2Scoops has generated mountains of press already and there's still more coming in. Like this BBC article. Not bad for a song we originally penned for our client, Credit Canada.

Through the use of social media and the song we have been able to spread Credit Canada's message well beyond the confines of a traditional media flight.

The note below is from Daisy McLean, of Two Worlds Entertainment - Michelle's manager.

OK, so when I received the politely structured email from BBC I could hardly believe my eyes. Could they please have a picture of Michelle to publish alongside and article the editor was writing about the music industry, (I believe I sent them ALL my pictures). And today I received my long awaited copy of the magazine. Forgive me for having written all over it, I was excited.

"could be a name we'll be hearing more from in the future" -- Oliver Moreland, BBC Focus

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Bill Bernbach forever changed the advertising agency business by knocking down the wall between the copy and art departments and forming the copywriter and art director team. It only made sense at the time and it became the impetus for the agency creative revolution that followed.

But are those days coming to an end?

In the past, the art director had to know things, such as the litho process, marking up type, marker rendering, mechanical art production, etc. These were important trade skills that not just anybody could do. But many of these practices have disappeared due to technology. And whatever’s left are now software applications that anybody can learn.

As more of these practices and disciplines become digitized and commoditized, the once proprietary trade skills and knowledge set of the art director are diminishing.

The copywriter isn’t fairing much better. As information and entertainment becomes ubiquitous, copy - let alone long copy - is disappearing. Attention is at a premium and the demands are that communication be short, simple and understood across media channels and cultures.

Rather than execution, the creative idea has always been the most important thing. Yet, in most copywriter/art director relationships, it’s typically only one of the two that consistently delivers ideas. Often, the idea partner is also equally adept at both copy and art.

Then there’s the cost. Two salaries. Two expense accounts. Two benefits packages. Two yearly reviews and expected raises. Two of everything.

The system is no longer efficient, effective, or valid. As with so many other things, technology is making it redundant.

In this day and age, doesn’t it make more sense that an advertising idea person is teamed with a technology person?

We think so and that’s what we’re doing. We team a strategic planner with a creative idea person and a technology person in what we call a cell. The cell is the key contact and collaborator with our clients. Integration is achieved at the point of planning and each person in the cell is free to collaborate with whoever they need to execute. This is the foundation of our structure and what we believe is a more relevant model for the 21^st century. We also recognize that not many agencies can do this. Especially the large ones, organized as they are around silos.

For example, a former protégé of mine who is now working for a large, well known agency as a creative director, recently lost his art director partner. To replace him and to try something new he suggested to management that he be paired with the creative director of their digital silo. Everybody thought that would be a good idea, until it dawned on them that both are responsible for their own profit and loss, as well as the management of their respective silos and disciplines, making it impossible.

Large agencies are too heavily invested in the old way of doing things and find it difficult enough to experiment, let alone change. In fact, they’re addicted to building silos. As soon as a new discipline, or way of making money is identified, up goes a silo.

The main problem with silos are the walls. Silos force everything through the lens of their own particular discipline. Insulated from the real world, the idea serves execution, rather than vice versa. And miraculously, all client problems can be solved by the thinking inside each particular silo alone.

Is this the best way to serve client needs and solve their problems efficiently, creatively and fast? How can the product coming from this antiquated organizational structure be called integrated, when any sort of integration happens not at the point of planning, but instead is cobbled together sometime after the fact?

More importantly, wasn’t it these very same walls that Bill Bernbach demolished fifty odd years ago, heralding the first creative revolution in advertising?

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The word brand as it’s used today has become so ubiquitous it’s lost most, if not all meaning. From individuals, to rock bands, to countries, to religious and political ideologies – all now called brands – one has to wonder what brand really means anymore.

Even prototype products, yet to be named, are regularly called brands.

The brand concept began in Sweden in the middle ages. A brand was a unique symbol burned into the flesh of a domestic animal to signify ownership. The branding iron wasn’t the brand, the mark on the animal was. And branding was the action taken to create the mark. The word “brand” is actually a degenerate of the old Norse word “brandr.” The Vikings may have spread the word “brandr” in England, where it was eventually incorporated into the language.

The meaning of a brand was later registered in the dictionary in 1552 as “An identifying mark made by a hot iron.” (online etymology dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper)

During the mid 19th century, the word brand began to be lightly used to differentiate products. However, the vast majority of products remained trademarks, labels, patents, etc., gradually becoming known as “name brand” or brand through the 20th century.

Then as today, there remained philosophical confusion in the meaning of brand, does a brand exist solely as a product, or does it exist solely in the customer’s mind, or both?

In 1960, Theodore Levitt who was then a lecturer in business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote an article called “Marketing Myopia.” In the article Levitt claimed that “Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing custom-creating value satisfactions.” Sound familiar to today’s mainly online idea of consumer customized products? Levitt claimed that firms that define their business myopically in product terms can stagnate even though the basic customer need they serve is enjoying healthy growth. His key contribution was based on defining the business in terms of the classic customer need rather than the product.

Although smart and insightful, Levitt was probably riffing on another man’s work. In 1954, Peter Drucker’s “The practice of management” placed marketing at the centre of the organization and proposed what became known as a marketing philosophy of business − “Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.”

In 1980, Trout and Ries published their thoughts in “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.” The concept “starts with the product…but it is not what you do to the product…but what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.”  In other words, branding takes place in the customer’s mind.

Again, Peter Druker, in his 1973 book “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices” wrote that “…because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two-basic functions: marketing and innovation…There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then, is to make the product or service available.”

(Sounds like the inspiration for Alex Bogusky and John Winsor’s book, ‘Baked-In,’ where they more-or-less claim this as a new and revolutionary idea).

Today, branding is mostly thought of as adding value to a product. It’s rarely seen as an investment. It’s mostly seen by CEO’s and CFO’s as a luxury and accounted for as a cost. Therefore, when times are tough, it’s the first cost to be cut.

The problem is, branding isn’t optional and doesn’t go on vacation. If you don’t create your brand in the audience’s mind, they will do it for you.

The admired corporations, whether knowingly or unknowingly, have taken Peter Druker’s advice that a brand as the marketing object “…is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view” and therefore view the brand as the central business idea and the impetus for everything the company does. This viewpoint breeds success.

Smart marketers should abandon the looser, and less useful meanings of the word “brand”, and focus instead on the one with the greatest potential to support their efforts in building their business.

That is, branding is a verb. It is the consistent, continuous and single-minded creation of a unique concept in the prospect’s mind, based on fulfilling rational and emotional needs. Therefore, a brand is not a product, it is an evolving concept in the customer’s mind.

Reposted from Reason Partners

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