The Brand Filter

Most advertising is somewhat of a constant push and pull, the story of the brand versus the insight into the audience. Brands with too much of a disconnect between these two things tend to just muddle through, bouncing from promotion to promotion without a clear identity or sense of what they’re here to do. It’s item at a price based on the idea that people want stuff, not necessarily stuff to facilitate belonging, values or any of all that fruity stuff that seems more difficult to quantify. At least those things that “feel” less like selling anyway.

But our goal is pretty simple. We’re helping brands operate more fluidly, expressing a coherent sense of self and an acute understanding of what that means for an audience, their needs and expectations.

So I thought I’d deconstruct a bit.

In a talk about David Hume, Professor Nicholas Phillipson said the following:

“All our cognitive skills are in fact acquired skills. Ordinary life, from birth to death, teaches us to exercise our various cognitive skills in order to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. They are acquired. The message in all that is that if you want to understand your own mind, it is best to start off with yourself…in looking at the history of your own belief system.”

In other words, the way we make decisions has everything to do with how we’ve experienced our past. So you can’t really understand a brand’s lens unless you also understand its history, how it got from point A to today.

The tool we’ve been using is meant as both a rallying cry of sorts and simply a way to focus new decisions based upon the important behaviors of the past. The stuff that shapes who these companies are and why they’re here.

For explanation’s sake, I’ll re-order a bit.

The first couple are super important, but also what you’d probably expect to see in something like this.

Values
What are the things that are most important? What is the brand’s moral code? For Apple this could be intuitiveness or accountability, for Google it could be experimentation.

Personality
Does the personality reflect that of their founder? CEO? How might you describe the tone of voice? If you called the company Steve or Stu and tried to describe it, what words would you use?

The next three are a package of sorts.

Purpose
This is the rallying cry bit. What is the thing the brand could rally their community towards? What is the bigger idea the brand exists within? What does it do in service to the audience, the world? The bigger idea is important. If you’re a foundation company, you don’t just exist to pour concrete, you might rally for more stable homes. Or if your Tom’s shoes, you exist to improve the lives of children. Nike exists to make athletes better.

Motivation
This is what gives you credibility and authenticity. What is the thing from which the purpose is derived? Why should we believe that you give a shit? Often this is founder driven, and sometimes crosses over with behaviors, but this is really about things that happen inside the company that shape who they are. You could say the core brand motivation for Virgin comes directly from Richard Branson. But you could also say that GM is what it is because of a scrappy, survivor mentality stemming from the restructure.

Behaviors
Often much harder than it seems, behaviors are the outward signs of this motivation. What are the past actions the company or people within it have taken in support of that purpose? If you can’t name anything, you probably haven’t found the right purpose. Red Bull made a secret half-pipe for Shaun White. Levi’s jump-started a town. Apple’s yearly strategy retreats for the top 100 employees or DRI’s begin to define the expectations the company has for itself.

Now we have what essentially amounts to our brand filter. Probably a good place to stop. Next up, we’ll tackle the external stuff and where that fits.

Product Content and Curated Consumption

As publishers continue to seek new revenue streams, we’ve also seen a parallel trend – product companies, whether they make shoes or sell real estate, are now in dire need of content, but structurally unable to create it in any compelling, systematic way.

And with curated consumption, we have a differently influenced audience making purchase decisions based upon a series of recommendations or exposure from the right sources.

This environment will further mash media products and physical products, making them invariably connected and inter-dependent. The content surrounding the thing creating much of that thing’s value. It reeks of mutual opportunity for the content people seeking new revenue and for the product people seeking new content.

Groupon should have been made by Murdoch. Yelp could’ve have been an off-shoot of the New York Times. For some reason local expertise around restaurants or entertainment hasn’t yet made that leap. But it will.

Niche publishing brands are already using their audiences to not simply sell ad space in cubic inches or pixel widths, but by deeply integrating and expanding from a vision, a perspective or point of view. Stores like H&M and Urban Outfitters now introduce new fashions, new music, new ideas – unquestionably blending distribution, influence and bottom-up lifestyle construction.

JC Penney recently partnered with Hearst Publishing to launch new product experiences crafted more specifically for an audience with which the publisher has a deep native knowledge of and voice within. With GiftingGrace.com, editors from Redbook and Good Housekeeping will play the role of curator. With their other new venture, CLAD, the team from Esquire will take a lead role in product selection. With each, JC Penney will have a willing partner for content, community and distribution.

