HEAD BLOG

There was a period, a long period, back in the history of advertising when certain things held true. An ad could give advice, for example, or have an opinion and the agency would be pretty certain it would be received as intended. If they made a claim that doctors smoked cigarettes because they were good for your health then you and I would simply just accept this as a fact. If the agency, on behalf of their corporate overlords, assured us that the oil pouring out of a hole in the seabed was actually beneficial to the sea life, well, who could doubt the printed word?

Authority was absolute. At least for the purposes of selling.

The change in behaviour, however, was coming. Our relationship with consumerism and the companies which provided us with product after product was bound to be affected by mass media which showed us different cultures and the impact of our actions upon them. We were given the means through which we could see, test and then question the decisions our political leaders made and we could organise like never before.

These insights into how authority operated affected our relationship with advertising. Like seeing the flaws in a parent as we get older, so were we able to see how misleading the claims of advertising could be.

The past ten years has seen change of this sort again but at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has begun to affect us in ways we were not prepared for and still don’t truly understand. It may well be decades before we adjust to modern life, if such a thing is even possible anymore.

Businesses, and the advertising agencies which represent them, have reacted in different ways. A tiny few have embraced, and appear to understand, the responsibility granted by social marketing but many still adhere to the Authority model, filling their pronouncements so painfully with jargon as to make it appear archaic.

The reasoning, I believe, comes from too much love.

The people who work with these brands all respect the process too much. If a decision is made to make bottled water from tap water then, because they understand the process then they respect the decision. It’s the same logic that swallows the line about a company’s interest being its customers so why would it ever do anything to jeopardise that interest.

The balance comes not from cynicism, however. This leads to being unable to sell what the company has to sell. A cynical creative is one not in a position to see the good in a product that might lie beyond the jargon-filled nonsense.

The balance comes from questioning authority, from demanding it to explain itself in terms you can understand and by using talking points and conversation starters, not declarations.

Microsoft seem unable to commit

Now you see it, now you don’t. Microsoft released their new branding device and company tagline yesterday.

And then withdrew it.

It drew the usual polarised opinions on Twitter and then, just a few hours later, was taken down. The tagline was for real but the logos, which showed the Microsoft product family, were not, in fact, new logos. Rather, they were an example of “a standalone treatment to show the flexibility of joined brands” (Engadget).

The opinions, the polarisation, the hate, all of these are de rigeur for any new brand these days. When opinions (such as mine) can be released and propagated within seconds, it’s inevitable. What’s interesting, to me at least, is that Microsoft chose to withdraw them.

Brand design is such a personal art. You either love the logo or you don’t really care. Even the haters will continue as usual once their bile has sunk back again.

So why would Microsoft back down?

When it comes to creating logos to reflect brands, many companies, large or small, want to please everybody. They want something that (as Steve Jobs once proposed) becomes a jewel. Everybody loves jewels. They sparkle, attract our attention and are worth a fortune.

What’s more, we love them instantly.

Open the box and what do you see? That’s right, treasure. And desire plays out upon our faces. It’s the reaction beloved of companies.

When that reaction is lessened, for whatever reason, a company can be thrown into turmoil. They sense a lack of love and fear that will reflect upon their business.

It’s easy to see why Microsoft would do the same.

With Apple being the… ummm… being so well loved by consumers, Microsoft feel threatened. Witness the constant faltering and self doubt over many of their product launches lately. They get buzz but then lose it through the self doubt and inaction. Apple announce a product and then release it. Apple love themselves, Microsoft don’t.

They need to realise that many people are happy with what they produce. It might not be passionate, it might not be vocal.

But they show commitment nonetheless. They should understand that self doubt is infecting their brand more than any perceived criticism.

A little self-love would inspire far more confidence than the efforts of analysts and graphic designers.

Have Microsoft allowed too much time to pass between announcing Natal/Kinect and its release? From all the chatter at E3 it seems the veneer has worn thin and people have already moved on to the next big thing.

It’s been a few years since anyone at Head First attended E3. We tried it for a while, went along with the belief that decisions and impressions were made in equal quantity and that we would break into the States with our creative vision for how video games ought to be marketed.

