The “I think it’s finally summer” reading list

OK, the sun came out yesterday. And again today. I can’t promise it’ll stay, but I think it’s actually finally summer.

Portland just had the wettest May in history and broke the record for the wettest June by the 16th of the month. We’ve  had no sign of summer until now.

So, with the new-found sun we finally get to post our summer reading list. And here it is:

Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-Creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation. John Winsor.

Just began this one, but it’s looking good already. Written by the man who started Radar Communications, which was bought in 2007 by Crispin, Porter, Bogusky. Just recently helped start the crowdsourcing agency Victors and Spoils. Promises to challenge most of what you think and know about how branding should happen. Victors and Spoils has just attracted Jon Bond (as in Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners) as an investor. These guys have something up their sleeves, and it ain’t paper flowers. A must read.

Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Grant McCracken.

What? You haven’t read it? What’s your problem? He’s telling corporations to hire the cultural capabilities we agencies are supposed to own. He’s describing a job most of us would want. And if you haven’t discovered the other writings of McCracken yet, or his blog, I hope you’re a professor of medieval history somewhere. (Mmmm…medieval history.) Sheesh. Get this book.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Yes, we’ve started it before, but who ever finishes it the first go-round? Or ever? But if you want to know who predicted the whole future model of branding and brands, you need to read this. Actually, you only need to read the first chapter on the Rhizome. Because it’s the second-best metaphor (after “culture“) for how brands need to act and live in this era. Benefits include looking like a mysterious post-modern philosophical type to the babes (of either gender) on the beach. Also good for crushing greenheads on Plum Island, or for swinging at Donny Deutsch to keep him away from your girlfriend in the Hamptons. Impressive tome.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Juliet Schor.

Yes, she’s an economist. But her book doesn’t read like she is. Except it’s smart. I heard her on NPR and had to pick it up. She could turn your head around about all kinds of things, especially your definition of sustainability. As in, human sustainability is connected to economic and environmental sustainability–surprise! You might just decide to work less and raise chickens as your own small way of preventing the next Gulf oil disaster (or personal disaster). Provocative indeed.

Designers Don’t Read. Austin Howe.

We’re reading this because some of us haven’t read it yet. Soon all of us will have read it. And by all of us, I’m including you. Reading Mr. Howe is like eating pots de creme. It’s absolutely delicious and over far too soon. Austin has abandoned his own people (advertising) to live with the Others (designers). Find out why. A must read for everyone going into or still slugging away in the business of branding. Each (short) chapter even tells you how many minutes it will take to read it. (Not many.) Yum.

Envisioning Information. Edward R. Tufte.

OK, it’s not his latest book, and it’s not new, but people here are reading it for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is because I haven’t read it. But Melissa, our senior strategist, highly highly recommends it. And Josh, our creative director, thinks everyone’s already read it. Is he right? (Oops, not quite.)

Livability: Stories. Jon Raymond.

Josh admits that he’s promoting the book of his co-editor of Plazm magazine, but I told him that was OK, as long as he was actually reading it, which he assured me he was. A review on Powell’s says: “These nine gorgeous stories from novelist and screenwriter Raymond find pallid Northwesterners testing the moral perimeters of their decent lives.” Beach-y, don’t you think?

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. Alexander Osterwalder.

This is another Melissa recommend. Josh asked if maybe putting it on our list was giving away a secret, and Melissa said No, everyone should read it. Melissa is smart, so I guess I’m going to be reading it. Sometimes I’m a Game Changer, but mostly I’m a Lyrics Changer, which drives my wife crazy. Ignore my digression and listen to Melissa.

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. Roger L. Martin.

I found this on Dennis’ desk. So he must be reading it. He just left for a Disneyland vacation with his family. So that might be an indicator that The Mouse and this book don’t go together. I don’t know. Looks interesting. Smells new. Got that nice, new tight binding when you lift the cover. And he’s emblazoned his name on the top of the pages with a Sharpie, so he’s committed to it. Ooh, and it’s published by Harvard. Dennis has good taste in books so that’s a recommend.

That’s it for now. Dive in, bibiophiles, and read your summer away.

– Doug

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Bierut on Clients

Michael Bierut of Pentagram

OK, I’m going to send you to the blogger who so dilligently wrote down the slide titles and reported on the experience of Michael Bierut’s talk about the designer and the client, because this person did us all a great service. I’m also going to repeat the titles of Bierut’s talk below because they’re so important.

