The legendary adman David Ogilvy told his clients that, “Promise, large promise, is the soul of advertising.” But in a faltering economy where trust is now in short supply, smart marketers are delivering the product experience first, and advertising it later – if at all. By the end of the decade, a category-leading ad budget could be a sign of brand weakness, not of strength.

The earliest known ads were drawings of a certain male body-part on the streets of Pompeii that directed potential clients to a brothel, making advertising the second-oldest profession. The marketing manager of the establishment set a model that’s lasted for 2,000 years. The message is father to the sale: Media promises an experience that trial delivers.

Now, even the best-crafted messages are attenuating to the vanishing-point. Media have subdivided into capillaries, too numerous and often too narrow to measure. Reach gets more expensive and product experience gets more remote.

Experience-first marketing reverses the equation. Deliver your best to some, and they will sell the many in ways that no media plan could envision. The media is not the message any more. The experience is the message that ignites media.

Direct sampling has long been a staple in the marketing toolkit and in today’s environment I expect it to explode, challenging coupons as the primary engine of product trial. Sampling leaves nothing to chance. It makes sure that people get the full effect of product design. They see it, they handle it, they use it - and then tell their friends.

Commerce Bank’s “Penny Lane” kiosks count people’s buckets of change for free. They come from other banks to get this simple job done, and an astonishing number end up moving their accounts. Commerce Bank makes its service story tangible. It’s not a promise. It’s what they really did for you. And word goes out.

Nike takes new products into urban neighborhoods. When the Nike van rolls up, it’s a big event. Everybody gets to test-fly the new shoes. And word goes out.

Great products create their own media, most of it free media. Experience-first marketing raises the bar for competitors while lowering costs for innovators. By the end of the decade, a category-leading ad budget could be a leading indicator of brand weakness, not of strength.

In our experience design practice, we’ve found that intensely individual experiences can be the grains of sand around which marketers form pearls. After her grandmother got dangerously ill from misreading a medicine label, Deborah Adler, one of our students at the School of Visual Arts, designed a more fool-proof packaging system for drugs. Target bought her thesis project. Naming it ClearRX, they sold the same medicines as other pharmacies, but they suddenly had a powerful new story to tell about how their customers can feel a little safer. The story behind their new pharmacy packaging became a media sensation, including features in USA Today, Time and a three-minute new story on the NBC Evening News. And word goes out.

We worked on The CNN Grill to bring the network’s CNN=POLITICS mantra to life in ways that messaging alone never could. We invited CNN viewers to submit their hopes about what politics meant to them. We used their responses to cover a turn-of-the century Denver brick warehouse.

Inside, a guest could enjoy a great burger and a debate with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper or Soledad O’Brien among others. CNN suddenly became the “standing room only” hit of the convention. And word goes out.

No one need to be “sold” when people live the difference.

The singular is often the universal.

The more an experience matters, the faster the word goes out in a zillion-channel world. And, unlike pre-packaged “viral” messages that consumers simply fly through and (maybe) forward, the stories people tell – “This is what happened to me!” – have the velocity and the potency of truth. ]]> http://www.briancollins1.com/?feed=rss2&p=1741 http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=1730 http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=1730#comment Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:21:50 +0000 Brian Collins http://www.briancollins1.com/?p=1730

It speaks for itself

Last week Arianna Huffington wrote so powerfully about the influence of mythic archetypes in modern American politics that I am shamelessly re-posting much of her thinking here. It clarifies why story is more potent than information. Her whole essay is on Huffpo - which I suggest checking out.

Sarah Palin, “Mama Grizzlies,” Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes

I’ve been thinking about this paradox: the most important political ad of 2010 so far did not play on television, and came from someone not currently running for any office.  It was Sarah Palin’s latest web video, “Mama Grizzlies.” For those who haven’t seen it yet, the video features footage of women of various ages taken at an assortment of Tea Party and Palin rallies, accompanied by audio clips from a recent Palin speech. Among the choice sound bites:

“It seems like it’s kind of a mom awakening… women are rising up.”

“I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody is coming to attack their cubs.”

“You thought pit bulls were tough?  Well, you don’t wanna mess with the mama grizzlies!”

