Bridge(s) for sale

Image remixed from Molas

We’ve all read Marty Neumeier’s “The Brand Gap”, or at least checked out his highly popular slideshare of the same name.

To recap the premise, here’s an excerpt from an interview with Brian Alvey:

Alvey: What is a "brand gap"?


Neumeier: The brand gap is the distance between business strategy (what the company wants to be) and customer experience (how people actually perceive it). The brand gap has its origins in the way our brains work. Strategic thinkers favor the left side of the brain (the logic), while creative thinkers favor the right side (the magic). Since these two ways of thinking reside in different people, there's always a gap between brand logic and brand magic.

There is another, related brand gap out there, and it exists not between business intention and customer experience, but within the brand development process itself.

On one bank is theory. It might be a simple advertising brief. Or, it might be the final report from a six-month, seven-figure market research study.

On the other side we have reality, namely the various people whose job it is to interpret that theory and turn it into design, advertising, product innovation, brand behavior etc etc.

And between the theory and reality, we have a yawning chasm. It represents time lost, arguments had, relationships frayed, focus diminished, and invariably disappointment from the theorists when they see their fine work (that they’d sold through to their bosses) come back unrecognizable.

The funny thing is the gap is invisible. You sure won’t see it called out in a development timeline. But again and again, there it is, suddenly bringing all momentum to a halt.

Why is this so?

I think it’s because we’re all optimists, for a start. We’d all like to believe that the translation of business fact into creative expression is smooth, even propulsive. (“I am engaged by your business challenge, and inspired solutions are already springing from my head” is the fantasy response.)

The other reason is that it’s very difficult to plan for the very real differences between the two types of minds that attack each side of the problem.

If I step back and look at what we’ve been doing at Persuasion, and before that at our previous company Cream, whether working on the client side as brand consultants, or collaborating with an agency on a new business pitch, it’s been re-interpreting fact into something more actionable for creative people. We’ve been building bridges and selling them.

The fact that it accounts for maybe ninety percent of our business suggests that the problem is more prevalent than anyone is aware of, and that it deserves to be planned for.

Have you ever had to re-write the strategy to fit the creative? Have you ever had to hire a second brand consultant to make sense of the first consultant's work? Have you ever found yourself staring at the climactic powerpoint slide, agreeing with every box, arrow and bullet point, but having no idea how all those squiggles will ever turn into an action?

You might want to find yourself some good bridge builders.

All the pretty titles

Image by LouisDavid

Here’s a bit of fluff for a summer’s day.

Crispin Porter Bogusky helped rewrite the way advertising is done by pouring creativity and intelligence into overlooked communications mediums. Yes, the need had been there forever - and “the shelf wobbler” had always been included as a symbol of the far side in the most ambitious creative briefs.

But it was all mostly lip service until traditional media finally buckled under its own oppressiveness. CPB was there to take advantage. They (and the award shows) glamorized non-traditional, making it the creative darling it is today.

Thank you Alex, Chuck, and crew. You are partly to blame for the glorious chaos we swim around in today.

Something else of note from Boulder, Florida is the new-new age job title. CPB's staff list reads like a time-capsule of advertising manufacturing, circa 2008.

Here’s a recent sampling from LinkedIn.

Director, Quality of Life
Senior Cognitive Anthropologist
Front End Architect
Interaction Manager
Interactive Conceptualist
Quality Assurance Analyst
Application Developer
Service Desk Technician
Content Manager
Director of Business and Cultural Insights
Budget Analyst
Visual Effects Supervisor
Senior Strategist
Information Systems Manager
Director of Partnership Development
Senior DFX Artist
Cognitive and Cultural Radar (intern)

What will the agency staff list look like five years from now?

Who's your maniac?

Image by lchance

I did a poster once for a telephone company in New York. The visual was a row of guys with letters of the alphabet carved into their hair. The client approved it, we shot it, we ran it, and then we got a complaint that the idea was racist. So the client pulled it.

