At the start of my career in the early 90s, I interned at a new agency in London called Mustoe Merriman Herring and Levy. I was a wannabe junior planner, so when I met with the planning director, I was determined to learn as much as I could from him.  He passed on this pearl of wisdom about planning that I still remember today. He told me a story about commuting on the train during the winter. It was a dark evening and as his train slowed down to a station, he looked out the window and was able to see into the kitchen of a house near the train tracks.  In the kitchen, a woman stood at the sink doing dishes. The train stopped and he was able to watch her for a moment, and she was singing (maybe to a song on the radio, maybe not). The house was close enough to the train that he was able to see the brand name of the dish detergent she was using.  He ended his story by saying…”that’s planning”.

I thought of that the other day when I came across this wonderful series of short films about the lives of New Yorkers run in the NYT back in the summer of 2009. It showed me that even though we are often looking for big insights or truths that resonate with huge numbers of people, it’s the individual stories within that reveal the gold. The piece is called 1 in 8 million.  A belated Happy New Year from Egg - 2010 has started like 2009 finished, hence the rather late first post of the year!

I thought this week’s Brand Camp cartoon was pretty spot-on  and thought provoking.  It talks about how excited we are about social media as marketers, and yet how little respect we give it as permanent and public representation of our brand.  In many ways the rules and tonality with social media are much more complex than those of more traditional outlets, and should probably be managed as carefully as we fuss over the typeface in our advertising copy.   

On a plane home the other day I saw the documentary “It Might Get Loud” - a film featuring three guitar playing legends - Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. The film shows how each of them were inspired and how their careers unfolded. One story in the movie touched a nerve for me. Jimmy Page was talking about recording the track When The Levee Breaks in an old manor house in the English countryside. They set up the drum kit in the front hall, above which was a vaulted high ceiling. Instead of moving the drums into the main room where the rest of the equipment was, John Bonham started playing out in the hall, quickly realizing that the uniquely high ceiling added a massive amount of “height” to his sound. This created the now legendary drumming sound on that track. Other bands tried to recreate it by recording in elevator shafts.

Loved this for a the marriage between serendipity and a great creative leap. It made me ask- what brands have recently “heightened” their sound in a unique way…and then one for you: what have you done lately to “heighten” what you do?

This post was originally going to be about Tiger Woods and Gillette, following on from the Thierry Henry post earlier in the month, but there’s so much stuff being written about him now, that I find the whole thing depressing.  Far better to be inspired by something that adds height, rather than focus on a guy keeping his head down for the foreseeable future.

Those of you who follow football will be aware of France’s qualification to the 2010 World Cup at the expense of Ireland with a controversial winning goal. The goal came after French star Thierry Henry controlled the ball twice with his hand before crossing to his team-mate William Gallas to tuck it into the net. The London tabloids (bless them) called it the “Hand of Frog.”

Thierry Henry is one of 3 men (Tiger Woods and Roger Federer being the others) who are part of a Gillette global branding campaign. A recent image on the Gillette website in France featured the 3 stars holding the tools of their respective trades. Rather than showing Thierry Henry with a ball at his feet, the picture shows him holding the ball with his “hand of frog”.  As my colleague Ted commented: who should get a raise this year?

1) The creative director or pompous photographer who thought shooting this image with the ball in Henry’s hand was a better idea than placing it his feet.

2) The brand manager who called the agency first thing Monday morning to tell them to fix the site.

3) The producer and post house (web designer…?) that made it look effortless.

Personally, I still think it looks like someone’s chopped his hand off, but that might just be me

The internet as we know it is 40 years old next week. October 29th 1969 was when the first two computers (one at Stanford, the other at UCLA) connected to each other. They were the first two “hosts”. At the end of the following year, there were 13 computers talking to each other and so it goes. The Guardian has a brilliant internet timeline, with milestones of each of the last 40 years. Glancing through it, it struck me how significant the pace of change has been in the last 10 or so years. Each year, something arguably massive emerges (1997 blogging, 1999 Napster, 2001, Wikipedia, 2004, Facebook, 2005, You Tube, 2006 Twitter).  This brings us up to today and a story in AdAge announcing VW’s launch of the new Golf GTI - a car I once owned and absolutely loved.  When the last version of the GTI was launched in 2006, VW spend $60 million on TV advertising.  In 2009, they are launching the new GTI with an app only available on the iPhone, costing them about $500,000 to do it. I love this for a couple of reasons:

1. I’m guessing the correlation between iPhone ownership and VW brand love is pretty strong…so a decent partnership

2. Driving a GTI is like driving a toy car on steroids…a neat creative spin to promote the launch with a driving game

I also just want to see how it works out…what a brilliant case study if it does and a ballsy move by VW.

Ok this is really cool.

I always thought Dyson would be one of those one-hit-wonder kind of guys who had a great revolutionary idea that changed a category that no one had thought about in a long time.  I figured he would have this splash and retreat to count his millions on the tropical island of his choice.  But he has done it again folks, this time re-inventing the humble fan.

So for the twist on this one…no blades…sublime.  He now goes on the list of people I want to have a drink with before I die.  To be able to re-think the mundane and turn it into inspired innovation (which sells at a premium, mind you) is truly a gift.