It’s classic Palin.  And, as often is the case with Palin, the video doesn’t feature a single word about policy — as many of her critics have pointed out. But they are completely missing the point.  Indeed, this video and the response to it are a perfect illustration of why we need to widen the scope of our political analysis.

We are awash in crises right now — crises that require smart and creative policy fixes.  So why is somebody who so rarely deals in policy fixes so popular? It’s because Palin’s message operates on a level deeper than policy statements about the economy or financial reform or health care or the war in Afghanistan.

To really understand her appeal, we need less policy analysis and more psychology. Specifically, we need to hear from that under-appreciated political pundit Carl Jung.

It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols.  Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes <http://aras.org/whatarearchetypes.aspx> , or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are “inborn forms… of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.”

This is the realm Palin is working in — I’m sure unintentionally — and it’s why she has connected so deeply with a large segment of the public. In fact, her evocation of mama grizzlies has a particularly resonant history in the collective unconscious. According to the Jungian Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism , “The bear has long fascinated mankind, partly because of its habit of hibernation, which may have served as a model of death and rebirth in human societies.”

As a matter of fact, another very popular Republican politician once used the image of a bear in an ad. The bear was used differently, but to powerful effect.

There’s a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear…

Simple. Forceful. Policy-free. And a very successful ad for Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. It raised the question of whether Walter Mondale would be strong enough to stand up to the lurking bear — in this case, the Soviet Union. Reagan won 525 electoral votes to Mondale’s 13.

Like Palin, Reagan was not thought to be a policy heavyweight, and, like her, he was often ridiculed by the punditocracy. And, like Reagan, Palin has come to prominence in a time of national crisis, a state of affairs in which appeals to the collective unconscious are much more powerful — and dangerous — than in normal times.

Jung himself was exquisitely aware of such a possibility, saying that during troubled conditions experienced by large numbers of people “explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to.”

What’s more, Palin not only has the ability to tap into archetypes, she also has a variety of social tools ready to help her do so.  It’s impossible to “refudiate” her mastery of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And, as Michelle Cottle writes in The New Republic, Palin is using them to speak directly to her audience, going around the filter of the mainstream media:

It’s an unconventional media strategy… Yet it’s hard to deny that Palin’s p.r. approach has not only succeeded but succeeded brilliantly. How? The most obvious element at work here is that Palin operates not as a politician but as a celebrity… The rules are different for celebrities: Palin’s megawattage enables her to command attention for every word and gesture, even as she largely stiff-arms the New York Times and Meet the Press.

Which leads Cottle to conclude :

Any political strategist who orchestrated such brilliant success via such unconventional means would instantly be dubbed the p.r. genius of our time. But, as far as we know, there is no crack communications team charting Palin’s course. At some point, even Palin haters may have to face the possibility that the p.r. genius is Sarah herself.

And, as Dave Weigel put it in The Atlantic, it’s not as if the media really even cares about policy as much as it likes to think it does. “This media is not going to care about her policies,” he writes. “If policies come up during debates, and she gives the same answers she gives on Fox now, and Mitt Romney pounces on her, the story will not be that the GOP’s frontrunner gave a pallid answer. The story will be that Mitt Romney pounced.”

In the end, Weigel concludes, “it’s hard to imagine Palin competing at the policy level the press claims she needs to get to, but easy to imagine her competing at the level they actually play on.”

So if you think Palin’s lack of policy prowess is somehow going to slow her ascent, think again. With unemployment predicted to hover just below double digits for possibly years to come, our vaunted recovery acknowledged to have stalled, and Americans’ faith in practically every economic and political institution at an all time low, it’s no surprise that people might respond irrationally. That’s what people do when they’re afraid. And in the absence of a coherent narrative that makes people feel reassured and hopeful about their lives and their futures, they’ll gravitate to whatever fills the vacuum.

Especially mama grizzlies.

So isn’t it wise to get a handle on Palin’s true appeal sooner rather than later? Because, to quote that other archetypal ursine ad: “Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?

A NASA photograph defined awesome for me today.

