Laurence Vincent

"I have notes in my bathroom, yellow notes, and I stick ‘em on the mirror … Notes that..."

Sat, 19 May 2012 15:15:00 -0700

“I have notes in my bathroom, yellow notes, and I stick ‘em on the mirror … Notes that say, ‘Today is special, make today count.’ And then I have one note on the mirror in the middle that says, ‘Look at the other notes.’”

- Burt Bacharach
award-winning songwriter, quoted in Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

The Hunt for Real Creativity in Advertising

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:16:00 -0700

My Monday morning ritual is deeply ingrained. I arrive early to find a stack of advertising and media trades to digest before launching into my client work for the week. One of those trades is AdWeek. I’ve been reading it for years but only recently noticed a new behavior on my part. When I come across the review of the week’s featured campaign I have to fire up my browser and search for the spot online so that I can view it. In years past this would have never been the case. I would have seen the spot during my television viewing. Lately, I can’t recall which advertisements I’ve seen on television.

In today’s New York Times, columnist David Carr pondered the strange paradox at play in the television business. The upfront advertising markets get bigger while live ratings for network programs continue to decline. Contrary to what you might think by looking at the data, the demand for television content is robust. Carr offers a personal opinion that may well characterize the whole market:

I continue to be a fan of (some) network television products; I just don’t consume them as they’re broadcast.

Instead of gathering on the couch at a pre-ordained time to enjoy the latest episode of their favorite show, audiences have developed a whole new set of behaviors. They may catch the week’s episode at a time of their choosing on their DVR, or they may grab it on the go from their iPad using Hulu, Netflix or YouTube. They may even wait until the season is over and watch all the episodes in sequence. There are more options available to the audience today than ever before. But for the advertiser, all viewing approaches have one element in common: they make it easier for the viewer to skip over or entirely ignore the advertising.

Several years ago, AdAge ran a front page cover story warning of the coming “Chaos Scenario.” The article painted a dire picture of the advertising landscape in 2020. That apocalyptic year is only a couple of Presidential elections away, yet the scenario described might plausibly unfold in an even nearer future.

The answer to the challenge isn’t a legal crack down on new distribution platforms. Advertisers and brands will not find solace by putting brakes on the speed of technological progress. We also won’t solve the problem by injecting more creativity into thirty second spots. Creative Week launches in New York City this week, and I’d like to make an appeal to the best of our industry. It’s never been more important for brands to re-imagine how they develop their stories with consumers. If there is one point we can be sure of by looking at the change in audience behavior and the demand for content, it’s that our passion for a good story hasn’t wavered. Traditional advertising interrupts the storytelling experience. Audiences now have a way to sidestep the interruptions. We won’t solve the problem by finding a clever way to force it into the experience. The problem will be solved when we find more creative ways to engage audiences around the story of the brand. And here’s the reality check: the answer to the problem may have nothing to do with sponsored content.

The audience and the markets have evolved.

Ironically, when I go to those spots I read about in AdWeek, many of them are so good at telling a story I enjoy them on their own merits. Today’s audiences are accustomed to watching short pieces they discover through social media links. Perhaps this is where the much heralded convergence of Madison Avenue and Hollywood should occur.

If you separate the current challenge into two separate parts, we may have a better path to resolution. The first part is the challenge of funding digital content. If television advertising as we know it today isn’t sustainable, how do you pay for the programming that audiences love? The fact of the matter is that audiences place a different value on content today than when television was introduced. Some audiences would rather pay for that content directly than tolerate commercial interruption (Hulu sells subscriptions and people rent through Netflix). The trick is to find ways to pay for the quality of content that audiences expect because current subscription revenue is insufficient. The answer may very well come from something other than advertiser-supported interests.

That leaves the other half of the problem: how to advertise to the modern consumer? Advertising is not a relic. It’s still a necessary part of a brand’s selling strategy. There’s plenty of pent-up demand for advertising vehicles. That’s why the upfronts keep getting bigger. But the television advertising model we’ve relied upon is becoming less relevant. Having spent the last 20 years working with some of the biggest advertisers in the world, I can attest that the model isn’t as effective as it once was. You have to reach wider and wider audiences to affect smaller and smaller returns on investment. Therefore, the challenge is to find a new advertising model. There may be no silver bullet. Instead, advertisers may have to be more creative in their approach. They may have to think about the way they are telling their story across a wide variety of advertising media—from social to broadcast, events to personal communications. The creativity we need more than ever is in the approach every brand takes to go to market.