This will define the next era in product-related content, where publishers and product makers don’t simply trade dollars for space, but carefully partner for mutual brand and monetary benefit.

And for agencies, we can play in these arrangements, as well. We are uniquely situated to provide assistance in the formation of these partnerships, shepherding the creation of content extending through television spots, microsites, brand and product experiences. For those product brands, they will be adding their own editorial layers, carefully injecting quality control over a thousand points of communication without the staffs particularly equipped to accomplish such tasks.

But this also means that agencies that thrive here will be more integrated not just into client businesses, but into the fabric of their value systems. It will require iterative strategies, shorter routes to approval, more agile development processes, less territorial stances and constant feedback loops. This won’t only be survival of the fittest, but something much more tribal – companies seeking each other based upon similar worldviews, purposes and a fluency within the right audiences.

(photo via alnka)

Linked

Jonah Lehrer on giving

"Why do we do this? The depressing statistics leave us cold, even when they are truly terrible. That's because our emotions can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. And yet, the good news is that we're still wired to care about each other. We feel pleasure when someone else feels better."

Groupon Copywriting Guide

You might call this the engineering of quirkiness.

Free Fonts, and more Free Fonts.

Digital Changes Our Historical Narratives

"The digital age continues to refashion what we want and expect from our cultural preservationists. The vaults at places like the Library of Congress and Smithsonian have long contained far more than could be displayed or appreciated in physical space. Curators cut a narrow path through all that information; they told tell stories. That part of the job hasn't gone away, but now we also want to be able to tell our own stories."

The Lottery of Life

The Nike Music Shoe

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1exujG3cY]

The Cognitive Cost of Expertise

Always find ways to stay stupid, try new things, make ourselves uncomfortable. "The larger lesson is that the brain is a deeply constrained thinking machine, full of cognitive tradeoffs and zero-sum constraints. Those chess professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of games and places they can’t easily understand."

The Case of the Old Shirt

4 in 5 Americans feel attached to at least one old t-shirt. One of those stats that make the world seem utterly simple and disturbingly complex at the same time.

Single Stories Make for Single Serving Friends

It’s a fine line between insight and stereotype. The teen multi-tasks. Mom is busy. Dad just doesn’t get it. A thousand little generalizations that appear again and again in television commercials and radio spots, banner ads and microsites. The complexity of humanity ignored based upon 57% of something in an internet survey somewhere.

The way we make this advertising thing happen doesn’t work like it should. Advertising tools most often serve these generalizations and stereotypes rather than any real knowledge. The creative process is a dice roll. Most market research is CYA-driven rather than providing real understanding to those who could do the most with it.

Which brings me to novelist Chimamanda Adichie and her Ted Talk “The Danger of the Single Story,” in which she explores her misunderstandings and being misunderstood based upon the faulty stereotype, what she calls the single story.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Morgan Gerard also touches on this in his post – Idioms and Insights.

Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their business and, more importantly, their consumers.

Case in point: the consumer research game. Virtually every market research department in every major organization is founded on an idiomatic understanding of consumers. Psychographic caricatures of actual humans, like the Active Mom, have become business idioms used to simplify and, more importantly, agree on the polysemy of what are lived preferences, behaviors, opinions, attitudes and needs rather than PowerPoint descriptions such as, “Mary is a successful real estate agent who struggles to balance taking care of her three kids with her love of pilates and desire to eat healthier breakfast bars.”

We simply aren’t doing enough, usually choosing to make complexity dumb rather than finding new ways to inspire understanding.

And frankly the only way to get from where we are now to where we need to be is by shifting our mindset from observation to immersion, from research as a department to research as a duty, from creative briefs or briefings, to mixing and shuffling the creators with the audience before, during and after, not simply as a means to vet ideas but to provide better inputs, learnings, and knowledge. This is how we’ll move beyond the single stories and single servings to something a bit more meaningful.

Edward Bernays, Context and Choice Blindness

As if we needed more evidence that we don’t really know why we want what we want, Jonah Lehrer takes a look at a couple studies showing just how few people can recognize the differences between the choices they make, even immediately after they make them.

“What’s most unsettling, however, is that we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In this study, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremely easy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insisted that they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam and cinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong…We are all blind to our own choice blindness.”