To some of us, this reaffirms many of the hard lessons we’ve learned over the years. To others, this might help you get through the hard lessons you’re about to learn.

Either way, this stuff is completely and absolutely true (and I don’t say that about nearly anything). Confidence versus fear. Exactly.

Agencies: ask yourselves if you’re treating your good clients like gold.

Clients: ask yourselves if you’re good or bad.

Michael Bierut talks about clients.

• Clients can be the best part of the design process.
• Clients are the difference between art and design.
• My clients are the same as yours.
• The right client can change anything.
• The best clients love design, or don’t give a damn about it. (i.e., they have confidence)
• The worst clients are somewhere in between. (i.e., they have fear)
• Never talk about “educating the client.”
• What makes a great client? Brains, passion, trust and courage.
• “You’ll never go wrong when you work with someone smarter than you.” (Tibor Kalman)
• Warning: Your great client may not be my great client.
• Great clients lead to more great clients (and more great work).
• Bad clients lead to more bad clients (and more bad work).
• Bad clients take up more of your time than they should.
• Meanwhile, we take great clients for granted.
• The trick is to reverse this.
• What do I owe a great client? Loyalty, honesty, dedication and tenacity.
• Once you find a great client, never let them go.
• If you can find five great clients, you’re set for life.
• “You’d better find somebody to love.” (Jefferson Airplane)
• Good luck.

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Could this be the next model of branding?

 

We at ID Branding are constantly in pursuit of breakthrough paradigms on how the world understands and consumes brand. We rely on our branding experts, hand-picked from a broad field of disciplines, to develop innovative new models for vetting by agency leadership. Once these models have been put through intensive intellectual study, they are applied rigorously in the field for months to years with actual brands. Throughout this intensive process, we are collecting, crunching and analyzing everything from established KPI data to the cognitive psychology of consumers. From this, we publish our findings and case studies to share with the branding world.

After digesting our latest model, please share your thoughts with us. If this one doesn’t work for you, then you can read about our other model of Brand Culture. That one does not include Space Invaders.

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The Halo Effect

It all started with a big cat. A lynx deep in high mountain snow.

I was a gonner.

The Big Cat

Then a photo of the lynx 2 storeys high plastered on the tail of a Frontier Airlines MD-80. And when I passed by the cardboard kiosk set up in the Denver airport where I could get a photo of that lynx for my very own – on the front of a Frontier Airlines MasterCard, I did what I had never done before or since. I stopped and signed up for a credit card.

Right there in the airport. I ignored my inner judge who insisted that a credit card garnered in the C-Gates transit lounge from anything made out of cardboard, by a rather grubby, rumpled guy who

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Emily, you came back!

Emily Reed interviewing a bouquet.

How overjoyed I am that my old colleague and friend Emily Reed has moved back to the US of A from ‘Stralia. Emily is one of those finely tuned instruments known as a Strategist.

She has worked as both an account planner and as a copywriter over her already-long career, and has continued to grow her bryozoan-like antennae that sweep the world for input which she then runs through a most exquisite digestive system to process that input into emotional and intelligent insights. I am so happy to once again be working with her.

She also brings from that place of marsupials and didgeridoos a new event for Portland. It’s called Interesting Portland, and it kicks off Thursday April 9th at
Norse Hall (wherever that is) at 6pm. She has also created an Interesting PDX Facebook group. Please give her a warm welcome and your support.

– Doug

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How different is Anomaly?

Blue Hill at Stone Farms, where Mike and his partners had their retreat.

Well, let’s just say that Mike Bryne, on Thursday, was in an owner’s retreat

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If only Microsoft could be as cool as… Microsoft!

Microsoft recently announced that it is unveiling a new Xbox Live gaming experience. Coming this November 19, Xbox users that also subscribe to its Xbox Live online service will be treated to a free upgrade of its user interface, which is currently called the Dashboard.

 

New Xbox Live Experience

Screen shots and videos of this new experience suggest that Microsoft has finally gotten things right by delivering a simple, intuitive, and imaginative way to navigate online content ranging from games to movies, videos, and music. Microsoft is even partnering with Netflix to provide its subscribers access to 10,000 on demand movies and TV shows.

 

This move is brilliant for the Xbox brand. It places them light years ahead of Sony Playstation and Nintendo Wii’s online capabilities and gives its users what they really want—an addictive interface that rivals iTunes, a social gaming platform and instant access to a huge library of online entertainment content. I think this is going to give on-demand cable, satellite and even Apple TV a real run for their money.