The truth, however, is that E3 is a show for the public. It is designed to impress the journalists who then trumpet the products they fall for. It really is an amazing event for bringing the spectacle of gaming to the attention of the world.

Last year, that spectacle revolved mainly around Natal, a new take on technology championed by Nintendo through their groundbreaking Wii system. Natal, by Microsoft, blew everything else out of the water by appearing larger than life and selling itself on a dream.

It was a dream that managed to make Nintendo look as though they were just mumbling in their sleep. Here was the true vision of motion control, the future in vivid technicolor.

Microsoft had done what few people credit it capable of doing, they’d pulled an Apple out of the air.

Move on a year and much of the talk about Natal centres around the renaming to ‘Kinect’ an ugly portmanteau to many; and around fake families showing off the technology in demos that many commentators are labelling as disappointing. The buzz, hype and excitement of a year ago has been replaced by reality.

Practical limitations for gaming have been raised over this past year and the answers don’t sit well with the hardcore. Sony, touting their own motion controller now neatly called ‘Move’ are on full assault, pointing out that games need buttons and who wants to be seen playing with invisible guns like a five year old.

It’s clever marketing on Sony’s part who were seen as the poor cousins only last year with technology totally lacking in ‘wow’.

But timing really is everything and now the playing field seems a whole lot more level.

If Microsoft had announced, wowed and released within months rather than a year and a half then maybe they could have carried us along just as Apple seem to with each of their visionary but crippled devices.

That, however, isn’t the case and we’ve had a year to consider what we want (if anything) from motion controllers and are in a position to make calm, informed decisions. That means the money men must also address the economics of these devices, counting them against percentages of current ownership rather than, as once hoped, driving hard core consoles into the Wii owning public where fake families have been happily jumping up and down, waving their primitive sticks in the air, for years.

These says the term ‘brand’ has become a catch all for any company thinking about reaching into the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere. It can be summarized as a logo and, occasionally, a set of principles which the company tries to ring fence as being typically theirs.

It’s easy to see why they take this view of course. The super companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and… ummm… Head First occupy the places in the minds of people that can be identified as ‘brand aware’. When asked, consumers will probably be aware, not only of these companies logos, but also of their ideological standpoints.

What right thinking, emergent company wouldn’t want a piece of this action? To them, getting the brand right leads inexorably to prominence, take-up and financial success.

Allow me to tell you a little story.

A friend of mine started a company providing services to children. On a casual consultancy level, I was asked to chip in on the subject of brand.
My friend was very keen on creating a brand.

I probed a little deeper in order to ascertain what, exactly, was meant by ‘brand’ and, sure enough, the concept appeared to be linked tightly to logo.

That’s not right, I said. Brand is different to design. Think of brand as something you earn through great service and a lot of time. And even then, turning your company into a brand takes a whole lot more than making sure you maintain your logo according to a designer’s style guide.

Look at Coca Cola, I said. That’s a brand. However we may feel about it, whatever we may see in the difference between the public face they market and the reality of their business practices, they can be clearly identified alongside specific values.
And that isn’t because they have slavishly followed design guidelines down the decades. It’s because they have vigorously marketed their product alongside a very particular viewpoint. It has cost hundreds of millions and taken decades.

Even those companies for which brand status has come quicker haven’t fallen into the trap of being restricted design-wise. Their service has come before all else and that is what has shaped any design elements to their promotions.

And those elements have changed over time, adapting, as they should, to changing tastes, expectations and technologies.

So the next time a designer (or a client) insists that you must present everything in a certain colour in order to adhere to brand guidelines, do them a favour and tell them to Google ‘brand’ for a while.

The humble tagline both attracts and repels me. As with a magnet, this effect largely depends upon which way it is pointed but one way to guarantee my dismay is to use then unnecessarily.

So whilst I am happy to learn that BA is “the world’s favourite airline” I am less interested to know that the people behind the East- West water pipe infrastructure are “keeping the water flowing”.

The former tagline grants me some kind of confidence as I choose which airline to fly with whereas the latter tells me nothing I didn’t know already and serves little purpose neither educationally or commercially.

It is as though the words leaked out from a meeting intent upon marketing its service in a ‘commercial’ manner.

