September 05, 2008

Horse Power #51: Online Branding discussion with Stanley Hainsworth, Gene Keenan, Rob Bynder, and David LaPlante

In this episode of Horse Power, Rob Bynder, Stanley Hainsworth, and Gene Keenan discuss the role of design in branding and how that relates to global business with Twelve Horses CEO, David LaPlante. It was a really interesting discussion and was held in the library up at Sierra Nevada College on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Listen to the full audio recording of the talk or read the full transcript below.

For more great events from the Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AIGA, see renotahoe.aiga.org.

AIGA Online Branding Panel Discussion

(Fade In)

Gene Keenan: That or the concert or whatever and turn that into a participatory experience, using the mobile phone and creating a positive branding experience for the brand with the consumer. And the key to that is creating utility or usefulness for that consumer.

In other words, it’s not about serving up an ad or serving up like a message. It’s about bringing value to that consumer’s life. That’s what’s going to bring, that’s what’s going to make a positive impact on the brand and make a consumer remember that brand for the rest of their life.

Like an example, I haven’t pulled this example out in years, but something we did a long time ago, for Motorola in Times Square, probably like five years ago, we did a simple thing where people could text messages, calls to each other on a board in time square, using their mobile phone. We had 12 marriage proposals in the 24 hours, 36 hours that that board was up.

This is an experience that those people are going to remember for the rest of their lives. It’s a positive brand experience.

David LaPlante: So where do you find your brand inspiration right now, internal, external, what’s got you jazzed up there. Who’s doing good work, what makes your jaw drop and go that’s cool?

Rob Bynder: To me it seems like the question to branding to what end, because it’s easy to have I’m not knocking the kind of stuff you’re doing, because it’s actually really, really cool. But one of the questions I always ask my clients is branding to what end.

Remembering a brand is important, but acting on the brand is really the goal, right? Hopefully people continue to buy Motorola phones or it means something to them.

Gene Keenan: If they continue to make more Motorola phones, which is debatable. (Laughter).

Rob Bynder: You can have that one.

David LaPlante: There’s one we should come back to. Because there’s Motorola at the top of its game the razor, defined the mobile industry. The brand is in the toilet. Let’s save that and come back to that.

Rob Bynder: I think you could say you see that a lot. It’s happening really easy. You could go straight to Apple and say everything they do is golden. They run their brand very well. I can refer to them any time I want to think about how to do something well. I think I can refer to them. Maybe for the last, not all the time. But maybe the last five years.

David LaPLante: Starbucks, you also have to say what you didn’t like about the Starbucks brand.

Stanley Hainsworth: I admire the like you were saying, it’s the brands that have the staying power. Some brands have come out and they made a big hit. And whether their product is differentiating in the marketplace or their advertising is incredible, but it’s the staying power that’s tough for brands.

Brands have been around for 50 years or 30 years and they go through all the cycles. They might have been the industry leader. They might have been the innovator they came out with a product that no one else or did it in a way that no one else did it. But then the competitors or the wannabees, they copy and so how do you continually evolve as a brand? How do you continually reinvent yourself but keep that core that you had intact? Which helped define you in the first place. And one brand that I’ve always admired is Corning. Corning is one you don’t think a lot about as a brand.

But they did dishware, started in 1908 as glassware, innovative glassware is what they started at. Corning is mostly what we know them for, for their glass dishware. Now they make fiberoptic out of glass.

So they kept their core. It’s about innovative glass things, but that’s always been their expertise. But 70% of their business now is in things that didn’t exist five years ago. So they couldn’t have predicted where they’re going to go. And so I admire brands like that that can stay alive and keep reinventing themselves and a company like Starbucks is in that point right now.

How do they reinvent themselves? They’re going through a tough time right now. I was at Nike during two big lay offs and things looked very dire for a while there. That’s when Reebok was a big competitor. They came out with remember the white aerobic shoes. That was like a huge thing. (Laughter) and Nike missed that whole boat. They smeared that.

So Puma was huge. Where is Puma now?

Gene Keenan: Everywhere.

Stanley Hainsworth: So admire those brands that know who they are, that have defined their core and are able to keep that core intact while continually tacking with the wind as it moves.

Rob Bynder: I think related to that is the ability to know that there’s a difference between a superficial aspect of a brand and really maintaining their brand. Whereas, I don’t want to jump the gun on the whole Motorola, jumping back to it, but if they can’t execute, if they can’t continually execute up to their brand promise, no matter how good the advertising is, the brand fails. Because they’re really not living up to the brand promise. So it’s a lot more than sort of the superficial marketing of it. It is can you run your business like Corning possibly, and a lot of other companies, and not screw up the delivery of the rest of the brand promise, product design, delivery, customer service, all these other brand mentions.

Stanley Hainsworth: Fun to see some of these brands that have been hot recently, you know like Method is one that a lot of people talk about. And Erica speaks at every other conference. They’ve done great work, brought innovation into a boring space, previously boring. But you know the things they’ve done like online that People Against Dirty, you saw that website. We can go in and write little confessions and then the hands wash, have you seen that, anybody.