The Helix Nebula is often referred to as the Eye of God and has been referred to this way, if mostly on the Internet, since 2003.

It’s a large planetary nebula located in the constellation of Aquarius. Discovered in the early 18th century this object is one of the closest to the Earth of all the bright planetary nebulae - about 700 light-years away.

Our partnership has been an extraordinarily productive journey on both sides.

We’ve done terrific work together, including the design of the Microsoft Store and the launch of The Alliance for Climate Protection campaign with Al Gore. Throughout that time it’s been a delight to watch Martin emerge as Adweek’s Agency of the Year.

As both COLLINS: and Martin have continued to grow, it was inevitable we would bump into client conflicts. So, starting today, with the support of my friends Mike Hughes and John Adams, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Martin Agency, ownership of COLLINS: is being transferred to my partners and me.

Now we will be growing independently.

Although we’ll be moving into our new offices near Union Square in September, we’ll continue to have a special relationship with Martin. It’s been an honor to be associated with such remarkable people.

May our next chapter prove to be as rewarding.

Here’s the official Press Release:

Brian Collins Takes Ownership of Innovation Firm Collins:

August 2, 2010 NEW YORK, NY—

Brian Collins, president and co-founder of the brand design firm COLLINS:, has assumed ownership of the agency, effective July 31, 2010. Founded in 2007 and incubated as a division of The Martin Agency, the group has created brand experiences for high-profile clients including CNN and Microsoft.

In making the announcement, Mr. Collins added an unusual twist:  he plans to limit the number of clients his company will serve at any given time.

Named one of five American “Masters of Design” by Fast Company, Mr. Collins, formerly the chief creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather’s Brand Integration Group, led teams developing Hershey’s fantasy chocolate factory/retail store in Times Square, the campaign for New York City’s bid for the Olympic Games, and Mattel’s flagship store in Shanghai. His teams have developed brand strategies, consumer experiences, packaging and campaigns for Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss & Co, Unilever, Jaguar, IBM and American Express.

“Three years ago, Mike Hughes invited me to incubate COLLINS: in New York City with The Martin Agency,” said Mr. Collins. “This was a chance to work with people I admire—and I admire them more today. The Martin Agency has proven that it is an agency like no other.

“Together we’ve done some remarkable work, including projects like the design and launch of The Microsoft Store and the campaign for The Alliance for Climate Protection.”

In 2009 alone, COLLINS: earned a One Show Gold Pencil, a Gold Clio, a Silver Lion at Cannes and a Jay Chiat Gold Award from the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

“From the start, all of us at COLLINS: have dedicated ourselves to producing the best, most effective creative product. As we embark on the next phase of that journey, we’ve made a new decision—to cap our client roster at nine.

“We believe this discipline will have a number of great benefits both for our people and, especially, for our clients. But most importantly, it signals what our main concern has always been and will continue to be: concentrated, game-changing creativity.”

According to Mike Hughes, The Martin Agency’s president and creative director, “We entered into our partnership with Brian because we wanted to increase the agency’s emphasis on design thinking—which can be very different than conventional agency thinking. It has been a wonderful experience. I know it has made us better.

“As both the agency and Collins became more successful,” Mr. Hughes added, “it was inevitable that client conflicts would arise.  We held those conflicts at bay for as long as possible. Now with more opportunities coming their way that are too good to pass up, COLLINS: will grow independently—but, thankfully, will always stay within reach.”

The COLLINS: team will be settling into a new space in Manhattan in September.

About COLLINS:

Based in New York, COLLINS:  is an independent brand-building design firm that specializes in using storytelling to spark innovation and structure marketing efforts. The firm creates engaging communications, experiences, environments, products and digital interactions that transform and strengthen the relationships between organizations, brands and people.

Disney’s newest Nicholas Cage movie, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, opens this week. No, it will not be as remarkable as its inspiration, Walt Disney’s original The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. which was created to revitalize the lagging career of Mickey Mouse. The short cartoon appeared in the movie Fantasia (1940). And Disney’s first Sorcerer was inspired by the music of Paul Dukas from his piece L’apprenti Sorcier (1897).