Aww man...

Oh yeah!

So while this is all good news to Xbox owners, it got me thinking about other aspects of Microsoft’s business. As I stare at my Windows Mobile phone each time I compulsively check for email, I wonder why it can’t be as cool as the iPhone. And while I conduct rote tasks on my PC, I wonder why Microsoft’s Vista isn’t as sexy as Apple’s Leopard. Maybe Microsoft should take a closer look at what’s going on in their Xbox division and figure out how to bring its design principles into its Windows experiences. Because until they do, Microsoft will never get the credit for the cool and amazing work that its Xbox unit is doing. In fact, many non-gamers I talk to don’t even realize that Xbox was created by Microsoft.

Is anyone up in Redmond paying any attention to this?

–Dennis

 

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Geoff Rogers Talks With John Jay

Geoff Rogers

[I’ve known Geoff Rogers since he first started showing his book around town back in 1995. His book was so good that Austin Howe, my mentor, kept a copy of Geoff’s book to show young copywriters how good their books should be. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Geoff on several occasions. Happily for Portland, Geoff always came back when he moved away. – Doug]

As anyone in advertising can tell you, there is always a gap between what you produce and what you wanted to produce. If you’re lucky, it’s a small gap, but it’s always there. So I should not have been surprised, when I had the good fortune of being asked to interview John Jay for a magazine article, that the magazine wanted a different, more biographical angle than I’d been intending to write.

It’s out there now, but I was more interested in finding out what makes John Jay tick. So, here. Be a fly on the wall.

John Jay

It took a bit of canceling and rescheduling before I finally sat down with the man, but when I did, he gave me way more time than we’d allotted.

John Jay is insanely busy, and that makes his easy, cordial nature all the more surprising.

John Jay has a gift of focus that’s almost contagious. While we’re talking, his cell phone rings on a table behind me. Eleven separate times. But we’re talking. We’re into a conversation, telling stories. And stories are sacrosanct to John Jay.

“Stories are at the heart of what we do – what Wieden + Kennedy does so well,” he says.
Having produced Japanese hip-hop albums, dabbled in architecture, clothing design, photography and organizing Chinese beat box concerts, John Jay is comfortable in just about any medium.

Somewhere between his stories about the unique challenges of opening a Wieden + Kennedy office in Shanghai and his opinions on the importance of tangible art in an increasingly digital world, I thread-jack our conversation and ask him to name his favorite Porsche. I know he’s a fan. I know he’s owned a few. I also know it’s a totally irrelevant question but the answer is revealing. “The one I don’t have,” he says, laughing.

And that’s just it. Most people, if they’d been blessed with John Jay’s creative chops –or certainly with his resume– would feel quite sure they’d arrived. But not Jay. He has two assistants scouring Chinese and Japanese websites for trends and designs every day while he pores over art books, creates art, and plows through websites, himself, all to find something he “doesn’t already have.”

He’s thirsty for new designs, in any medium.

“I love the 993,” he continues. “You can stand on a corner with your eyes closed, and when any 911-based car drives by, you can hear the DNA of a Volkswagen in it.”

The advertising world is full of Porsche enthusiasts, but not too many of them feel the whole design continuum back to Ferdinand Porsche’s original VW Beetles when one drives past.

This penchant for contextualization is something that sets John Jay apart, and it serves him well. His office walls are lined with enough art books to fill a small library, no doubt helping him maintain the kind of historical perspective that allows him to see art and culture as things in flux. He knows where we’ve been. He knows where we are. And his guesses about where we’re going are more valid than most.

Of China, he says, “There’s a lot we can learn from a 5,000-year-old culture. That’s why we opened the

W+K Shanghai offices

Shanghai office without clients. We wanted to acclimate. I told all the people in that office, ‘look out the window. That’s not traffic; that’s history passing by out there.’ Everything is happening at hyper-speed in China. Advertising as we think of it is only 15 or 20 years old in China. There will be a normal crawling-before-walking process, but China will stand upright, and they will do it much faster than we did.”

We were having this conversation in April of 2008, months before the rest of the world would see vivid High-Def proof of China’s creative chops at the Opening Ceremonies to the Olympics. With thousands of people choreographed to perfection atop a giant LED screen and ’84 Olympic hero Li Ning running gracefully in midair above the scene like some odd hybrid of a mythical kung fu master and a shoe pitch man, China did not look like a country in the infancy of modern communication.