I mean it’s great. It’s addictive. And it’s very much supports their brand promise as well. So it will be fun to watch brands like that to see how they can continue to evolve.

David LaPlante: Gene, what are you liking out there?

Gene Keenan: What do I like? I’m going to take an easy answer. I think the stuff I admire, we just won Walt Disney, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching television, watching a lot of movies. I think the movie industry is interesting constantly have to be innovating, creating great product, whereas a lot of brands like Motorola, for instance, they could skate by. They came out with the razor. Rather than improve the razor, they diluted the quality of the brand by reducing the price of the product and not, instead of putting, instead of taking that money and putting it back into making the product better, they just went to the route and sold trillions of them, not trillions but millions and millions of them.

Look at the entertainment industry, boy, if you’re not producing a great product, you’re out of business instantly. And I think that’s one of the things Walt Disney is trying to do. Walt Disney is actually trying to create a brand around their whole film franchise.

So, for instance, you typically don’t think: Oh I can’t wait to go see the latest Paramount release or latest MGM release. You’re thinking it’s like Will Ferrell, can’t wait to see it. Might have been produced by Disney or Paramount. Disney is actually trying to create a brand around Walt Disney films, which I think is kind of interesting. So they want to create a community around their films and keep consumers engaged across multiple titles, which I think is something that’s really interesting, something that nobody else has done in the entertainment industry. It’s typically been, like, for instance, we do a lot of media planning and buying.

We can work for six different film companies because there’s no conflict of interest. Boy, that light is shining right on me like the spotlight of God. (Laughter) So we can work with a bunch of film companies because there’s no brand there. It’s like you’re promoting a specific film and then it’s gone.

I think what Disney is doing is pretty interesting. They haven’t come to market there with it yet, but I’m going to digress a little bit. One of the things I learned about Disney is they have cut all their fast food they don’t do any single serving restaurant promotions anymore. And they have created food guidelines for all their partners.

So, in other words, if you are a partner of ours, we will not partner with any company that produces super sugary or fatty food or any food that has trans fats in it. Which is a huge departure for Disney, considering they were part of McDonald’s for many, many years. (Laughter) you’ve got the hand over it.

>> Blocking the sun from his eyes.

Gene Keenan: I think it’s interesting that Disney in my mind has always had this family wholesome image they’re trying to live up to that brand promise now by saying you know what we’re not going to partner with companies that are causing obesity in our children, or causing poor health in our audience. I think that’s really noble of them.

David LaPlante: So let’s crank this down to, we’ve all dealt with this situation, either it’s a client or it’s someone, the CEO or someone, organization that can’t get past self referential branding. If it was up to me everything would be put through the filters of skis and bikes and gadgets and that’s the way the whole world should be. And you’re dealing with that client that says: Well, I like red wine and everyone else on the planet likes red wine.

And that’s going to be it. And they don’t listen to the audience. They don’t listen to you. I know, and I’m looking at faces that I know have felt this pain. How do you fight that? How do you get past this self referential marketing?

Gene Keenan: And everybody thinks they’re a comic brand when they’re not?

David LaPlante: Yes. There’s only a handful of those you may have come across one. War stories around this or it’s just changing a brand, changing a paradigm, you’ve got to change people’s minds on that. War stories and tips and techniques on fighting that battle. I know you’re itching to go on this.

Stanley Hainsworth: I’ve worked a lot with internal clients on this, and a company like Nike, we worked from the kids division to the golf to the basketball, and they’re as different, almost as different companies. The audience is so different. And then Starbucks you have the entertainment division, and you have coffee and you have food and car groups, very different kinds of clients.

And there’s a lot of personal taste involved on the client side. And so I think I was able to successfully block a lot of that without being harsh about it because someone says I don’t like green. And so that’s why they’re not going to approve the creative that you show them.

It’s about training your clients how to write good briefs. And then letting them know that you’re going to stick to that brief is going to be your bible you’re going to go with. So any comments will always filter back to the brief. It’s forcing them to think up front and be strategic and really figure out what they want before, because many clients use creative as a means of developing their strategy. Because when they see it, they start seeing it. They’re saying oh, that doesn’t work, I didn’t really mean that.

So we did a lot of training, client training on how to write briefs, how to respond to creative, when we present creative to them. We do everything like role playing and all those things. Put themselves in our shoes and all that so that they could see that if someone says: You know what, I just don’t it just doesn’t feel right. If that’s their feedback, well that’s not very helpful. We don’t know what to do with that.

They need to run it, again, through the brief.

Gene Keenan: Needs to be edgier.(Laughter).

Rob Bynder: Make it more designed.

Stanley Hainsworth: So I would say as a we were talking a little bit about this, creatives are some of the more strategic people that I’ve ever met. And the reason why is because their job is to put together disparate things and make them all funnel together in one message to the consumer.

You might be handed 10 things, didn’t really have much to do with each other. You had to make a campaign around it or website around it, whatever it is. So we tell stories that are at our core. We are storytellers, we have to figure out what the story is. So I find that creators are very strategic. Standing up to clients in a way that let them know we’re strategic thinkers and that we can be their partner on the business side. And that’s the conversation we were just having right before this, is some designers fall into the trap of kind of making fun of clients. It’s like they don’t understand type faces and that stuff. They don’t get creative. That’s not a good thing.

