Images via superiorpics.com and brandrepublic.com

I spent the first half of my adult life to date, playing in bands and the second half planning brands, most recently at Zag, the brand ventures division of BBH.

After an awkward adjustment period where I tried to deny all existence of my previous life and its accompanying streaked mullet jpegs, I’ve recently been finding that I actually learned a lot of useful things in those years in the Highbury Garage. Here they are:

# 1 Develop your dynamics

Listen to any AC/DC, song, especially Back in Black and you are listening to a lesson in dynamics. The space, the drums, the shifts, the CRUNCH – you can’t help but be moved by it. Loads of massive rock tracks owe a lot to soft/loud dynamics from Babe I’m gonna leave you to Teenage Dirtbag. Boys in particular like this sort of thing. The laws of rock dynamics are directly applicable to any presentation.  It’s a good discipline to think “where’s the bit where the chords come crashing in?” and “how can I make this section feel more like ACDC?”

# 2  Your brain is a divining rod

Captain Beefheart (RIP) instructed us to “Think of your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over”, Keith Richards said he used to think of himself as an antenna. This is a useful way to think about getting to good insights and ideas. It’s less about thinking hard and more about pointing your divining rod in the right direction…..

# 3 Creativity loves constraints

If you want to get to interesting places pretty quickly then it really helps if you can limit your options. Rather than using PC/Mac based synthesizers with infinite sound banks, my band employed ‘dated’ synths like the Roland 505 which had 2 brilliant sounds and loads of unusable ones. Limited resources often produce better end results too. Just compare the White Stripes’ two piece original of “Fell in love with a girl” with Joss Stone’s 16 piece funk/rock version.

At Zag we’ve found that setting ourselves ‘constrained’ brand invention briefs has lead to better results. One thing we do from time to time is to set “piggy back briefs” along the lines of “Invent a brand that attaches itself to a popular behaviour, has an element of utility/style and is uncomplex to create”. The results have included Bo Peep boot cuffs which went on to be a UK high street phenomenon last year.

#4  Hangovers help (at times)

Hangovers, in my experience, obliterate a lot of the brain’s cognitive reasoning functionality, we can’t reason our way through things in the same linear fashion. This is good if you want really want to know whether you truly believe something is any good or not whether that’s a song, a proposition or a business idea. They are also really good for thinking up brand names.

Images via drummerworld.com and cocainebrain.tumblr.com

# 5 Your Charlie Watts are as important as your Mick Jaggers

The Stones would have been half the band without Charlie Watts, same goes for the Beatles and Ringo, Oasis went downhill after Tony McCarroll left. None of these guys are virtuosos or ‘stars’ but they give the songs and the stars the space they need to breathe properly. Every agency team needs at least one Charlie Watts to make beautiful music together.

# 6 A little ownership goes a long way

Planners often like taking problems off by themselves, pondering deeply and then coming back with ‘the answer’. A lot of songwriters are the same, particularly since sequencers mean you can kind of write all the parts yourself. But the tunes with the most energy in my bands were always the ones where I didn’t present them finished and everyone really put a little bit of themselves into it. Those are the ones which really lift off on stage. Luckily on Zag the planners don’t have much choice here being seated next to talented, interfering types like @stephenwake & @schnuffs…..

And if all else fails:

# 7 Start a beef

Starting ‘beefs’ with higher profile peers is a well-established career strategy in hip hop. 50 Cent has probably done this more effectively than anyone.  In one of his early tracks ‘How to rob’ he raps about robbing a variety of stars including Jay Z, Wu Tang Clan, P Diddy, Busta Rhymes and also Mike Tyson. A lot of them then responded in their own tunes and his profile started to build. You even see this in indie with Eddie Argos from Art Brut bitching about Bloc Party’s more famous Kele Okereke and benefiting from extra publicity. Planners are not generally the most aggressive types so this is a real opportunity to differentiate with minimal risk of actual violence. Pick someone higher profile than you and have a go…

If you made it through this post you may also want to take a look at Dan Hauck’s excellent post here in February on what agencies can learn from labels.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The promo for Dels’ “Trumpalump” looks at the space between fantasy and reality and very cleverly focuses on a line from the track, as the directors behind the promo explain it:

“Our process of generating ideas always starts with the lyrics. With Dels it helps massively that his lyrics create such vivid images, for example in Trumpalump we took inspiration from his line ‘do we dream in colour or black and white?’..” ….ooh, how very Inception.

It’s directed by us, AKA Christopher Barrett & Luke Taylor, double D&AD award winners, who also run their own multi-disciplinary graphic design and branding studio, alongside shooting promos and commercials with Academy Films.