Which reminded me a bit of the old Edward Bernays documentary, The Century of Self: Happiness Machines. Bernays, the nephew of Freud and so-called Father of Public Relations, helped to establish the cigarette craze among women, apparently by re-dubbing the cigarette a torch of freedom as a symbol of masculinity. (the first few minutes of this video covers it)

But I do wonder if the important bit was really all that much about the positioning and more about visibility more generally. Yes, the cigarette has the enduring sense of rebelliousness, but the degree to which the ready-made tagline mattered versus the fact that the cigarette was exposed in a different context, I don’t know. It is possible that the staged protest was only a proxy, giving the journalists fodder to chew on while the real work was done simply by other women seeing the right women lighting up.

Which is all to say that what we like isn’t just the thing, but the context of that thing, too. So if we’re talking different types of jams in some study, perhaps the confusion is simply because the methodology made these things equal. And it was that equality that made them interchangeable and easily confused. Which, as always, means we’re spending too much time finding a good one-liner and not enough time on all the associations that make that one-liner meaningful.

The Expectation Problem

We have an expectation problem. This is how a car ad should look or how this beer spot should sound. And given similar kinds of people solving similar problems for similar markets with similar insights, that’s to be expected, I guess. Given a certain environment, it’s usually not all that difficult to figure out what the outputs will likely look like. It’s why every problem looks like an advertising problem. When everyone at a table hold only different sized hammers, it’s easy to find those nails.

It doesn’t help much that we’ve developed an industry built around distilling to single insights on single sheets of paper. These insights can be enough to drive a single piece of communication or maybe a campaign, but those that are sustainable enough to last are few and far between. We’re substituting this “insight” for actual understanding which only reinforces preconceived observations and makes it much more difficult to just solve problems.

“Playing the authenticity game in a sophisticated way has become a requirement for every marketer, because the opposite of real isn’t fake—it’s cynicism. When a brand asserts authenticity in a clumsy way, it quickly breeds distrust or, at the very least, disinterest.” -Bill Breen

Of course, most of us are clumsy. We are busy and pressured. We rarely get out of our own way enough to allow anything remotely organic to evolve.

But here’s the thing – authenticity isn’t something you do – it's something that happens. In the top down world we’re in now, we define as much as we can in order to minimize the gap between what we think might happen and what ultimately does. And when the practice doesn’t particularly match the assumptions, we blame the assumptions, not the fact that we assumed.

I don’t deny the need for top down some things, like leadership, organizational purpose, stuff like that. This is where long-cycle strategic planning is most needed. But from there, it’s time to get much better at understanding whole people, whole communities, in order to stop developing for the person we want rather than the one that exists. And it means we need to get much better at getting out of the way, leaving the spaces where those people can make use of us in the way that works best for them, too.

(photo via this isn't happiness)

The Cultural Tour Bus

 We are on a cultural tour bus.

“It’s the difference between traveling where you go on the tour bus and they show you Notre Dame, it was built in whenever, or the one where you end up spending a month in Paris and you end up in one bar and then you’re off. I’ve always preferred the second kind. Get me off the tour bus.”

Love this little bit from David Simon of the Wire and Treme. He describes his hatred for writing for the “Average Reader,” referring to him as “that fucker” which is probably understandable for anyone that’s been asked to design for a target of 18+. Yeah, thanks for that.

He’s developed these rich stories because of a total immersion in a distinct environment, his use of live muses for characters in order to write in a proper language within a realistic storyline, an awareness of the point of view and an adherence to a core purpose, a statement that he wanted to make. Probably 4 key areas for us to develop in ad-like things, as well.

But for now, I guess my point is that we’ll never get that kind of immersion with 95% of clients that are out there. Even with a Budweiser sized budget, it’s just not possible to immerse a team in someone else’s world enough. A single insight doesn’t really give us much understanding at all. And really, with the surface level nonsense most are doing, we’re usually just pecking at observational scraps rather than reaching for some perceptive nirvana.

So maybe it should be the other way around. We shouldn’t be observing them as much as they should be living with us. We just need to get better at either selecting the archetype or maybe just selecting the clients that fit the passions of our staff.

Branding by Association (part 2)

A continuation of the thoughts in branding by association, there’s a bit of magic in how we use words and pictures to reflect the experience of an audience. These references are a brand’s language, the ability to build camaraderie through commonalities.

One of my favorite examples is dog whistle politics, a term first used in the mid-nineties when Australian pols were accused of exploiting illegal immigration as a proxy for racist language.