All of this was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ballad Der Zauberlehrling (1797). His poem tells, through monologue, of a young, ambitious sorcerer who attempts to use powerful spells to do his work in the absence of his master. Unfortunately, he can’t control what he’s unleashed. He’s eventually saved by the return of the master sorcerer.

From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Jerry Bruckheimer. But at least it took 200 years.

My (pathetically limited) high school German couldn’t get me through the original, but this translation below is terrific.

Illustration from an 1882 publication of Der Zauberlehrling

This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. No, my friends, these are matters of undeniable fact…

So speaks Marlon Brandon in the first minutes of Richard Donner’s 1978 film, Superman.

The design of the opening credits by R/GA delivered just this promise, instantly transforming what had been a dusty, childish comic book into a stirring American epic. In a blaze of soaring blue typography amplified by John Williams’ triumphant score, Superman arrives as a hero of epic proportions. In mere seconds, these titles accomplishe a major feat. Beyond setting the tone for what’s to come by establishing a big, emotional expectation for the audience, the opening sequence sends a very clear message - Superman now has gravitas.

It does so, first, by honoring its subject’s origins - opening with a black and white shot of a tattered comic book from the Great Depression. It grounds the story in what the audience already knows. Next, it connects us it to the present day and achieves verisimilitude via a flyover shot of The Daily Planet headquarters. Finally, as the audience flies through the stars toward the doomed planet Krypton, the design solution crystalizes what was most beloved about our hero’s story as the only son from another realm — its mythic power.

Great myths momentarily lift us into another plane of existence so we can see the world - and our own lives - with fresh eyes. And these credits do just that – summoning the latent, epic potency of the story. As designers we are often charged with reinventing products and brands. And this is a road map I sometimes use in our own work - revisiting a story’s past to revitalize its future.

The movie’s ad campaign exclaimed “You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly!” By the end of this opening sequence, I believed.

And that is no careless product, indeed.

W.B. Yeats

Last Saturday I spent the evening at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Although the play that night was not the thing, the Abbey Theatre itself absolutely was. And has been for quite some time.

One of its most celebrated directors was William Butler Yeats, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Dublin. He became a leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival, a late 19th and early 20th-century movement that aimed to revive ancient Irish folklore, legends and traditions in new literary works. He also founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899.

In 1888 he published The Wanderings of Oisin, a long narrative poem that established his reputation; and in 1893 he published The Celtic Twilight, a book of peasant legends. In total, he wrote nearly 30 plays and a number of books of poetry. His best poetry was inspired by his deep and unrequited love for Maud Gonne - an Irish actress and political activist - and his longing for the mythical “Irish Golden Age”.

Had the play that evening enjoyed the smallest fraction of intelligence exhibited in anything Yeats wrote, I would have stayed through the second act.

Next time, I imagine, will be different.

The Santa Maria della Concezione Church displays, in macbre detail, the bones of over 4,000 friars collected between 1528 and 1870. The remains are fashioned into exuberant Baroque and Rococo decorations. Yes, creepy. Still, I was raised Catholic, so I planned my Sunday morning to visit it.

After I arrived, and on my way down to the crypt, I passed the first chapel.

And that’s when I saw him, Michael the Archangel, floating gloriously above the altar. Painted in 1636 by Guido Reni, he is triumphant. Powerful. His foot placed firmly on Satan’s neck.

Michael had been honored and invoked as the protector of mortals for generations. He had been celebrated as a warrior and leader of the forces of heaven over the powers of evil.

in the 1600’s much of Northern Europe was being reshaped by the Protestant Reformation. Italy, however, remained staunchly Catholic. Recognizing the need for change and reform, the Catholic Church answered the Reformation with its own Counter-Reformation. Where Protestant sects protested the use of art in a church setting, the Catholic Church, which had been the greatest patron of the arts for centuries, re-affirmed the importance of painting in propagating personal faith by funding work that was realistic and yet believably illusionistic. Commissions for churches exploded in 17th century Italy - and nowhere more so than in Rome.

When l looked up at this image I was spellbound, but not by the beauty or drama of this piece. What hooked me was what Michael was wearing - a blue bodysuit and a flowing, bright red cape.