I took great offense at the charge, and despite the fact that the ad wasn’t the best execution in the campaign, and despite the fact the ad had already run, I decided to go to the mat.

So I set about to prove to the client that all we were doing was reflecting a sub-cultural phenomenon. I took a producer (footnote: Peter Cline, who went on to be one of the founders of 180), a camera, and went down to Astor Place barbershop in Manhattan to interview the people who sport these weird haircuts, and the artists who create them.

The finale of the mini-documentary was a to-camera appeal from me to the client, asking them to reconsider their decision. At the very last, I whipped off my baseball cap and turned the back of my head to camera, to reveal the word ‘please’ carved into my hair.

A bit of an over-reaction to the situation, you might say, and looking back, I would have to agree.

But looking around at the companies that succeed wildly, and the ones that don’t, the difference is not in talent, or dedication, or luck, or connections. It’s really the ability to balance all that stuff with an uncomfortable amount of unreasonableness.

Unreasonable hours, unreasonable expectations, unreasonable ideas.

In short, every business needs maniacs (embarrassing haircuts optional). Who is yours?

The best idea does not win

Image by R80o

I’ve come to a conclusion that is disturbing for someone who pays their mortgage by creating ideas for people.

Our business is not about ideas, it’s about agreements.

The logic goes like this:

If traditional communications have become devalued;

And if the actions a brand takes are more truthful and therefore more persuasive;

It follows that the most important initial audience for an idea are the people within the client company charged with bringing the idea to life. They are the ones that will make the brand act in a certain way. They are the ones you must co-operate with each other, working from the same place and to the same goal.

So, what they need is not a great idea, but an idea they can all agree on.

Sure, let’s do everything we can to make that idea as great as it can be… but remember it isn’t great until it works. And for that, every idea needs an agreement.

Cleaning up the mess we've made

image by corypina

Here’s something you all know, boiled down into handy dandy aphorism size.

Apparently it came spilling out of my mouth during a class at Miami Ad School a few weeks back, and it’s come back to me a couple times since, so perhaps it’s worth sharing formally:

“Communication pollutes, actions communicate”

Okay, so it’s not exactly Oscar Wilde.

The Neophyte Network strikes!

A couple months back I wondered if, instead of proclaiming our areas of experience, us advisor/consultant types ought to wear our deficiencies on our sleeves.

The thinking being: the reason we’re brought into collaborate in the first place is because of our outsider perspective.

In that rant, I took the first step, by naming categories in which we are/were entirely virginal. In our case, entertainment, pharmaceuticals, government, and a couple others.

For anyone who believes in these sorts of karma/self-actualization things, I present you with another exhibit. No sooner had the post been thrown out there to the ether than the ether replied with a project promoting an upcoming film.

The above is a pic from the meeting room where we presented our thinking. No prizes for guessing who the client is. (But prizes to client for fanatical devotion to brand touchpoints!)

So, not that one project makes us entertainment pros, we do have to take that category off our Neophyte Resume. Which leaves toys, government agencies, pharmaceuticals and auto parts. Waddya say, ether? And what about you other Neophtyes? Stand up and be clueless.

Crying wolf once more

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You've probably seen this video. It got lots of views, news coverage... the stuff we often measure success by.

Yes, it is another stunt on the edge of plausibility, the "reality" of the idea enhanced by its delivery mechanism, namely good old youtube.

“Woah… look at that girl jump, can you believe it? And did you see that one with the sunglasses/jeans/etc?”

Well, as James Frey knows, claiming reality sure does add another dimension to the power of your story. But when that story turns out to be not real… look out!

It seems to me we are mistreating our fellow citizens yet again - conning them into showing some interest in us.

It’s entertaining and all. But won’t the attraction of ‘reality’ wear off as soon as people tire of the trickery?

Worse still, aren’t we deepening the basis for mistrust?