and want to talk about. It could just as easily be from WIRED or Mashable. I become grateful to Marriot for being the catalyst, and I start thinking Marriot is a brand with a much higher IQ, irrespective of whether they’re slip-steaming the smarts of others or not. (Check out what a friend of mine, Faris Yakob, has to say about Time Travel and ‘Memory Hacking” here.) 

The effect is also similar to when I recently stayed at a W Hotel and my key card – in addition to opening my door - referenced their partnership with Intel and Roman Coppola, about a short movie collection (and spin-off competition) they’ve made. I think W Hotels are pretty cool, and I actively looked into what kind of film-makers the W are. They’re this kind: CLICK.

 

“IMAGINE IF..?”: THE NEW AGE OF ADVERTISING  

I’m in the front row here-cheering where Greg’s article asserts, “distribution is as crucial, if not more so, than the curation and creation of content. Don't expect the Kevin Costner field of dreams effect”. I also however believe that in the same way that talent outs and cream rises, if you conceive the content equivalent of a Shard or a Gherkin or a Burj Khalifa, then you’re stacking the odds of making an impression on anyone’s horizon.

“Imagine what would happen if you ate a whole ladle of cinnamon… pitted a tiger against a lion… tried to free-fall from the very edge of space?”

The late Don Simpson, Hollywood Fast Lane Lunatic, is living proof that High Concept is no way to live, but it might just breathe new life into the advertising model.

Any brand that bank-rolls the creation of something ‘Very Cool’, that I’d naturally pay to see or read, is a brand I’ll happily say thank-you to, and more likely buy.

"Netflix made history tonight, winning three Emmy awards for House of Cards, becoming the first company to win the awards for online-only shows." (Sep 22^nd, 2013) 

Where Jay Leno declared, “I don’t know what TV is anymore”, it might just be a very good thing if we all embrace the idea of not knowing what 'advertising' is anymore either.

Blockbuster never went knocking on Kevin Spacey’s door, and look how that turned out. Netflix figured the best possible ad they could make was a brilliant TV series (and maybe one of the best and longest TV “ads” of all time?). "Give people what they want” said Spacey, “when they want it, in the form they want it in. It's all content."

Content that I naturally crave: this is the stuff that sells itself. And it’ll sell the brands that make it.

SP.

Article as also appears in MediaTel Newsline, KoganPage.com, Business 2 Community, and Emerging Spaces.

The Quant of One: Big Data's Next Big Thing

 

We all love a good sound bite, a snappy label, a catchy tag. Our necks snap, our attention is caught, and we fall in love. New Labour. The Third Way. A Roadmap to Peace. Yes We Can. The Fiscal Cliff. Big Data.

 

Editorial 101: give 'em the quotable and instantly re-quotable. This is how ideas spread. And there's only one thing more contagious than an idea. It's an idea that can evolve, that serves as an open mic, that everyone can riff on. Because no sooner do we ingest and espouse these headline ideas, than we desire to then spin them in fresh, ever-revolving directions.

 

The best headlines are the invitation to become evolving thoughts.

 

Take 'Big Data'. It's been the label du jour long enough for speculators to question if it's time to fire up a new dawn and invert the prefix. Maybe data is no longer big? Maybe it's small?

 

'Big' and 'Small': early learning words with all manner of delicately contrived inferences.

 

Brands like using big. Businesses like using big. At least, they like using when they are big, or want to be perceived as bigger. Big is strong, mighty, has clout and stature, implies leverage and power. People buy into big.

 

 

Barclays. 'Big', starring Anthony Hopkins. Agency: Leagas Delaney (2000)

And brands and businesses wield 'small' with equal finesse; small is nimble, agile, "boutique-like", can imply smart. People buy into small. David & Goliath was a tale conjured by those selling the virtues of 'small'.

 

But what has this got to do with data?

 

You see, data has changed, both in typology and our feelings toward it. This Digital Revolution of ours has changed our relationship with data.