I have always believed that the best brands are great storytellers. Unfortunately, many interpret that statement as meaning that the best brands can afford brilliant broadcast advertising campaigns. The truth is that great stories usually unfold in the minds of your consumers and your employees. So, to my colleagues who are about to spend several days stimulating their creative juices in New York, I offer a challenge: we need you to lead us to a new era of brand storytelling. Creativity has always thrived on chaos. We are told there’s plenty of it headed your way. Let’s use the dawn of an apocalypse to usher in a renaissance of brand storytelling. In the meantime, I’ll keep tuning into your advertisements on YouTube.

"Design is the imposition of meaningful order"

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:53:08 -0700

“Design is the imposition of meaningful order”

- Milton Glasser

"What’s special about language is its productive combinatorial power. We can use it to combine..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 07:21:00 -0700

“What’s special about language is its productive combinatorial power. We can use it to combine anything with anything.”

- Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard professor of psychology and a pre-eminent researcher of the basic ingredient list from which all human knowledge is constructed? This article in the Science section of the New York Times details how Spelke has discovered a baby’s recognition of dialect and speech patterns even before they are able to speak.

On Storytelling

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:32:00 -0700

On Storytelling:

lore.com

In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
Dreamers and Storytellers – legendary Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson on art and reconciling science and the humanities

Timeless Tag Designs paul0v2, abduzeedo.com Whether it’s a...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:32:36 -0700

Timeless Tag Designs
paul0v2, abduzeedo.com

Whether it’s a product label tag or an airline tag, most of the times they go unnoticed and end up on the trash, but not today. These tags are designed to be timeless, and I took the time to make a nice selection that we can appreciate and get…

It’s the little brand touches that make a great overall experience. This collection of branded product tags proves the point and also makes for a beautiful portfolio of artwork and design.

"Explaining why a chocolate cupcake tasted so divine makes us love the cupcake a little less, while..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:28:00 -0700

““Explaining why a chocolate cupcake tasted so divine makes us love the cupcake a little less, while explaining why a movie was so horrible makes us hate the movie a little less.””

- Sarah G. Moore
Assistant Professor, University of Alberta School of Business
Author of “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid: How Word of Mouth Influences the Storyteller.” Journal of Consumer Research: April 2012

Great Brand Experiences Change Behavior

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:08:00 -0700

What is “brand experience.” While a lot of managers talk about the importance of brand experience, it’s awfully hard to find agreement about what, exactly, brand experience is. At the simplest level, brand experience lives exclusively in our minds. It is impossible for me to know whether or not your brand experience matches mine because how we perceive the brand is so subjective. A brand experience affects what we think, feel and do as a result of interaction with the brand. Of these three dimensions, perhaps none is more valuable than the “do” part.

Brand experiences are most memorable when the experience either changes the behavior of the audience or compels the audience to behave in a very specific way. This is certainly true for Instagram. It allows users to do certain things they couldn’t have done as easily before. For example, the service makes it easier for users to exhibit their work to a broad audience of people with similar interests. Serious photographers use Instagram as regularly as an amateur with a smartphone. Each has the ability to distribute their work to people they know, but their photos are also broadcast to a lot of people they don’t know. The service makes it easy to follow interesting photographers and keep a collection of “favorite” photos. This social functionality has augmented the behavior of users. Many users are taking photos to share with the world as much as they are taking photos to memorialize a memory.

Though it is often the butt of many jokes, the fact that people have to assemble IKEA furniture is an important part of the brand experience. We may curse the crazy names, the limited instructions, and the funky maneuvers we have to master with an Allen wrench, but the experience also makes us more invested in the inexpensive furniture we assemble. The furniture and the experience have meaning because of the behavior the brand induces.

Go into a Starbucks and order your favorite coffee. You’ll use a specific vocabulary. Starbucks engineered its own language, and we willingly put it to use. That’s part of what makes the Starbucks brand experience memorable. In fact, Starbucks influences a lot of our behavior at its retail locations. We stand in line. We sit in overstuffed chairs. We tip our barista. All of that activity influences our perception of the brand.

The fact of the matter is that many brands create memorable experiences by constraining what we can do. You can’t buy a meal on Southwest Airlines. You also can’t reserve a specific seat location. Southwest doesn’t fly to all the major airports, nor does it allow you to fly first class. And an awful lot of people positively love the Southwest brand experience. We frequently perceive greater value in the experiences that constrain our options. Sometimes we feel less overwhelmed because we didn’t have to sort through many choices—the brand lessens our sense of responsibility. Sometimes we feel a greater sense of accomplishment because the experience focused our attention. In either case, the brand experience makes us more aware of our behavior, and that behavior differentiates the brand at the point of delivery and in our recollections.