There’s a sign in one of the 6th floor windows at Wieden + Kennedy. It faces outward, so for a long time, the man it was gently poking fun at didn’t know it was there. It reads, “John Jay is working harder than you are.”
It might just be that when one loves his work as much as John Jay seems to, the line between work and hobby blurs or disappears.

Recently, when the Japanese architect Masamichi Katayama visited Portland, Jay showed Katayama and a

Design by Masamichi Katayama

group of artists, architects and toy designers around the Pearl district in a train of pedicabs, touring the Ace Hotel, Chinatown and Studio J. The day ended with a trip to a Wieden conference room that Jay had filled with 100 out-of-print books on art, architecture and design.

“It has nothing to do with making money…nothing to do with Wieden + Kennedy getting work, he says. “It’s about being a conduit for culture and information. It’s the kind of thing that if I went to a country, I’d want done for me.”

And it’s the kind of thing that keeps him in the office long after everyone not pushing a vacuum cleaner has gone home.

But don’t all of those long hours feel like work? “It’s still fun,” he says, “or I wouldn’t do it.” Listen to him for an hour, and you’ll believe him when he says that. His anecdotes range from working on Star Wars films to hanging out with rock stars, but even more remarkably, his stories are peppered with phrases like “they let us” and “we got to…” These are things that most ad creatives try to strike from their vocabularies. And that’s part of the reason most ad creatives sound a lot more jaded than John Jay. He still appreciates things. He still wants to discover more. He even dared to say “there’s a lot I can learn from them” when referring to the artists and businesspeople he hosts at his art salons.

His ever-evolving Studio J remains as important as it is low-profile. “I’ve always had a Studio J. It’s whatever I’m not doing for work at the moment,” Jay explains. In the past, that’s been everything from books to architecture. And as soon as he smacks a home run with one of those projects, it’s time for Studio J to morph into something new. Even (or especially) at the height of its popularity.
Because John Jay seems Teflon-coated when it comes to hype. He’s already looking for the next big thing.

“Popularity hurts everything,” he says. “You just can’t stay still.”

– Geoff Rogers

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The Eloquent and Honest Jeff Goodby

(I grabbed this from the Adweek 25th anniversary tribute to Goodby Silverstein & Partners because it’s too good not to. This is Mr. Goodby speaking, so please, everyone, listen up.)

25 Years

by Jeff Goodby

People ask you what you’ve learned. You have to have learned something.

Those at our company have given a range of answers. We’ve learned to be patient, we say, to hire great people, to take answers from anywhere, even from clients. We have learned that advertising is art, we say, that you can’t make everybody happy, and that even though we often think sex, food and death are the funniest things on earth, not everyone else agrees.

In other words, we say all kinds of things.

I’ve thought of another way of answering this question, though,that’s much shorter and to the point. For it turns out that there are only two forces at work in a successful creative business:

Accountability. And forgiveness.

A great agency is a high-temperature fusion of both. Old Testament and New Testament. A long memory and a short one.

That’s all you really have to know.

We learned about accountability early on, and we’re still learning about it this week. It starts with yourself, actually, when you’ve just opened the agency and you’re alone in your office. How honest can you be with yourself about whether the work you’re doing is really valuable? Are you really making a difference?

The depth of your honesty will be the biggest limitation on your achievement.

If you’re any good, you’ll find yourself alone in that same room, with that same question, 25 years later. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, has put it another way. He lives in fear, he says, that he’ll wake up one morning and find his company “completely and utterly irrelevant.”

When you add employees, accountability gets even more complicated. In my first efforts as a creative director, I found myself liking everyone’s ideas because I wanted them to like me. I confused a relaxation of judgment with encouragement.

It turns out that hard and clear – some would say brutal – judgment is actually the best kind of encouragement, if it’s carefully administered. People will listen to you and the work around you will improve, not because you let people do the first thing that comes into their heads, but because you lead them to the best work they’re capable of.

That often requires the discarding of a lot of beloved material. It’s your job to keep everyone advancing enthusiastically through that thicket, despite the fact that the explosions of their most cherished ideas are still ringing in their ears. That’s honesty. That’s accountability. It must be carried to extremes, even when it would be easier to just hack something out because the meeting is getting close. It’s an exploration of what you’re made of, and it requires constant refreshment and self-analysis.

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