 

Now I have an admission. I never really liked 'The Numbers'. They were for the numbers guys. I'd always inclined to let those Kings of Quant deal in the empirically abstract. For me, the numbers had always felt a bit too quant, too antiseptic, at a remove from scratched knee truths of the human condition. I'd never needed 'The Numbers' to tell me why people climb trees. I'd always been a qual guy; reasoned that human understanding was through interpreting the irrational, the small detail of facial tick and guilty tell; in reading between the lines of perhaps what wasn't said. Empathy and intuition had always been the reference points upon which I'd drawn my own 'best fit'.

 

Now it's not that I've flip-flopped on my view of qual. I still love qual. But I'll admit it. I'm in a quant U-turn. My feelings for quant have changed. Because data has changed.

 

Along came the digital revolution, and the data is now so much more than it once was. For starters, there's so much more of it. It's vast. Hence, 'Big Data', loads of the stuff, being produced all the time, as a consequence of a digital age where we're all connected and networking, and (almost) all carrying a phone around with us.

 

"Facebook reports that its users register 2.7 billion likes and comments per day. For many, this magnitude of data is intimidating: they can't keep up with it, much less sort it, analyze it, and extract value from it."

 Philip Lee, Trends Crux, Feb 2013

 

Of course, 'Big Data' is really just an acknowledgement of how much data is now being created, and how it's tricky processing anything north of something as big as an exabyte. Imagine a really big elephant. No, not even close.

 

But framed another way, 'Big Data' becomes a crazy-exciting idea when it becomes this vast catch-all portrait of 'life', so much multi-source data that we can encourage to join hands, like an 'arms around the world and teach it to sing' Coke ad from the 70s. Because it can join hands. New data points are being joined all the time. Multi-source can be single-stacked, becoming an oceanic trench of data inviting us to dive in, swim down, keep swimming, and start whole new depths of discovering.

 

Where indices once left me cold, because they attempted to explain the motivations and behaviours of creatures whose blood runs warm, 'data' has turned body-temperature. To be human is now to create a data trail, a 'digital exhaust', new data, different kinds of data to the stuff we made before, and we're not talking a few binary crumbs, but a forensically lit trail, criss-crossing with everyone else's, like giving Saul Bass a pen and ruler and telling him to have some fun. These trails reveal our online movements and increasingly our offline movements. The data is a converged portrait of our digital and physically collided world.

 

Returning to Lee's earlier quote, the numbers remain a portrait of hidden value. The value is generated from interpretation, as ever, a matter of applied insight and elegance and bona fide smarts. Either side of a best fit line is always a steep gradient, a surface of hidden contours cast in fading light. However big or small the data gets, the task is how you choose to traverse it, negotiating the shadows, avoiding the treachery.

 

Which swings me round to small data: in the sense that all this giant data is potentially, quite simply, exposing individual human experiences more vividly and accurately than ever before. Meaning: it's exposing each of us. This intersection of 'Big Data' and 'Human Experiences'. A 'Quant of One'.

 

And this is only becoming a plausible contradiction because of how smart we're getting with the data, building machines that can learn and algorithms that adapt. A touch of Bayesian probability here, the application of NLP there, all fed into the real world versions of a HAL 9000. The 'Quant of One' becomes a very alive idea the moment trends become accurate predictions. Human actions, before the fact, revealed, through data; now there's a Minority Report kind of thought.

 

Maybe data is still big but now also small, and perhaps other prefixes are also deserving? Intimate. Knowing. Predictive. Human. The fact data is earning any prefix at all illustrates how it's changing - along with our feelings towards it... and how it's getting to know and reveal us.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post.

THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE

What the future of branding has in common with Tony Stark, Charles Revson & Archibald Leach

 

 

We all want to live better, fuller, richer, more complete lives. We don’t want to live by half measures, be Some Kind of Schmuck, Average Joe or Journeyman.

A ‘Human Truth’, our ‘Human Condition’: we aspire to dream big and chase those dreams. We want to be in control, take control, master our own destinies, shape our own narratives.