"Few among us yearn for a world in which the only music is classical, the only dance is ballet and..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:57:00 -0700

“Few among us yearn for a world in which the only music is classical, the only dance is ballet and daily clothing requires corsets and waistcoats. As such, we might all embrace a brave new world where we can both write and talk with our fingers.”

- John McWhorter
Linguist and New Republic editor, McWhorter argues the merits of digital grammar and style conventions in this New York Times Op-Ed piece.

Why words matter so much

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 08:17:00 -0700

Why words matter so much:

lore.com

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

Whenever I need a little design inspiration, I return to the...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:36:52 -0700

Whenever I need a little design inspiration, I return to the great ones. This tribute to the title art of Saul Bass usually does the trick.

Big Brands in Small Business

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:39:00 -0700

This morning, I had the opportunity to chat with Jim Blasingame, the Small Business Advocate, on his syndicated radio talk show. I actually enjoy talking about branding for small business because, in my experience, some of the biggest brand ideas and most innovative brand experiences unfold in the small business community.

One of the interesting things about success is...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 08:39:00 -0700

One of the interesting things about success is...:

We must act with purpose, and commit to a meaningful promise. To do this, you have to look deep inside and understand what motivates you. What is your cause? This is true for brands as much as it is for you and me. In fact, the strongest brands are built around a culture that shows up for work every day because they believe in the cause. This excerpt from Maria Popova’s excellent exp.lore blog quotes philosopher Alain de Botton, who reminds us why purpose matters:

We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

I really like this new Topps Pennant app for iPhone. Mostly, I...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:46:00 -0700

I really like this new Topps Pennant app for iPhone. Mostly, I love the way infographics are integrated. Here’s the clever way Topps shows me the action from Monday’s Angels game.

Missed Connections Illustrated: Visual Paeans to Modern Love by...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:22:28 -0700

Missed Connections Illustrated: Visual Paeans to Modern Love
by Maria Popova, brainpickings.org

Reverse-engineering serendipity, or what ice skating collisions have to do with fish market romance.
You might recall Sophie Blackall, known for her distinctive children’s book illustration, as one of the brains and brushes…

I often say that brand identity needs to do more than paint a picture of the obvious. It has to tell a story. These stunning illustrations and inspired visual translations of otherwise pedestrian copy (Craigslist missed connections) demonstrate how to use art to convey the meat of an idea.

What Avon Can Learn from Instagram

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:02:00 -0700

With most of the business press focused on the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram yesterday, you might have missed the big news surrounding a 126 year-old social networking company that generated more than $10 billion in revenue last year. Avon Products announced a new CEO: Sherilyn S. McCoy, who was previously a senior executive at Johnson & Johnson. McCoy has a big job ahead of her. Avon has struggled with declining sales, unsolicited takeover offers, and decreasing consumer relevance. What can this dowager brand do to become strong again? I suggest that McCoy look sideways at three relevant brands who have focused on their promise to develop fierce customer loyalty.

Instagram

You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging with just a simple reference to yesterday’s big announcement, did you? Avon can learn a lot from Instagram’s success. For starters, Instagram proves that the simplest of ideas can be developed into the biggest business opportunities. Instagram does one thing and it does it really well: it makes it dead simple to captures images wherever you are and make them look beautiful and easy to share with the world. In less than 2 years, more than 33 million people have downloaded and used Instagram. That’s astonishing, but not as astonishing as the way people talk about the brand. Instagram’s brand experience is so easy and fun that if you masked the brand name in recent interviews you might mistake its core users for Apple fanboys. In the age of mobile, the best way to connect with others, express yourself and participate in a broader conversation is increasingly with images, and everything Instagram does makes imaging effortless and enjoyable. It doesn’t try to do anything else and that’s why fans love it so much that many worry about Facebook’s post-acquisition intentions.

Before women had the right to vote, Avon was empowering them with a chance at financial independence. The secret to the brand’s success was the relationship between the product and the community it fostered. Real women sold Avon to their real friends and acquaintances. Women who purchased the product enjoyed the experience of meeting with their saleswoman and sampling the latest product introductions. In fact, the sampling experience was one of the early differentiators. Like Instagram, Avon made it easy, enjoyable and social to explore beauty products, and both the buyer and the seller relished the social interaction. How can Avon revive this experience the way that Instagram has revived the experience of sharing images?