We have a lot to offer each other. And the only way we’re going to get to the real result is in problem solving which is what we do for a living, we solve problems, is by both of us living in each other’s shoes and understanding each other and helping each other to get to that solution.

That was like a lecture, wasn’t it?

Gene Keenan: I thought it was really good, completely. Very empowering. We hear it all the time at work. We always want to make our clients wrong, like they just don’t understand. Or I can’t get them to understand. It’s a disempowered situation for both sides because you walk away from a situation rather than trying to solve that problem. Or you’ll say I don’t want to work for this client anymore, or I want to get transferred, or whatever and I quit my job and go work for somebody else.

David LaPlante: Do you have a good story for that?

Gene Keenan: No but it happens yeah, I had that come up in my work all the time. Like I was talking to Colleen about it. Girlfriend Colleen about it the other night, who is there in the audience, about how I just don’t want to work on this one client. They just don’t understand. They want to hire us as advisors but they don’t want us to be advisors because they want to control everything we do. And I haven’t found, it’s like a Rubics cube and I haven’t been able to solve it.

Rob Bynder: We try to do research because everybody has opinions. And a lot of clients actually surprisingly have not done research. Some of the bigger ones have, but a lot really haven’t. One of my clients is AEG. Has anybody heard of them? They’re based in Denver. They own half the world. Never heard of them but they control everything you do. They own Staple Center down in Las Vegas and half The Kings and the major league soccer league. They either own or run about 20 other venues around the world.

So we went in to do the Staple Center website and the creative director said, I drive a Harley Davidson and I love that website. And you know I hang out on it and write stories on it and I go there every single day and that’s what this website should be like. We had to come back and say, look, there’s a reason that’s not the right solution. Maybe it’s a good idea but it’s not the right solution here.

What we did we did a little bit of solution, we used a lot of common sense and experience, but we did a little bit of research and looked at what the people were using the current Staple Center website for. Which is pretty obvious what they’re doing. They’re researching events. They’re buying tickets, they’re researching parking and they’re gone in 15 seconds. I mean it’s literally like a 15 to 30 second transaction. People are not hanging out. They don’t go to the Staple Center website to interact with that brand.

They don’t care about the venue. They like it. They have a good time there. They care about the Lakers or Garth Brooks or whoever the heck is playing there, right? They want to interact with that. We had to come back and sort of prove to them, or at least lay our case on the table and say, no, we really don’t think that’s it. What’s your product? Your product is events. Let’s sell your events. Let’s not sell the community. People have their own community.

Lakers have their website, their community is happening there, why redo it. So we try and fall back we try and use research and sort of common sense as much as we can. And train them to think about creative and think about briefs and goals.

David LaPlante: So there’s this guy Clay Shirke who writes a lot of crazy stuff out there. Doesn’t get into branding but talks about how things are shaking up, everything is getting weird out there, all these gadgets and technology, all these super smart people. Google has leveled the world. And so he wrote this blog post. Getting a ton of discussion out there right now. And I’m just going to read a little bit about him, kind of use that to set the stage. Then we’ll take it off to the audience.

He said: “I was recently reminded of some of the reading I did in college way back in the last century by a British historian arguing that critical technology for the early phase of the Industrial Revolution was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life is so sudden and so wrenching that the only thing society could do was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing. There were gin push carts working their way through the streets of London.” He goes on and on to talk about how for a whole generation everyone was drunk on gin, nothing happened.

Gene Keenan: Nothing’s changed.
(Laughter)

David LaPlante: He uses that to talk to the world that we’re just emerging out of, saying, you know, television and radio in this one to many noninteractive, we sit around on our couches, our couch potato generation, our fathers and to us many of us for a while, that was our gin of marketing media and branding in that generation.

Now we’ve got gadgets. I’m sitting here I can send Flickr photos up to you. I can Twitter you and U stream you and do a kick video. You’re bad mouthing me in the background, I can hit my Twitter page see what you’re saying about me. People in the Twitter world asking me to ask you guys questions. It’s getting real weird out there. There’s design and brand principles. There’s still print. There’s still all that, but it’s getting weird. What do you guys see, how is that changing your world? Are you excited? Where are you taking advantage of that? Where are we going? Give these guys the spotlight. Start with the gadget guy.

Gene Keenan: Gadget guy, I’ll give you the company line. Our company line which I think is accurate, and you probably heard this before, that brands are losing control, because the brands are really a reflection of the consumer. The consumer controls the brand. And if you go to a site, say you’re going to buy a vacuum cleaner, for instance, you go to a vacuum cleaner site. You see a bunch of glowing reviews about the vacuum cleaner. It’s probably going to be bullshit, but if you go to a blog site and you read a review about that vacuum cleaner you’re probably more than likely to believe that.

And so we have this saying: The brands will win are those whose consumers tell the best stories about those brands. And I think that is so true because in this online world where we’re in this digital world where we are so connected as you were just talking about, you can’t lie to people anymore.