The same goes for the BBC election broadcasts. Maybe I ought to be glad they are “making it clear” because all the other channels are “pulling the wool over your eyes since 1882″. The clarity of a tagline brings everything into sharp focus.

Public bodies, in their confusing remit to offer choice, seem to suffer more than most from the scourge of the pointless tagline.

Everywhere I turn I learn new and interesting facts.

Did you know (I didn’t and almost to my fatal cost) that the NHS is “safe, clean, personal”? I should hope it is but saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. I don’t need the glib sales talk. It does nothing to make me feel better.

And then there are the taglines that don’t even give you any sort of clue why they were written. Travelling behind a van for a company called Fantasy Bathrooms I wondered at their tagline, “Why Compromise?” I can think of lots of reasons to compromise really. It actually seems like a good skill to learn. So what were they trying to say? Was it that their bathrooms were top quality and expensive, imitation brands at a low cost, very cheap and poor quality? What?

It’s such a general line that it evaporates into nothing. Much like Smirnoff vodka who also make use of it which just shows how interchangeable it is.

It is as though creatives or marketeers have a tool in their kit which they simply must deploy despite being unsure of how to use it. Perhaps these lines were trotted out as a way of selling in key creative which might be fine in the context of a presentation but less so when released into a population of people who aren’t fired up by the possibilities of sales talk.

Change is a funny thing. It suffers greatly from the Goldilocks complex and getting it right is no easy thing.

Change too quickly and you run the risk of leaving people behind. Look at the artists whose work was never appreciated in their own time.

They sought to convey a vision too far removed, too far ahead of what was considered ‘just right’ for the times.

But change too slowly and, well… Microsoft learned that (some might say still learning that) when it let Netscape leap ahead with its browser. Ofcourse Microsoft are still with us and Netscape aren’t. Not really anyway.

It is interesting, therefore, to see Google seem both too advanced and too slow. Perhaps it is a measure of how established they have become that this could be so but when I see the wild promise of Wave and the lumbering fool of Buzz I see a company still wonderfully eager in its approach.

Wave astounded me. The early keynote was like a glimpse to a better way of working, a new way in which to communicate. Then it arrived and it baffled most people and failed to find a purpose. I feel it is ahead of its time and that the Wave functions might yet find a place in our daily emails. For me, this is where Google went wrong. They chose to introduce Wave as something new. Perhaps if they had chosen to fold its functionality into Gmail then it would have found an audience as, by osmosis, feature after feature slowly became useful.

And then there is Buzz.

After Twitter became such a huge hit, Google seemed to believe that owning one of the biggest brands on the planet was sufficient to make headway in any exciting new business. But people are more fickle than that and whilst they will be willing to try something new simply based on a trust relationship with a brand, switching allegiency is an altogether different ask.

Navigating the channel between too hot and too cold isn’t easy, not even for Google.

I swore to myself when I was initiated into the Cub Scouts that I would never, ‘pon my honour, ever make a pun as bad as that one. As with most things in life, however, promises are made to be broken. Circumstances change and what seemed like a good idea at the time now looks dated and out of step.

Enter 2K Games, a company we’ve had dealings with in the past and for whom we have nothing but love and affection. OK, you can sidestep the client loving if you like and skip to the part where we say they came to us to request a new perspective on their International website. The world of HD video was passing them by and the amazing visuals they had in their games wasn’t being shown to full effect.

Head First came up with a new look which evolved the great work done previously and which would enable 2K to showcase their games in line with modern technology. Times continue to change, of course, and we’re aware that we’ll soon be beaming the demo packs straight to the cerebral cortex.

But we’ve got an App for that.

In addition to the design work, something within Head First just doesn’t stop thinking and we have also put in place several neat sub-branding opportunities for use in subsequent development.

At the start of the year my colleague, Carl Pugh, wrote about how best to tackle a year in which the word ‘recession’ would feature heavily. Five months in and the news media seems confused as to whether it should be reporting we will emerge in 2010 or whether we’ll sink under the weight of the trillion pound debt. I’ll leave the future to the kids and focus instead on another aspect of the article – celebrity advertising. Why? Well because I just read a story about Susan Boyle. Read more…