 

To almost all of us, all of the above sounds all good - because being all you can be is a highway to happiness, a smooth blacktop gun-barrelling towards that perfect sunset.

 

And here’s the thing: I think brands and advertising, in some small way, can help us on that road. Yes, I really do. Only first, we need to drop the “advertising” label and call it something else.

 

TO ADVERTISE

You see, “advertising”, the verb, by dictionary definition does itself no favours.

 

to advertise – the verb

to call attention to something, in a boastful or ostentatious manner, in a public medium to induce people to buy.

 www.dictionary.com 

 

Ostentatious. Boastful, these are not particularly likeable qualities. These are not the kind of human traits we seek out in others, with a view to then making them our friends.

 

Advertising, by definition, is ineffective communication, because it’s so unlikeable. 

 

But let’s flip it. Instead of “boastful and ostentatious”... let’s consider any experience or encounter that feels tailored to us and our needs... or any message that demonstrates a benefit to us, that (crucially) puts us at the centre of the universe and in the driving seat.

 

When advertising truly knows its audience and places a brand in the context of its audience’s needs, it ceases being advertising “by definition” (while suddenly wielding enormous power to persuade, create desire and want).

 

THE BRAND FORM: NEWLY EVOLVED

Now, “consumer-centric messages” is nothing so new. The finest Madison Avenue output of Don Draper’s day observed the truth that successful advertising must make its appeal to human truths, to human wants.

 

However, 50 years on, in a world gone digital, the ‘brand form’ has newly evolved. Social Media Brands are so successful, very simply, because they let us build the idea of ‘The Me I Want to Be’. They allow us to chronicle and edit an online self that conforms to the more idealised and satisfying versions how we wish to see ourselves.

 

In this Digital Age of ours, “media” has gone from mass to personal, and not just personal, but intimate and expressive. “Media” is a thing of self-expression and social affirmation and lifestyle curation. Digital brands, social media brands, are potentially the most narcotic and charismatic evolution of the brand form - and not because of what they say about themselves - but because of what they allow their users to say. Digital brands take a back seat, rather than trying to hog centre stage. Ironically, brands today become successful by letting their consumers be “boastful and ostentatious’. And physical brands are quickly learning from their social media successors.

 

Consider a successful physical brand like Nike. Nike has gone native; has become a digital native, in order to survive. The Nike brand is no longer selling running shoes. The business sells running shoes... by building a brand world that orbits the consumer, in the form of Nike+, which is all about making it easier to live and express a ‘Just Do It’ lifestyle.

 

Consider the ever-expanding gap between Sony and Apple. Sony still try and sell hardware. Apple sells a “lifestyle ecosystem” of software and hardware that looks to provide a cooler, hipper, somehow “more fun” and more creative world for people. Love or hate Apple (and for most it’s the former), but Apple shows genius for creating covetable products that become part of a bigger, equally covetable “Think Different” world – even if that world is largely illusory.

 

DREAM WEAVING & FOURTH DIMENSIONS

Advertising has always been about selling The Dream. Revlon founder Charles Revson acknowledged that he manufactured cosmetics... but sold hope. (Revson was a seriously shrewd character.) In acknowledging that so many of us aspire to a life more remarkable, we’re seeing brands become ever-more-imaginative dream weavers.

 

This Spring we saw Audi adopting Tony Stark, “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” as its brand ambassador. The new Audi R8 we learned: “engineered for Iron Man”. Audi’s strapline, “Truth in engineering”, but with an aspirational allure borrowed from the world of superhero make-believe.  

 

Without superhero assistance, but in similar sentiment, Jaguar recently launched its new F-Type by asking, “How alive are you?” and telling us, “It’s your turn”. 

 

Brands – physical and digital - are at their best when they put us in that driving seat, when they invite (and even better empower) self-narration.

 

An interviewer once observed, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant". To which Grant replied, "So would I." No one knew better than Grant that he’d have likely had a very different career, had he not ditched Archibald Alexander Leach.