Kanye West’s brand took a big hit when he misbehaved at the MTV VMAs a few weeks back and he’s been keeping his head down since, even going so far as to cancel a proposed tour with Lady Gaga. But perhaps in a surprisingly frank move today, he released a copy of a short film made by director Spike Jonze, which got a ton of online coverage. The film, called “We Were Once a Fairytale”, is about 7 minutes of Kanye acting like a drunken moron in a club (thereby reinforcing all the things we’re coming to associate with him), then a bizarre bathroom scene where he cuts open his stomach and removes a little troll/goblin/demon mouse character, which promptly kills itself and Kanye sobers up sharpish. It’s definitely a self indulgent piece, but its frank depiction of a drunk and unattractive Kanye must have been some kind of catharsis for the man and surely the exorcism of “his demon” has to be taken at face value. By way of an apology (even if the film was made prior to his MTV shenanigans), it’s a pretty interesting new layer to his brand.

Interestingly enough, as I went to find the video to post, I discovered that it has been removed from the web from all the sites that were hosting it. At Kanye’s blog, he says “sorry I had to take it down:(”.

Any good brand has layers for its consumers to discover - I wonder this most recent one of Kanye’s was a little too much to bear. It’s a shame he didn’t leave that one out there for longer…but perhaps that was the point.

UPDATE: Here it is…back online this morning:

A few weeks ago the CEO of VW North America, Stefan Jacoby, attracted a lot of press for his comments made in an interview in the Washington Post. Herr Jacoby explained that his key goal for the brand was to create more mainstream “North America friendly” fleet of cars that honored the different driving experience we have here (vs. Europe). He got a lot of stick after the interview for comments about better cup holders and entertainment systems. Basically VW brand fans were afraid that this vision would lead to a dilution of what they love about VW - i.e. that the brand would become more blah, less unique and less “imported”. I’m one of those people. I only have to look at Saab to see a European brand that’s been denigrated with a more North American approach to design and manufacturing.

Further enhancing my brand snobbery, I came across this set of viral films created by DDB Stockholm, sponsored and supported by VW. No doubt about it, this is the spirit of VW that I like and which draws me to their brand. Lovely idea, well executed, nice message and one which seems in keeping with what I associate with VW (good design ideas for the people). Piano Stairs is my favorite:

While I’m at it, this is my favorite  VW spot from their UK agency DDB London. It’s a couple of years old, but I could watch it over and over. Another perfect example of their brand voice. I’m hoping that with the change in corporate direction and the upcoming change in agency partner, that this voice is never lost.

The consistently good Brand Mix pointed me in the direction of a great article in the New Yorker about the psychology of delayed gratification.  Experiments were conducted with 4 & 5 year old kids where they were given the choice to eat a marshmallow immediately or if they could wait 15 minutes, they could have two.  See this hilarious video example of it in action.  Psychologists stumbled on the theory that those kids who were better at delaying gratification became more successful in later life (as measured by academic and career success, wealth etc..).

It made me consider whether there are brands today that could be considered to be delayed gratification brands? By this I mean brands that increase in value because we have to wait before we get to use them. I found it really hard to generate a list, mainly because we can pretty much have what we want when we want it today. Even a brand like Starbucks with its new VIA coffee ensures that you can have a great cup of coffee even when you’re nowhere near a cafe.

Apart from serious luxury goods, the only things we typically crave but can’t immediately have are either distributed on a limited basis OR have not yet launched (like a new movie not yet in theaters, a new iPhone not yet on the market). Even big ticket items like cars and vacations are easily accessible to anyone with a decent credit rating. What brands these days have created greater value by making their customers delay gratification?

I love the Evian couture bottle program. With the proliferation of bottled water brands that span the market from packaged tap water to luxury designer water, there is a natural comparison between bottled water and fashion.

Fashion sells textiles at extreme markup through design. Doesn’t Voss, Bling2O, Antipodes and other ‘Fine Waters’ do the same thing? Evian is clearly keeping a foot in this trend.

Here are some of the Evian designs so far. The latest one by Paul Smith is definitely my favorite.

I came across the photographer Fred Herzog a few years ago and loved a retrospective of his work shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. Walking through the airport the other day, I came across this shot, showing a bunch of kids at a corner store and the obligatory retro style ads for Coca-Cola. The one I loved was for 7-up, with the fabulous message “You Like It..It Likes You”. Six words that basically sum up the goal of online brand relationship building. From 1960.

From a business point of view, the last year has essentially been about the economy and what we were once told was the worst recession since the Great Depression. I’ve long held the belief that the depth of recessions are manifestations of our own fears, i.e. we’re told there’s a big recession, so we slow our spending and boy, wow, we’re suddenly in a recession. I’m not discounting all the significant economic indicators, but I believe false pessimism leads to a deeper hole than one we might originally have been in.  So I was interested and chagrined to see this graph, courtesy of the Societé Générale which shows how economists are largely far more optimistic about recessions than the reality.

As James Montier, the author of the report wrote, “when you look at their record, it’s clear that the three blind mice have more credibility”.  A question I’ll pose now and try to answer later is this…if economists can be this wrong about predicting future behavior, how about brands?