It used to be you could like put together a campaign. You could do a TV spot. You’d hit the whole world, and you could lie about what your product could do and what it couldn’t do.

You cannot lie anymore. We’re in a world where truth prevails 24/7. And there are no secrets anymore. And I think that in a clam shell.

>> Nutshell.

>> Nutshells are bigger.

>> Let’s go with scallop. So I think that is so true. So you look at the videos that just got released of that poor kid in Guantanamo Bay or what happened with the guy who shot Saddam Hussein being hung just terrible thing was happening to him on an old camera, on a little cell phone camera, video camera. That got out to the world, because there are no hidden places anymore.

And so we have to be really careful about what we say. Authenticity and truth is what is going to make us survive and make our clients survive or our brands survive. Like I was talking to my boss the other day, and we were doing this we were doing a campaign. It didn’t go that good. How can we spin it. You know what she said to me? We can’t spin it. We have to tell the client the truth, and we have to say this is what happened and this is why we think what happened. We can’t say like, oh, we knew this was going to happen because of X, Y and Z. We just have to be really honest with our clients.

And our clients have to be really honest with their consumers.

Stanley Hainsworth: Along the same lines, I did a fun presentation in San Diego where I forced myself I wasn’t going to use any imagery that I had. It was just going to be a reflection off I just did screen grabs of how a consumer I started with myself. I kind of Googled myself, and I did screen grabs of that. And I did all the companies that I’ve worked for, Nike, Lego, and Starbucks to show we can put things out there but in the end it’s the consumers who are going to form their own opinion of what the company is.

And as I think about brands that have created communities, Harley Davidson, Lego, other brands who have created communities that exist outside of those brands.

And they have there’s a whole life outside of the brand. And communities and you can generate or facilitate experiences and hope that they catch fire and you can do something online and hope that it gets picked up. But in the end it might be some YouTube video that is a fan of yours but nothing you did actually has much more impact than a multi million dollar campaign that you did.

So it’s such an interesting world right now. I am so excited about it. I embrace all of that technology. And I think they’re just more tools for brands to use to create the community and tell their story, because in the end that’s all that brands are. They’re telling a story. They’re creating an emotional connection.

Gene Keenan: Sounds like a dream.

Stanley Hainsworth: Creating an emotional connection between the consumer product and experience.

Rob Bynder: I hate to think, though, when brands start catching on and they are about doing it in a very inauthentic way, planting a row and pretending it’s real. Or going out and soak a river that’s so underground pretending this is a community.

Gene Keenan: I’ve got to tell you they get busted. It happened to us like six or seven years ago. We tried to do a whisper campaign when we went online to like blog sites and community sites started posting things check out this show or check out this product.

I gotta tell you, there are people out there, because it happened to us, they trace back the they look at the poster. They trace back the ID address, they look at actually where that posting is coming from and they tell the whole world.

Rob Bynder: That’s awesome.

>> That’s what I’m saying, you can’t

>> But what kind

>> You can’t be unethical anymore.

>> What damage does that do to your brand.

Gene Keenan: The brand wanted to do it because they thought they could be smarter than everybody else. Like we were just working in a chop shop. And we were just doing what the brand asked us to do.

Rob Bynder: But you know the whole other the whole social networking aspect of that, and twitter is sort of one thing, but the idea used to be that you make a website and then you get links and you get people to come back to your website. And what’s happening now is that really you build a website and then what you try to do, which I’m just trying we’re working on remax.com right now. So we went to them with this great idea. We thought it was fantastic.

Facebook apps, MySpace pages, Facebook pages. Google apps. Widgets. All these things that are out there that are small representations of the website and the brand online, and rather than expect links to come back to the website, take chunks of the website and put it

Gene Keenan: There are no websites anymore. It’s the brand consumers are allowed to take the brand wherever they want to. If you have a widget, it’s like something we did. I’m sure other companies have done it. But I’m just going to use this example, which is Nike ID, a site where you can go on and create a custom shoe. We create a widget so anybody can take that widget and put it on their school site. They can put it on their facebook page. So you could create shoes on that site wherever it was and you could buy those shoes directly to that widget.

Rob Bynder: That’s right.

Gene Keenan: And the thing is, my phone, like my iPhone, like the 2.0 version of the iPhone had the apps one of the apps I downloaded called app page 1. They have an online version of it started online app page one. What it does it allows me to aggregate all my different websites that I would normally go to, it’s all personal financial stuff.

Like etrade, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. My United account. Like 12 different sites. I can aggregate it all into my own personal website so I don’t need to go to the individual websites anymore. I go to a website that I’ve created.

It’s the idea of like my Google. You go to the Google page. There’s all these different widgets. Create your own home page by pulling in all these feeds from different sites.

>> Net vibes is a great one, too.

>> Net vibes. Or

>> [Inaudible].

Gene Keenan: Yeah, and I think the future is all about contextual perception. And I think Pandora is a fantastic site application. You go on who has used Pandora?

Stanley Hainsworth: Lastfm.