 

Today’s Revson-shrewd brands know that no one wants to be Archibald Alexander Leach... and that even Cary Grant didn’t start out as Cary Grant. He had to build that particular edifice, same way we all do. And brands are becoming tools that help build those edifices.   

 

Where mobile technology is now augmenting our reality, advertising is (more than ever) exaggerating our reality, blurring the boundaries, inviting fiction in, and (crucially) putting us in the driving seat. We’re seeing advertising collide with a kind of hyperbole. In mathematics, “hyper” is used as a prefix to denote 4 or more dimensions - and advertising is encouraging a fourth dimension to take shape, where brands and consumers join in co-creation.  

“Advertising” still needs a new definition, and it’s not “hypertising”, but one thing is for sure, brands can help in our road to somewhere. Happy motoring.

SP.

Article as also appears in Strategy Online and The Huffington Post.

BALL & FLINT - TRANSMEDIA IN 90 SECONDS

 

I rather liked the idea of taking a very thin slice from between the pages of 'Digital State', and turning it into a piece of promotional content, that was both a single idea and (hopefully) held a little value in its own right.

The result was 'Ball & Flint'.

It's about storytelling in a digital world... expressed in 90 seconds... through a metaphor. 

Yeah, it'll make more sense just watching it.

 

 

 

Director & Producer: Babis Tsoutsas
Motion & Graphic Design: George Zestanakis
Script & Narration: Simon Pont

And to Babis and George, massive thanks.

SP.

Patrons & Pace Cars, Pilot Fish & Parasites

 

 

What role do brands play in "culture", in society? What is their contribution?

 

Are brands like pilot fish, connected by pre-coded design to their shark host, symbiotic, and making a helpful contribution?

Or are brands more parasitic, more like carpet-baggers, sucking up pop culture's fumes, rehashing at will, derivative, just looking to exploit and make a buck by riding any bandwagon that's slow and big enough to hop a ride?

Or maybe, it's more the other way round, the contribution brands make more glowing and pioneering? Maybe brands are more like crusading philanthropists or Daytona pace cars? Perhaps brands can be original, can set the pace and contribute to form, to the socio-cultural shape of things?

Of course, the truth is always a blend, with exhibits easily cherry-picked to make any case to the jury. Because brands cannot be pigeonholed anymore than people can be. Some brands are parasitic, some more akin to pilot fish, and some, a select few, are closer to bold philanthropists. I’d like the “select few” to become the majority. I don’t believe it’s possible for brands to be too useful. In fact, I believe they should behave more like “Power Networkers”, or even Texan oil billionaires.  

 

The “utility word”

 

“Utility”. It’s a popular word in the world of brands. “Brand utility” – that’s the phrase. And it’s not a bad phrase, as phrases go. In fact, it’s a good deal better than “not bad”; because it reminds everyone that a brand should always bring something to the party, even if it’s just a half-decent bottle. Brands: they should be of use.

 

As the expression (more exasperation) goes, “Make yourself useful!” It can just as easily be applied to brands as to lolling and ever-so-slothful teenage off-spring. Brands can’t afford to slouch and sloth around, taking up space, and offering nothing in return. No one wants that kind of brand in their home.

 

For me however, the “utility word” also conjures images of gas works and utility bills and the not-so-sexy properties you can buy on a Monopoly board. And who wants to buy the water works, when you can buy a slice of Pall Mall or Mayfair?

 

So while, in brand terms, the “utility word” is good, it isn’t great. I don’t think it goes far enough. It isn’t ambitious or sexy enough. It isn’t owning a hotel in Mayfair - and that’s the desirability stakes brands should be shooting for.

 

So what’s better?

 

I’ll get to that, I promise, but let me start with suggesting this:

 

A brand can’t give enough.

 

If you want to “get”, if you want to be on the receiving end, of gratitude, appreciation, adoration, respect, love even – and brands would love all of this - then you’ve got do a whole heap of giving. You only get nothing for nothing. Consider it quid pro quo. Consider it like karma. Or any other transactional dynamics or behaviour-based economics. You get something for something. Sometimes you get short-changed, other times you get a tip. But long-short: you put in, you get out. It’s something the “Power Networkers” know very well.