I knew I had seen this image before. But where? I had never been to this church or even knew of this painting.

Suddenly I remembered a different story of a protector from another realm. He also wears a blue body suit and bright red cape. He is a defender of mortals and celebrated as a leader against the forces of evil.

Seek.

Innovation doesn’t pop out at the end of a PowerPoint presentation.

Innovation is personal. It happens at the extreme margins of enterprise, where no one knows what the exact problems are because the maps are blank. Send a designer out there and they’ll come back with something nobody’s ever seen - or a prototype that fulfills a need you didn’t even know existed.

You never really know what’s out there. That’s what’s the problem with hiring problem solvers - a definition for designers as crippling as it is outdated. The great problems, the ones really worth solving, aren’t already on the agenda. Innovation is personal: if we are open, curious, and empathetic, the great problems find us.

The water problem found me in 2007, although I didn’t know it at the time. John Bielenberg had invited me to go down to Greensboro, Alabama, with his remarkable program Project M. Project M is like a self-guided Outward Bound course for socially conscious designers. A team of young designers parachute into a poor or challenged area and then are left to discover a problem that they can solve in 30 days. Nobody tells them what to do. Or even what the problem is. They live with local families, look around, talk to people, and find something they can put their hand to that will do some good.

They become problem seekers.

In Hale County we discovered that one family in four had no access to safe water. Some of them were going to the local Texaco station with buckets because the water they had pumped from their back yards for generations had become full of foul waste from the county’s biggest employers. A thousand families couldn’t get clean city water because they couldn’t afford the $425 hook-up for a water meter. Getting these people meters was what the designers decided to do. They created communications and a website to bring national attention – and money for meters – to Hale County. They’ve connected over 100 families so far. That’s not a bad month’s work for a brand new design team.

After my experience in Alabama, I started seeing water crises everywhere. Half of China’s cities have water shortages and 700 million people drink contaminated water daily. The World Bank calculates that 30 million people will have to relocate by 2020. 30 million “water refugees.” In Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, where humans first domesticated corn, there is no longer enough water to grow corn. In rural Africa, one woman in five spends two hours a day fetching water on foot from wells miles away. There are Hale Counties all over the world.

In 2008, NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger and I shared some of these water stories at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Four months in orbit aboard space station Mir, looking down at Earth’s shrinking river systems made Jerry a water hawk, too. Although water wasn’t at the top of the agenda in Davos, it quickly emerged as the axis that connects many of the other problems that were. By itself, the lack of safe water unleashes all four horsemen of the apocalypse: death, famine, pestilence, and war. In fact, the U.N. predicted outright conflict over water in the next five years.

So Jerry and I, with the support of the driven journalists’ organization Circle of Blue, invited a group of global thought leaders to explore this issue in a quickly organized work session at Davos. They already knew the global to-do list was pretty full. We needed to come up with our own resources to put more effort into fighting these water crises. Design students are one of Earth’s abundant resources, so we set out to engage them. Working in partnership with INDEX: Design to Improve Life and AIGA, we invited 10,000 of them from around the world to participate in The Aspen Design Challenge: Designing Water’s Future.

These students would be our dandelion seeds. More than 700 students from 28 countries sought and provided 225 water solutions that did not exist before. The best of them were then shaped for venture capital and presented at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Efforts like Project M and The Aspen Challenge are creating an architecture of participation outside of traditional silos. Today, an increasing number of influential networks of designers are emerging with a desire to make a tangible difference in people’s lives. As a discipline, design is transcending the traditional “service” roles of the institutions that employ us. Designers work at human scale. For a designer, the obligation to make life better with workable, tangible solutions is immediate, personal, and direct. And while institutions are very good at making lots more of something that already exists, they are not as good at inventing the new.

Fortunately, rapid prototyping systems have transformed the designer’s role. Now we can move out of the Concept Business and into the Real-World Solutions Business faster than we had ever imagined.

Within a single generation of designers, the cost of creating innovative solutions for small groups of people has become almost trivial. Now every designer can be a factory where the future is made.

What we can see, we can solve.

And we’ll all see a lot more far beyond our office walls.