Gene Keenan: That’s another good one. Pandora is a site you can go to, you do a search for an artist. Do a search for The Kinks. It will play a Kinks song. You can say I love that song or don’t love that song. If you don’t love that song, it will pick out artists that are similar to The Kinks within that genre you like. You keep saying yes or no, yes or no. And it creates a recommendation engine. Essentially creates your own personal radio station. For instance on I Pandora, iPhone if I had a 3G phone I could literally plug it into speakers and have my own personal radio station that I created because of my preferences in my car, party, no matter where I go my personal radio station based on my preferences being generated on the fly because of my musical preferences. I didn’t have to create a play list. It understands what I like and generates that play list automatically for me.

David LaPlante: Last question. I want to get

Stanley Hainsworth: One quick on Nike ID. One interesting insight on that. When I was at Nike there were sneaker freaks that would take Nikes and customize them. Combine a golf shoe put the flap on a basketball shoe and color them up and all those things.

So that’s another example of a community developed. Nike watched that community and they said oh, customizing sneakers, so they developed

Gene Keenan: Developed their own sneakers. We have kids lining up. It’s like I have friends who own three, 400 pairs of sneakers they’ve never even worn. They keep them in the box or they put them on a shelf. It’s like they’re pieces of art.

David LaPlante: Last question, before wrapping to the audience, with trying to be authentic, it’s hard to have people who don’t know what they’re writing about be truly authentic. Google controlling your page one Google results, your digital identity is your page one.

The personal brand has come out of the woodwork in the last three years especially. Agencies are looking for personal brands that are congruent with the brands that they have to manage. It’s easy to put a skier in front of a ski resort. It’s easy to put a runner in front of a running company, because there’s no line.

It’s transparent. There’s the passion. There’s the emotion, the connection. That seems to be a trend out there that I’ve observed and I’ve heard dialogue on. Is that something you’re seeing out there and just for the folks in the audience, what are maybe some techniques or tips for managing your personal brands to help snap you to that future brand client?

Stanley Hainsworth: I’m kind of hypersensitive about it right now, as I go from my identity being tied closely with brands. With like Starbucks, Nike, Lego, to creating my own brand and my own agency. And as I start as I choose which clients to work with, that starts forming who you have become, the personality of your agency. And so there’s, it’s interesting it’s a combination of survival. We want to take jobs for money. But that job that you do might not be something that fits with your brand personality that you want to develop.

So it’s interesting going through that right now. And also before I was in the business of promoting other brands, now I’m promoting my own brand and my assistant the other day just called me narcissistic because it’s all about blogging now, and self promotion.

And that’s what we have to do to be heard and to develop your brand, because as you said it’s just, someone just goes on Google and looks you up. It’s not only what you put out there but it’s what others put out there about you. You go and speak at a conference and you’re really lame. Well, that’s up there. Someone’s commented about that.

And maybe that’s a client deciding whether to use you or not. So every move you make is part of your that’s why when I used to when I worked with brands, I always use the analogy of a person, a brand is a person and everything that you do reflects on you as a brand and the way you the person the way the hairstyle they choose or the clothes they choose or the way they talk, the way they interact with people, that all reflects on who you are and the opinions that people form about you.

The same with the brand, everything you do, online, off line, whatever you do reflects back.

Gene Keenan: I don’t know if I have anything to contribute. I’m going to digress and go to a tangent of mine.

David LaPlante: So Gene Keenan got the mobile industry off the ground in the U.S. with a rag tag crew. But sometimes people wouldn’t remember his name, but they would always remember he’s the guy with the scarf.

Gene Keenan: I’m not wearing a scarf. I’m wearing an oink T shirt instead which was three minute music download site before it was shut down. So what was I going to say? Personal brand. Personal brand, I think about me Gene Keenan, personal brand, my stuff, what am I interested in and I’m a conglomeration of brands, right, and I think about how I use brands. For instance, the example I was giving on my cell phone. For me everything is contextual, like what communities do I want to belong in or belong to. And how did different brands fit in. There’s different communities within those different brands that I have specific affinities to. Right?

So, for instance, what’s an example? So say I’m into wine. I have an affinity for a specific wine site. I’m part of that community, but there’s specific people that I’m interested in having relationship with on that site.

It’s all part of this big wine site brand. But within that site, within that brand I’m only having an affinity with specific things. For instance, if you look at you’re talking about how great Apple is. I may only have an affinity for Apple when it comes to the iPhone, right? But I’m really not interested in their computers or iPods or anything else.

But that’s not true, really. (Laughter) But I think that’s true for anybody. There’s plenty of products or brands I can think of that I have an affinity for that I have no interest in anything else they do. And I don’t even know where I’m going with this. (Laughter).

Stanley Hainsworth: Tires or

Rob Bynder: It’s interesting being defined by brands. Your personal brand is being defined by other brands than you’re associated with.

Gene Keenan: Say that again.

Rob Bynder: Your personal brand is defined by the brands you associate with. In other words, I’m defined

Gene Keenan: Absolutely. Because even like there’s a mobile marketing company out there that is they have their idea is you know what a ring back tone is, when somebody calls you there’s a music track playing instead of a ring. So this mobile marketing company came up with the idea we’re going to allow consumers to make money on their ring back tones instead of having to pay for the ring back tones.

