That’s what I’m saying

Robert Rasmussen

Robert Rasmussen, the executive creative director at R/GA, just moved over to Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH these days) to be executive creative director of innovation. Long title. Bad hair. But the right direction.

Apparently Rasmussen is credited with the brilliant Beta-7 campaign for Sega’s ESPN

from Beta-7

Football game from Wieden + Kennedy NY. (Beta-7 has to be considered one of the watershed moments of the third creative revolution, along with Mini from Crispin, Scion from ATTIK, and The Art of the H3ist from McKinney. Speaking of…did people recognize just how interesting things got when Ty Montague and Todd Waterbury started running W+K NY?)

As I said earlier, this is the way things need to go. Interactive capabilities need to migrate over to more broadly brand-based shops, whether previously ad-centric, like Crispin, or previously design-centric, like ATTIK. I just don’t see it happening the other way around. And I certainly don’t see things staying the way they are. (See my post below on Creative Revolution no. 3.)

– Doug

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Merit and Excellence

Ahhh, the Roseys.

We left the PAF Rosey Awards show last Thursday without the burden of hardware, but pleased that our ID Branding identity system won a Merit Award and that our design for 12 Bridges Gin won an Excellence Award. Satisfied? No. Pleased? Yes.

Our deepest bows of appreciation to Integrity Spirits for the opportunity to work with them to invent such delectable brands.

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We’re not an interactive agency

I once was, but I got better.

As one of the founders of Paris France, an interactive agency in Portland, which existed between 1999 and 2003, I was privileged to work with some amazingly bright people, like Jeff Faulkner, Chuck Nobles, Erik Falat, and others, and to do some work I’m still quite proud of. It was a wonderful time to be in the field. We did a bunch of cool things together for some very cool clients, and I focused on strictly interactive work for almost 5 years. Long enough to know that the stand-alone interactive shop is not the future.

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Creative Revolution No. 3

Or, We’re Not an Ad Agency, Part 2.

Brian Collins

Brian Collins, the ex-ECD of Ogilvy’s Brand Integration Group (BIG), who has just launched his own agency, Collins, nailed the difference between design and advertising in a talk he gave during the the One Show week in New York last Spring. He showed images of Philadelphia’s beautiful and historic 30th Street Station. And then he showed giant vinyl ads that ran down the walls and out onto the floor of the station’s historic architecture. A wretched, loud, visual assault against its targets. And against its venue.

His message: design would never do this. This is advertising.

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Distilling The Brand; An Exercise in Sub-Branding

Would you believe me if I told you what you see in front of you is not some sort of blatant knockoff, but in fact a new, highly specialized McDonald’s store? What if I told you it was located in Japan? I thought so.

McDonald’s seems to have launched a new brand initiative in the land of the rising sun which strips away all of the familiar McDonald’s iconography (e.g. the Golden Arches, Ronald McDonald (and posse), any instance of the color yellow) in favor of stark red and black fields of color with large, clean sans serif type. It’s as though we are bearing witness to the illegitimate child of McDonald’s and The Sharper Image (God rest its soul). Hit the jump for the breakdown of this strange and interesting new idea.

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Silver Naked Angel

Or maybe it’s supposed to be Icarus. Either way, we’re happy to report we won a Silver statue in the package design category from the London International Awards for our Lovejoy Vodka four-bottle design system.

As we reported earlier, we had three finalists (our new logo and identity system, the Lovejoy Vodka series, and our design for 12 Bridges Gin). We’re lucky to have won any hardware at all. The London International Awards have worked hard to make their statues fairly challenging to win. In the package design category only two silvers and one gold were awarded out of 18 finalists.

Winner of Silver for package design

So thank you, Integrity Spirits, for your visionary approach, and for the privileged of working with you to create such great brands.

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Change is a good excuse for change

Here’s some advice for brands:

When the cartoon anvil falls on you, crawl out from under it as something different.

And make no mistake about it. The anvil is coming.

In bizarrely bad economic times, people change their habits and patterns and expectations. It’s a perfect time to make changes as a brand. Like dumping bad branding habits and stepping it up. Or looking hard at the value and experience you’re delivering. Everyone in the world is going through change, so they expect change from you.

Give them a good one.

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Branding and Customer Service

“Branding includes everything a consumer experiences, even the way people answer your phones.”  How many times have we heard this over the past few years?  While I won’t get into the definition of branding (you can read more about our opinions on that here), I do want to touch on the “answering your phones” part.

 

Customer service is critical to many businesses.  When done right, it can create raving fans; when done poorly, it can erode years of brand loyalty.  I bet you have a personal story about either a great or an awful customer service experience you’ve had recently.  Chances are you’ve told others about it, maybe even going so far as to post those thoughts on the internet.  In fact, why not comment on a few of them here?  We’d love to hear from you.

 

 Businesses such as Nordstrom and Zappos.com have built reputations for having great customer service, so much so that it has become an integral part of their own unique brand cultures.  Others (a few cell phone companies, cable/dsl providers and financial institutions come to mind) tend to see this as a necessary evil, or from a business standpoint, a mandatory line-item expense to be “managed.”  Some may claim to implement “best practices,” but these are more than likely just a set of well-known and industry-wide processes, serving only to create even more sameness and inhibit any one company from really standing out.  Others may even spend more money advertising their customer service than they do actually educating and enrolling their employees in it.

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American or Americana? Is Brand America back?

Suddenly it may be cool to be an American, or at least what Yahoo is reporting. The decision Tuesday night has sparked re-interest in America worldwide after eight years of steady abandonment of brand America.

Germany US Election

I started thinking about this a bit as we find some of our major American brands in a bit of a crisis. What does ‘Brand America’ mean now going forward? What can these brands (i.e. GM, Ford, Chrysler) learn from the current patriotic vibe?

Check out the rest of this trend >>>

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The Girls’ School Delivered

And delivered big time.

The jobcuzzi, the most relaxing job interview in the world.

Mr. Ian “I am the most unobnoxious person in advertising” Cohen showed some incredibly inspiring stuff at the Portland Advertising Federation lunch talk today. He’s a founder of Wexley School for Girls, and their work included a recruiting campaign for Microsoft that made me feel like the world is a good place after all. Who would ever expect a recruiting campaign do that?

It’s not just the work that made me feel that way, but the fact that Microsoft approved work like that. More evidence that our large friends to the north are willing to show their soul. (And have one.)

I must certainly add Wexley to the list of agencies reinventing the agency. They started out to do that 5 years ago and, honestly, I just hadn’t seen their work presented with stories wrapped around it or I would have understood this long ago. Bully for you, girlies.

Today’s presentation, along with day before yesterday’s election, proves that hope springs eternal in the hearts of humans despite the multitude of crushingly hopeless moments that rain down upon our heads like stunned birds.

Thanks, Wexley. That felt good.

– Doug

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