But, of course, the master is George Bush, who dropped subtle cues that appealed to the religious right. One of the most well-known examples comes in this interview with Wolf Blitzer (about 1:20 in) when he said, “when the final history on Iraq is written, it’ll look like just a comma.”

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11793879&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=dc00f0&fullscreen=1

Most from the South would feel a not-so-faint echo of the proverb “Never put a period where God has put a comma.” (interesting discussion at the language log)

You could argue this is just a product of growing up in church rather than an underhanded attempt to influence a segment of people, but it’s hard to argue the influential part.

Another good example comes from the Burger King – Spongebob rap. I rather doubt that they necessarily thought of it this way in concept, but in this odd mashing of cultural cues, they actually seem to follow an audience lifecycle. From the spike in "Baby Got Back" as an axiom of the early 90’s while mom still found time to bump and grind, to a slightly more grown up mom watching Spongebob with her kiddos 10 years later. While I’m pretty sure I’m reading far too much into this particular video, it is an interesting way to think about crafting an appeal.

Which brings me to the (very) round-about point. We generally use all this audience stuff when crafting the concept, not necessarily the execution. We use focus groups, develop personas, etc. defining the audience as a guardrail for the creative team when the value of cultural immersion should be drawn through the execution, as well. The language, the music, the pictures, the video and the rest of it, become the environment that allows a brand speak as one of us. And the better we immerse ourselves in these collective reference points, the better we’ll be at weaving the story we’re trying to tell into the story they already know.

photo via sean lamonby

Branding by Association

In Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marsha Kinder first described her concept of Transmedia Storytelling with the phrase, “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation,” setting the tone for a conversation still ongoing nearly 20 years later.

While we’ve talked the transmedia part to death, we haven’t yet spent much time on the intertexuality bit. As in, a lot about distribution and not enough about what is distributed.

Intertexuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts. This strikes me as a much more fertile place to play when building brand meaning, particularly given the struggle to find a human brand when we adapt them to more social spaces.

Imagine if you saw a facebook page of someone you’d never met. You can know what they like and what they don’t, what’s important to them and what’s not, we can see past conversations, what people have said about them and what those people look like. More than enough information to let you take some fairly informed guesses about their worldview.

These things are within the purview of a brand in our environment. In other words, a brand can’t be your friend, but it can get an inside joke.

It’s obvious when Nike+ associates with OkGo or when the NBA co-opts the Noah Kalina video for Where Amazing Happens.

It becomes clear when remixes mash a brand and an audience, blurring the associated meanings that lie within both.

Intertextuality places a brand in the cultural zeitgeist. It’s branding by association, cultural sponsorship, and it’s in this space – trading on the language of communities, that brands find their context.

photo via yeliR<>

Planning versus Preparation

People are pools of contradiction, trained mostly to recognize the unexpected and discard everything else.

Ironically in this reality, we made an industry out of enabling consistency in order to create an expectation. Or maybe to make a confusing marketplace seem stable.

This is what branding traditionally is, the creation of an assumption.

And it’s this need to find order in the chaos of the marketplace that brought us to planning.

Planning is just a nice word. When you think of someone who makes plans versus someone who goes with the flow, you can probably get a good picture in your head. One in a carefully constructed three-piece suit. The other in board shorts at the beach. The planner is punctual, polite and is where he is because that’s where he planned to be. The other might look a bit ragged at times, but is generally comfortable just about anywhere you put him.

One avoids the chaos by trying to create order. One thinks beating chaos is futile so chooses to enjoy the ride.

If we brought these stereotypes into practice, one model would be rigid, generalizing broad swaths of people so as to not crack the standard. The other would require a comfort in the unfamiliar few possess.

The problem of course is that neither extreme really works all that well. When we sell the idea of planning, we’re selling a calm in the clutter. And when that calm doesn’t come, brands are left ill-prepared for situations unforeseen. Sticking to the plan actually leaves us less adaptable at a time when adaptability might be more important than just about anything else.

So yes, we need plans, insights and the like, but our inability to accept the unknown is a problem with almost any of our current models. Brand after brand markets by setting and executing on a plan that leaves it unprepared for changes.

The question we’re answering now is what will things look like if we're as concerned with preparation as we are planning. How are we making companies structurally more adaptable to new situations and audiences. And what does an input into the system look like when the result is unknown.

photo via blake tackett