The way it works you sign up, go online and choose brands that you have an affinity towards. For instance, I have an affinity for Apple, maybe BMW, BW, or like General Mills, whatever the brands are. I choose the brands I have an affinity for, when people call me they hear marketing messages that are personalized by me about Apple or General Mills. Because you may think it’s awful, but

Rob Bynder: It’s awful. (Laughter).

Gene Keenan: We’ve done research with teens. And teens have come up with this idea themselves, because they don’t want to be advertised to, but they don’t mind advertising to their friends.

Rob Bynder: They don’t know (Laughter).

Gene Keenan: I think it’s funny.

David LaPlante: All right. We’re at a good point to get some audience participation. I meant to say I’ve got a present. They went thrift shopping today. I got you a new one. I want to make sure you compete with Stanley.

If you do go to Stanley, you’ll find many, many mentions of the hair. Great aspect of personal branding. (Laughter).

Transparency. Authenticity. This is the game today. So Jeff, Derek, you guys want to help with the audience figuring out

Questions of the panel?

Audience 1: So we talked a lot about these big brands that you’re kind of pushing to the online space, but it seems like a lot of the newer start ups are leading with that as opposed to building their brand and then taking it online.

What are like the pitfalls and things to watch out for because it’s so transparent? You don’t really know where it’s going to go. You don’t know how it’s going to take it. How do you help funnel that into the right direction or to the right area.

Rob Bynder: Can you be more specific about one of these new brands? Just doing a pure play for the web?

Audience 1: No, no, I’m saying you start up a company regardless if it is a brick and mortar, if it is anything.

David LaPlante: You’re saying they’re starting up a new company?

Audience 1: Exactly.

Stanley Hainsworth: You’re talking like a looped, that’s a company that exists only on the web. But I’m working with a few Silicon Valley start ups like that, and the reason why they were interested in working with me is because they’re interested in building a brand and not just building a website.

So start ups like that have become very conscious of branding, because there’s so many almost identical applications going on right now in the online search space and other places.

So you could it’s interesting taking just take something like Looped, for example, a brand that is about knowing where your friends are on your phone or on your computer.

Can you take that brand, can you figure a way to start extending that into the physical or the nononline space?

Yeah, if you thought about it you could probably it’s about community. It’s about common interests and all those things. So as many brands are moving from physical bricks and mortar into the online space, a lot of the online companies are interested in doing the opposite as well for staying power.

It will be very interesting, Google, you know, there’s no telling where they’re going to end up doing. But pretty much guaranteed it’s not going to be just restricted to the online space because they’re going to have so much money they won’t have to do it.

So I think it’s extremely interesting time we’re in right now.

Rob Bynder: And also to that point, I think as the web is sort of a default marketing channel, the first place I work with a lot of start ups and we don’t print brochures. We don’t do a lot of direct mail like we used to do. We’re doing websites, e mail marketing, campaigns. Based on brand strategies, sound traditional brand strategies. We’re just not going to press quite as much as we used to.

And if we do, we tend to do it after the website is written. All the stuff is written, it’s already there. Sort of flopped from about 10 or eight years ago where it’s the exact opposite. Just make my brochure a website.

Audience 2: It’s true that you have to communicate the web and print and it’s kind of two different communication messages in a sense. I mean it’s all ultimately the same message, but the verbiage is a little bit different. But do you find it more difficult to develop the actual brand platform and the whole design, everything, just starting right with the web? I mean when you don’t have the print and all of the radio and all the media, the traditional media that goes into it like that, where you see and the customer sees or your client will see firsthand the development process and their brand creative and then it’s a little bit easier to transfer into the web, or is it a little bit harder starting at the web and you’re trying to discover your brand.

Rob Bynder: I think you need to start there’s nothing different. The web is just another medium. You need a brand platform. You need a positioning platform. A mission statement. A creative brief. A marketing plan. I mean those are all things and it’s the same thing we’ve been doing for a long time in this industry the web is just a different medium to do it in.

If you don’t do those things you’ll be screwed up on the web or you’ll be screwed up when you get to a brochure. You’ll be screwed up any time you try to manifest that brand if you don’t have that platform, you’ve got nothing.

Gene Keenan: I think it’s a colossal mistake to only do online or I mean depending on the brand, of course. But we work with clients that they have success online. It’s like we’re going to dump all our money online. We’re not going to spend our money on TV, print, radio, anything else because online has been so good. Well, it doesn’t quite work that way.

There’s a, what do you call it when the sum is greater synergistic effect between the media channels that ends up being greater than the individual media channel.

For instance, I work in mobile. Mobile can’t survive on its own unless we’re doing display advertising on mobile sites to drive people to a mobile experience. Mobile is about connecting the different media channels and making them interactive. It’s not so much an individual media channel in itself. Honestly, in my experience off line and print people totally get mobile better than digital people do, because digital people, I think, we’re already have an online experience why do we want to send them a mobile phone. Digital and print people are thinking mobile, my God I don’t have like a static print ad anymore or static TV experience, I can turn it into an interactive experience.