 

You’ll have met the type.

 

You get certain folk who are just rather brilliant at “networking”. They’re great in a room, can work it like they’re conducting a symphony. By consequence, they seem to know everybody, collect business cards like it was narcotic, pack a Rolodex so thick it makes ‘War & Peace’ look like a Krishna pamphlet. How do they do it? What’s their knack?

 

Networkers “network” by not asking and looking to take, but by permanently giving; by continuously working the angles by which they can connect people and help them out. And people like people who are there to help them, who are useful, who’ll make their lives easier. It sounds possibly a little manipulative, whichever side of the divide you look at it, but I think it’s really just about appreciating human nature and the idea of there being benefits-all-round.

 

Am I therefore suggesting brands should be more like ‘Power Networkers’? Certainly, if they want to connect with consumers, then I am. But I’m suggesting more than that. I’m suggesting brands become ‘Power Givers’.

 

Because the fact stands: I feel nothing for the particular utility company who provides my electricity. I could switch providers in an instant, if only I even possessed enough interest to look into it and try and switch. But even that feels very boring to me. Whereas ask me why I prefer Johnny Walker over Jack Daniels or Absolut over Smirnoff, and I’m gonna take pause and proper thought before weighing in with my reply.   

 

The truly genius brands are steering a course beyond useful, into a place where they’re capable of making a more powerful and profound contribution. Truly genius brands are in touch with ‘Power Giving’.

 

From utility to humanity, via LA

 

Have you ever been to the Getty Center in Los Angeles? It’s a 110 acre parcel of Santa Monica mountain side. The campus sits some 900 feet above the 405 interstate, looking down on the LA skyline, out east to the San Gabriel Mountains and west over the Pacific.

 

The day I visited, it was very clear and very hot, even by LA standards of hot; late August, late afternoon, no “June gloom” to provide a cooling gloop and stand in for an absentee ozone.

 

The mercury was nudging nicely over 90. On days like that, you walk around outside with umbrellas, only it’s August in LA, so they become parasols. And because so many of the Getty Center is so very white, so many surfaces clad in white travertine, you wear your sunglasses low, to reduce the albino effect of a searing sun bouncing up at you from the limestone over which you walk.

 

While the Getty Center draws a curious architectural thread between Roman classicism and mid-century modernism, that wasn’t the driving thought that had me mulling when I visited. What I remember thinking most (as I twirled my parasol) is how the Getty Center is a consequence of private wealth, a gift to the city of Los Angeles (and to art and culture) by an oilman. The whole place is grandly impressive, make no mistake, but it’s a bequeathing. Of course, I understand the spirit of donation, but the vast scale of such ‘giving’ is rather foreign to me. You see, I’m a Brit, spoilt for choice in London by so many museums and galleries and public displays titled the ‘National’ this and the ‘British’ that – but that’s my point. These London museums and galleries, the really big ones at least, are very public in all senses of the word. I’m conditioned to “culture” being part of a visibly civic responsibility. But the Getty Center demonstrates the power of individual contribution.   

 

Now, I’ve always thought there’s clear reason why you hear the tag, “Billionaire Philanthropists”. I’ve always thought I’d be pretty philanthropic if I too were a billionaire. But I also appreciate saying that is a bit churlish and mean of me. Because giving and do-gooding is simply good, and praise-worthy, however you look at it, whatever your bank balance. 

 

John Paul Getty is attributed with the line, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.” Funny, yes, but also telling in that he acted on the observation by converting the profits of his mineral rights into a public inheritance, into an endowment in “culture” to the tune of 5.6 billion US dollars. The numbers make as lasting an impression as all that travertine cladding the higher slopes of Santa Monica.