It’s hard to read about social media these days without encountering stories of Pinterest, the digital service that lets users clip images and content from around the web and organize that content on pinboards that can be shared. Much discussion of Pinterest has revolved around its core user base: women. I believe Pinterest skews more female than male because it actually replaces a distinctly feminine social behavior that has existed in the analog world for decades. Where women once tore pages from magazines to keep track of styles, designs and fashions that interested them, now they have a digital solution. Pinterest’s anemic representation with men has less to do with the stigma of it being a brand for women than it does with the fact that scrapbooking and magazine clipping has historically skewed female. And in this behavioral characteristics lies an opportunity for Avon. How can the Avon brand make it easier for women to clip, share and organize skin care and beauty interests? Can a pinboard metaphor reinvent the direct selling model Avon once used to be the dominant brand in the category?

Dove

Finally, McCoy might spend some time studying Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.” In fact, the first time I saw one of the iconic advertisements that featured real women redefining the notion of “beauty” I thought it was an ad for Avon. It made perfect sense to me. Avon was the brand that every woman on our block related to when I was growing up. My mom exchanged holiday gifts with her Avon lady. Who better to know how to make you, personally, look your best and feel beautiful than a representative from a brand that takes the time to stop by and meet with you once or twice a month.

When Avon was at its best it democratized beauty. Sure, it was always a cosmetic brand and the Avon ladies left brochures behind with beautiful women wearing the latest cosmetics from Avon. However, Avon was incredibly accessible. Women believed the products were made for them by people who were like them. Looking at Avon’s advertising and product materials today, it’s hard to see that accessibility in action.

According to Dove, the purpose of the “Campaign for Real Beauty” was to make more women feel beautiful. Dove came across this cause after conducting research that showed only 2% of women worldwide described themselves as beautiful. Dove’s purpose was to raise that number. That’s a powerful cause and an inspiring message. It seems to me that Avon could develop a similar purpose in order to fight its way back. Avon should be the quintessential “accessible” brand. It began life as a company that promised to empower women and improve their self-esteem. Perhaps at a time when so many women’s brands glorify the image of only 5% of the female population, Avon can become more relevant by returning to this promise and embracing the digital lifestyle that can make it more potent. It should do so using the tools and technologies that are reshaping our conversations. That’s how it can truly deliver on the promise it heralds in its tagline of being “the company for women.”

Good Design Is Good Business: Master Lock and the Battle Against Myopia

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:32:00 -0700

Reblogged from aigalosangeles:

What happened was that Wal Mart came up to the folks at Master Lock and said, “We can make this same product in China for dirt-cheap. Either cut your price by 30% or we won’t give you shelf space.” Monday’s AIGA Los Angeles event at the A+D Museum ‘Master Lock and the Battle Against Myopia’ was a study of a company in crisis that found relevance through selling a brand over a commodity.

Scott Williams, tonight’s speaker, is a brand consultant whose work deals within industries where creatives are not the top dogs, and where designers have to consistently prove a return on investment. Master Lock had a product with no customer loyalty because their strategy had only been to produce padlocks. Consumers didn’t care if they bought a Master Lock or their next cheapest rival. Unlike other companies that found themselves in a similar crisis, they decided to build that loyalty.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:08:00 -0700

there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him…

This beautiful video treatment of one of my favorite Bukowsi poems is part of a series posted on California is a place, a blog that celebrates California culture. Do yourself a favor. Watch it in full-screen mode.

There’s an interesting trend at work in our culture. In...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:21:00 -0700

There’s an interesting trend at work in our culture. In spite of the most amazing advances in technology, a lot of people are craving a sense of authenticity, history and craftsmanship. It’s a growing interest in “old school” approaches. You can see this in our love affair with Instagram, where a high quality photograph is deliberately roughed up around the edges to look vintage. Or in the revival of the Moleskine. How about the surge in the growth of vinyl albums? This video from photographer and filmmaker Ian Ruhter portrays an extremely beautiful variant on the trend with his quest to capture ever larger wet plate photographs. “I didn’t just build a camera. I created a time machine.”

These posters represent some of the best thinking in branding. A...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:50:23 -0700

These posters represent some of the best thinking in branding. A visual identity should provide only a cue, be it an artifact, a plot point, or a character trait. We just need the simple cue to let our imagination do the rest of the work. In fact, research has shown that we enjoy graphic identity more when our brain is engaged piecing together the story from the cue.

explore-blog:

From Rapunzel to The Little Red Riding Hood, beloved fairy tales as minimalist posters.