And then maybe they go online. And so I’m digressing again, but I think it’s a colossal mistake to think of like individual media channels I’m going to focus on line or I’m going to focus on print. Really depending on brand, what the strategy is, and what you’re trying to achieve, but keep like I am not a proponent of killing TV. I think TV is going to be around forever in some form.

It might not be the way we watch it today. But TV makes the daily sacrifices of life possible and solves the riddles of our lives. (Laughter)

Audience 2: I feel where this is going, you feel like your creative juices flow more with the traditional media, developing those concepts, because when you were mentioning start ups and going maybe straight to online first or maybe that’s all they have and then you’ve missed kind of the rest of the picture which kind of helps in those creative processes. But, yeah, I know, you have to have nice

Rob Bynder: Can’t work in a silo.

Audience 2: No. Yeah.

Audience 3: I really appreciate the very 30,000 foot discussion. Great to have the quality speakers. Thank you guys. I guess to bring it down a couple notches, 10,000 feet, more tactical: If a brand has traditionally been very much we tell you, you don’t tell us and dabbled in blogs and dabbled in the main community or the sub community, one of our communities, [Inaudible] communities, that’s looking at a facebook fan page, perhaps. We’re not sure. What are some of the strategies that makes a facebook fan page successful? Starbucks having several hundred thousand members and is it around a campaign or is it just creating the community and letting it run, or what are some practical how tos on the facebook page. If that is passe, maybe it is, but maybe it is not.

Gene Keenan: For me I think the whole widget thing and facebook stuff, the stuff that’s successful, is the stuff that actually creates news feeds. If it’s a stand alone widget and nobody is going to come back to that widget.

But, for instance, I get facebook updates from my friends. I get updates about specific applications. Whatever widget you create, you have to make sure that you’re creating a news feed so that it spreads virally consistently every single day that somebody interacts with it or whenever that application is updated. If you don’t have that, it’s kind of like you built a field and nobody’s going to come to it because they don’t know about it.

And secondarily, this is more of a strategic thing, I’m going to talk about Nike, because Nike just launched a facebook application called, The Ballers Network, which I think is a spectacular idea. The idea is you can find basketball courts in your area and sign up for a specific time and have other people in the community sign up for those basketball courts also.

So you can do pickup games with people you don’t even know in basketball courts in your community. I think it’s a fantastic idea. Totally wrong place to do it. Facebook is not the place for a basketball player to hang out. They’re on MySpace. Facebook is primarily, hate to say it, but primarily it’s college educated, primarily white demographic. MySpace is much more of a younger demographic, kids who are just look at the genesis of the two sites, right? Facebook came out of Harvard. MySpace came out of very much a grassroots effort, very focused around youth and music.

And so great idea. Bad execution.

Stanley Hainsworth: I think also feel for Starbucks, for instance, for a MySpace page, sometimes they’ll put up a MySpace page just for that, that current campaign or that drink that’s launched, and that gets back to there’s a lot of tentacles out there, they’re doing sampling on the sidewalks and in the stores and creating awareness and they’re doing advertising. So the communication is happening at a lot of levels. And you’re also starting with a fan base.

And there’s a fan base for every brand. And then there’s those that need to be converted as well, and so you tackle those both in different ways.

Gene Keenan: Then there’s those who have a love/hate relationship with the brand, like me.

Stanley Hainsworth: I guess there’s no secret to a MySpace page. But it’s the momentum that gathers and the momentum comes from starting to roll several small rocks down the hill instead of just one big rock. That wasn’t a bad metaphor was it?

Audience 4: Do you have any stats on how many facebook users actually viral applications?

Gene Keenan: How many facebook users what?

Audience 4: The apps, the facebook apps how many are using them, engaging with them, sharing with friends?

Gene Keenan: You know, I’m not the facebook expert within my company. So I can’t give you

Rob Bynder: I think unless it’s Scrabulous they have short shelf lives especially with privacy issues. I think

Gene Keenan: And the spam issues, like a lot of the apps have, there’s spam apps. When you sign up for the app you have to invite like 20 friends.

Rob Bynder: It’s a big deal.

Gene Keenan: Those apps die pretty quickly, because people dis the gap and say get this out.

Audience 4: What’s the secret to a flaming hot facebook app?

Gene Keenan: You have to provide some useful utility. Some stuff like the little green patch app, I get 30 green requests a day. But that app is generating income to buy rainforest. So it’s an app that I’m willing to participate in, even though I know it’s a spam app. It’s providing useful utility in my mind like I’m thinking like I’ve saved a couple of square feet.

And several million other people save a couple square feet. It adds up to some acreage, right? But that utility, has to provide utility.

Rob Bynder: One of the tenets I have for all the websites that we do, all the interactive projects, and I think you could actually apply here, would be is it useful? Is it usable? And is it desirable? And I think you could apply that to any component you do online and say, you know what, that’s going to work. Hopefully it works, hopefully like the 14 year old kids pick up on it.

Gene Keenan: I just downloaded an app on my phone called the Carling Beer app, cool app. What you have to do is navigate a pint of beer across a bar until you get it into somebody’s hand. It’s a cool app, but it only has like three levels and it takes about two minutes to play. And it’s like, all right, done with that one, no reason for me to come back. No reason to believe. As you were saying is it useful, desirable, what was the other one?