 

John Paul Getty was a Power Giver. He made himself more than just useful. He had the wealth, he had the fame and profile, and he chose to do something with it, in a way that contributed and creates legacy. And I believe brands have this invitation - by Getty’s example. Brands can play a similarly powerful role within society and in their contribution to culture. This is a brand’s ultimate role; the ultimate invitation to bring more than just a tidy bottle of Californian red to the party, but to begin a legacy with all the permanence of a white limestone monument. And they can do this by demonstrating not just “utility” but, far better, genuine “humanity”.    

 

Patrons, Pilot Fish & Parasites

 

Brands must show their humanity! I know, it maybe feels a little “grandstandy”, the idealism feeling more over-baked than over-easy. But let’s spend just a short time in its company.

 

Very recently, I was in the company of a guy called Anthony Ackenhoff. Anthony is smart, shrewd, and makes an inspiring compliment to a morning coffee. He also founded the agency Frukt, a bunch of people who get out of bed every morning to try and “connect brands and culture to entertainment”. It’s a cool thing to wake up daily and try and make happen – because it’s about trying to make brands more than “just useful”. It’s about giving them a role in something bigger than ‘consumerism’; a constructive role in the Big Picture, that of society and culture.

 

When I met with Anthony, we chatted some about brands as “patrons” and how patronage feels like a sincere, genuine stance for a brand - though one that hasn’t yet really taken hold the way it should or could.

 

For me, patronage plays into power-giving and a brand demonstrating its humanity. And what I like about patronage, in just the same way that Getty became a patron of the arts, is that patronage reflects genuine passion. It’s sincere; something you can't fake. It's about word and deed. Patronage gives a brand opportunity to demonstrate a set of values and beliefs it holds dear, that consumers can then identify with and relate to. It's not about saying, we love art - we're a badge sponsor at Frieze Art Fair. It's about, "we love art - we have a 'muse' programme that gives 1-year bursaries to fresh-out-of-college art grads who want to become professional artists."  

 

Look at Johnny Walker. Johnny Walker involves itself in a number of bursary initiatives, ‘making real’ the spirit and sentiment of its founder. A belief in progress and momentum is embodied in its ‘Striding Man’ logo and the mindfully slanted label on every bottle (at precisely 24 degrees), but the spirit of the brand is most tangibly evident in its various philanthropic programmes.

 

Consider Absolut vodka. ‘The Product’ is a white spirit, but ‘The Brand’ is a slice of iconic 20^th century advertising as consequence of being a bona fide collaborator in modern art.

 

In 1986, Andy Warhol was the first of what now amount to 850 commissions by Absolut vodka. The brand’s modern art collection is one of the most valuable in the world, and, as born of the Absolut’s patronage, is recognised as an important part of Sweden’s cultural heritage. Modern art has inspired Absolut’s brand expression, and Absolut has made a genuinely positive contribution to the modern art movement.

 

Absolut is visual proof that brands can be patrons, where patronage is a brand investment of head and heart, in a cause that touches people. Brands ask for consumers to love them, to be passionate about them. To do this, brands must run deep, must love something too, must show what they are passionate about. 

 

Many P-Words

 

Brands take many forms. They can be good, bad, or ugly. They can make contributions that are large, small, or not at all. All sorts of P-words apply. They can be patrons or pace cars, pilot fish or parasites. Some even feel like peeping toms or like private investigators rifling through your garbage bins. Those moments of brand “invasion” are trashy for everyone. On the flip, while I’m not suggesting any brand looks to take a seat at the UN or starts petitioning against landmines, I do believe in the potential of brands to help make the world a better place.

 

Be useful to people and they'll want you around. The logic stands, and can be applied to brand-building. Brand patronage is about acknowledging fundamental human needs, but it is not about “utility”. It is about being more than "useful". Along with physically needing warmth and light, we also need their spiritual versions. We crave the heat and dazzling brilliance of culture, of passions and pursuits that thrill and inspire us. Brands can play their part in this. They can be equally human.

SP.

Article as also appears in:

- Expert Marketer Magazine Q3 2013 (pgs 44-47). To read an electronic version of the magazine, click HERE. 

- Talenthouse for Business, click HERE.