monkey business. our only business.
So I’m keen to talk to people in the Tech Startup space about Branding. Questions like: How important is your Brand? How did you come up with it? How much do you spend on it? Do you see it evolving over time? Is it just a logo and colour palette to you? How much does your brand steer and influence your products and services?
Anyone who’d be happy to meet up / talk over the phone please ping me at nathan@simiant.com. Any help much appreciated!
This looks interesting, a new agency set up by old colleagues Robin (from back in the day, ‘when niggaz had waves, Gazelle shades, and corn braids’ i.e Clarity and Nathan from MRM). I <heart> the name ‘we are social’, makes me feel all warm inside.
Hello, we are social. We are a conversation agency. We help brands to listen, understand and engage in conversations in social media.
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
So watching the video it IS called ‘blist’ not B list. Anyway, guess they didn’t test that.
Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.
Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…
I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.
The Partners live in a really lovely building at the end of Greenhill Rents just off Cowcross Street in Farringdon, London. In their reception they have lots of awards, or more specifically Pencils including a black one. Awards are something they have lots off, in fact I think, hundreds, which for a company of less than 50 people is pretty damn inspiring. The trouble is though, that to me they are a challenge. None of them are so far, I think, for work that is entirely Digital. I have a lot to live up to. Gulp.
A good post from and ex colleague Geoff on the opportunities for Brands on Flickr has preempted something I was going to write on the same subject, but it’s interesting to see that Geoff came at it from a different, perhaps more positive attitude. I’ve long used Flickr as a gauge to research peoples perception of a particular brand. There’s no real technique to this, you just enter the Brand Name as a Flickr search and see what comes up…. simple.
A recent bad experience with Carphone Warehouse, that I’ll write up when I have time, got me to searching Flickr to find some images of a store that I could use in a PowerPoint deck… what I found however were lots of images tagged ‘carphone warehouse’ a bit like this:
Something to do with their Christmas Ball or whatever. As Geoff rightly points out, the amount of traffic Flickr gets, aside fro perhaps Google images, it’s pretty much THE image database of the Internet. What interests me, is not the opportunities as outlined by Geoff which are all valid and spot on, but how do Brands deal with the stuff they can’t, or perhaps can control? Do Brands need to consider what they allow their employees to publish in what is essentially their name?
When I started working commercially in the internet back in 98 (Oh! 10 year anniversary, Yay! ) the Agency that I worked in then had 5 kinds of people working for it:
Account Managers, Project Managers, Designers, Back End Developers, Front End Developers
That was it. Five. There wasn’t even much of a sense of rank or hierarchy. Look inside a Digital Agency now and it will look something like this:
All those discipline above exist, but may have within them 5 to 7 levels of seniority. The tech Department may have separated into technology disciplines: MS Practice, Java Practice, Data Warehousing etc. The creative department will now contain traditional Designers as well as Copywriters (of an advertising ilk), Flash Designers (not Flash Developers… they sit in Tech), more traditional Creative Teams of two if the Agency is biased towards online campaigns, 3D Animators, Video & Motion Graphics specialists. New disciplines have emerged or transfered form another mediums: Editorial and Content (written), Information Architects, Usability Experts, Usability Testers, Interaction Designers, User Experience Architects……. Planners, Strategists, SEO & SEM experts and so on…
The point is that many of the Digital Agencies that exist today are pretty mature, despite only been 10 to 15 years old. The people who have worked there through this period, now really do know their stuff. Forces to be reckoned with, digitally…. So why are most ‘traditional agencies’ now trying to compete with these guys on their ground? Advertising dollars, no shock there.
If you look at what digital agencies are trying to do, they all want a piece of the Traditional Agencies action… they’re now talking about Branding, Advertising and so on. The reason here not being dollars, but one of ego’s. Digital people now realise it’s ‘their day’, and after ten years of scavenging the crumbs of advertising dollars, want a seat at the table just like their big brother at the Ad Agency. Traditional Agencies on the other hand are now all talking Digital ‘cos that’s the way it’s going isn’t it… uh…. computers’. Both as bad as the other. The point is, both kinds of agency have fathoms of deep expertise in their own areas. Where is the experience deeper? On the traditional side, it’s been around longer.
‘Digital’ people who have grown up in web agencies do know a lot about technology, the internet, the world wide web and the magic therein that can be woven. Where we can lack experience is in a deep understanding of things like Branding, Design, Advertising, PR. Despite what we may think, we still have a lot to learn. It’s interesting that recently both AKQA and Digitas have launched content offerings: AKQA Film and Digitas - The Third Act. Why? Is that what thy are really good at?
LBI Is now publishing a ‘magazine’ and on first glance it looks quite interesting: LBIQ. “We’re not experiencing a ‘digital revolution’ and this isn’t a ‘digital age’ any more than the 50s were the ‘atomic age’ or the 60s the ‘space age’. We simply live, as we always have done, in fast-changing times. LBiQ is a response to this frantic pace of change, and it’s one that responds from an attitude and point of view that we’ve shamelessly stolen from Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Moncler: When I was in Paris recently I spotted lots of people wearing Moncler puffa jackets, and upon investigation, they are the bestest puffa jackets i have ever seen (in particular thew Junya Watanabe sports jacket)
Colette: Also in Paris, my hotel was on the same block, Colette for a beautiful, very edited selection of designer gifts n stuff. A bit like Magma, but with expensive watches and designer clothes
Two bestest things I found this week on the Internets:
1. Digital Gravel: “Digital Gravel first hit the web on 1/19/1999, as the first site dedicated exclusively to selling gear from underground and independently owned brands.” … “Basically, we are still the same company we were on day one. We still believe that the best gear in this industry can only be found beneath surface..”
2. Collective Discharge: A set of really rather poptastic mixes for you to download. They remind me a lot eclectic method, uh, but without the video’s… obviously.
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