Rob Bynder: Useful, usable and desirable.

Gene Keenan: Useful, usable and desirable. I like that.

Audience 4: One other area that’s like a good example.

Gene Keenan: Useful, usable desirable app, there’s tons of them, man. Like on the iPhone there’s one that’s called, it’s actually being burdened because it’s so useful. The yellow pages, the yellow pages app or Ware.

The one I really love is Save Benjis. Save Benjis. For instance, it’s location of where apps for the phone. I use this as an example. I just went to Greece. I was at the Parthenon. I wanted to read about the Parthenon. I pull out my iPhone, fire up Safari browser. Go to Wikipedia, do a search on Parthenon, click on the link. A lot of clicks. With location aware phone I fire up my phone, there’s an app that fires up a geo app, you’re at the Parthenon. Want to read about it. I click on it and I’m right there.

Tons of apps like that. Imagine you’re standing in front of a restaurant, don’t know if it’s any good or not. Location aware. You pull out your phone. You’re right here in front of Starbucks on 4th and Howard. That’s a bad Starbucks. Don’t go to that one go to the one that’s two blocks away or across the street. Right? So it’s all about utility. I mean for the phone there’s tons of apps. Obviously my specialty is phones. So I’m going to talk about the phone.

But online, Colleen, can you think of any good actually you’re not a facebook user, are you?

Colleen: I cannot think of any good online apps.

Gene Keenan: Games are actually good. Like there’s some facebook games that I play.

David LaPlante: I’ve got one. Megan brought it up. If you don’t get clouded by emotion what you’re trying to do is get your brand in front of the motions that are congruent with the motions of your branding folks. So no secret I love skiing and I joined one million strong preskiing in the Olympics, and if your brand is congruent with my brand, and what I’m emotional and passionate about, come on, let’s go mob scene the Olympics and make sure we’ve got some super pipe going on in the next Olympics for us free skiers, the app is out there someone else created it but you have the opportunity to capitalize on that emotional plug.

Audience 5: I want to ask you about TV on the web. About what Revision3 is doing and Twit television where they’re trying to produce programs that are at a much cheaper level and get advertisers to advertise. Do you think IP television is going to succeed?

Gene Keenan: Here’s my form of IP television. We don’t have fast we don’t have big enough pipes in our home. Have you ever played with IP television. It’s like click, change a channel. And tonight is happening. Click, change a channel. And on the next episode is going to be. It’s like the delay is too great. We don’t have big enough pipes in our house yet.

That’s been my experience with IP TV. But watching it online. I watched, there was a story in Ad Age. I think it was Nielsen that did a study that showed that consumers are more than happy to watch advertising before a video or after a video online in order to get the content for free.

It’s considered a fair exchange.

Rob Bynder: I think it’s a great

Gene Keenan: I watch a lot of TV online. Do I? I watch a lot of YouTube online.

Audience 6: I would just say one thing to his point a second ago. Go do Google I have some experience in IP TV. Do a Google over the top video. I think that’s kind of where you’re headed with that question.

There’s some interesting things to your point. The pipe is getting fatter.

You’ve got the cable guys and the phone guys, but AT&T universe and Vios is rolling out pretty successfully across the country. You’ll have choices to Charter here.

David LaPlante: All right. Last question, Mr. Pickett.

Jeff Pickett: I would like Stanley and/or Robert to talk about AIGA and how it’s important to their career and how it’s relevant and important to the design community at large.

Rob Bynder: Who is not a member here? Raise your hand. Stand up. (Laughter).

Go write a check to this guy.

You’re on the board.

Stanley Hainsworth: I accepted a position on the national board recently and so I have a three year stretch ahead of me to give back to the profession. And that’s what AIGA is. I think Leilani and I were just talking today about how lucky we are as a profession to be doing what we do.

You know, it’s really fun what we get to do. And it’s pretty easy. We have to think hard sometimes, but it’s pretty easy work, as work goes. And so it’s so we have a skill set, and as I said before, I think designers are some of the most strategic people, and I think we have a lot to give back to our communities and back to our professions. And one way we can give back to our communities is through our profession. And a lot of pro bono work and all that we do. And AIGA is a professional organization that has a structure for us individually to gather together and do something bigger through the chapter level and then through the national level as well.

So, AIGA isn’t perfect. Neither is any organization. But the way that it’s going to get stronger is by having more passionate members and more members who are willing to give of their time.

And it will only help all of us in networking, education, all the different things that we’re looking for in our profession.

Rob Bynder: You know, I just have to add: I was talking to somebody about this over I forgot who it was, but I’d say 90% of my business has come through connections I’ve made through AIGA. Whether it’s direct referral, directly working with people I’ve met at these events or projects the connections I’ve made through AIGA have built my business for the last five and a half years.

And business is really good. And the question is, you know it’s only as good as you get out of it only as much as you put in. But it’s true. It’s worth every dime. If you only come to two events and disappear back into the woodwork, you’re not doing yourself any favors. It’s a good community. It’s a good way to give back.

Jeff Pickett: Thank you very much, guys.

(Applause).

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