You must watch the promo through to the end, as the more it goes on, the cleverer it gets. Shot on a shoestring, made possible by using mates (the twin girls are friends of Dels) and by doing everything in-camera…no possibility of an Inception-style post prod budget in the promo world these days! And that’s precisely what makes the piece so exciting and inventive. Out goes budget; in comes creativity.

If you like this, check out the Making Of too:

Mintsource is BBH’s internal initiative to provide BBH with an opportunity to seeing fresh, alternative and up and coming talent.  A kind of director’s showcase for the ‘unusual suspects’ in the film directing and animation world.

The title might sound a bit presumptuous, but that’s not the intention. Clearly, there are a huge number of things that music labels can learn from agencies, and indeed most labels are only starting to embrace things that have been commonplace in agencies for years.

Why should anyone listen to an industry that is in such obvious structural and financial turmoil? Well, partly because that’s exactly why the music industry is starting to embrace change where it once ignored it, happy to let the CD dollars roll in. Those days have well and truly gone, and that has brought a realization that if they don’t do something new, they might not be doing anything at all.

But mainly because the particular nature of the music industry has led to certain practices that I believe agencies can learn from. I’ve worked at Sony Music for a year now. We’ve tried to establish some of the basic principles of brand planning into the way in which marketing campaigns are created – proper understanding of audiences, an informed neutral approach to channel planning, artist/campaign propositions, creative briefs, full campaign evaluation etc etc.

In truth, some initiatives have worked better than others. There are factors unique to the music industry that can make planning for bands more difficult than for brands (incredibly short lead times, and the difficulty of working with a living and breathing product, to name two).

But there are also factors particular to this industry that lead a planner in music to a certain type of planning, one which I think can offer some interesting learnings for the discipline as a whole.

1. We have to respond to buying not just liking in real-time

The music industry is arguably more responsive to sales results than any other. Every single day the daily charts are circulated around the office, poured over and talked about. This can lead to some knee-jerk reactions (could you imagine a car brand killing spend on a model launch after 3 days!?), but it also offers a great resource for marketing personnel, giving an immediate measure of not only who likes a campaign (through views, friends, likes, posts etc) but also how many are buying. This allows you to adapt the emphasis of the campaign, and also to build in gateways up front for when different phases of the campaign will kick in (e.g. move into mainstream media once we hit 60k sales).

I’ve been in countless situations as a brand planner where the client has either been reluctant to share sales information, or doesn’t even have access to it themselves. Maybe as brand planners we need to make the case better to our clients that being on top of the hard data can lead to better results.

2.  We have to truly understand the specifics of our audience

Music is a fairly unique category in that almost every member of the UK population is a consumer, but tastes are incredibly varied (compared to, say, toothpaste). Audience demographics are therefore pretty blunt tools; an Olly Murs fan and AC/DC fan may be the same demographically but utterly different in their tastes and habits. So we’ve had to develop lots of ways to get under the skin of our audience; spying on gig crowds, our own music-based social network, a team of regional student journalists. Our biggest tool is a segmentation study that divides the UK population into 28 types of fans.

Looking back on my time as a brand planner, I’m embarrassed to admit that the ‘target audience’ part of my briefs often had the least time spent on them, sometimes just copied from previous briefs. Segmentation studies are understandably derided in agencies, and research is coming under attack from all quarters for leading to standardised work. But there are lots of ways of getting to know an audience, conventional and unconventional. By turning against research in the broadest sense, planning could lose the best tool it has to get to work that genuinely engages.

3.  We need to charm rather than tease

One thing that has struck me about music is how much time and effort goes into engaging certain individuals before the release of a record. Due to the power of radio as a medium, pluggers (and often the artists themselves) spend countless hours buttering up the decision makers at the key stations. Online promotion has become as important as offline and labels will now always give away tracks in the build-up to a key release (called ‘set-up’ tracks) to warm up fans before a release.

Typically on brand campaigns the most done prior to launch is a tease campaign for a couple of weeks. Brands (and therefore agencies) can arguably do more to charm rather than just tease the relevant individuals – product reviewers, cultural commentators, or existing customers – to get them excited and to maximize the buzz at launch. Should there be a ‘charm phase’ built into every plan?

4.  We have to think about how our ideas will move

Music is naturally viral – it’s something that people enjoy together, share with others, and use as an outward expression of their identity. The question for a music campaign is not if a release will spread, but how. We build a number of audience phases into all of our plans based on how – and how fast – we think it will propagate. So for a new guitar band we may start for single 1 in a group we call ‘Living It Live’ (indie-fans in their early 20s who regularly go to gigs), but will plan to move by single 2 and album into a more mainstream segment we call ‘White Collar Radicals’ (early 30s lads who live outside the big towns and love anthemic pub-rock). Each phase will have an associated set of media, and a message that is tailored for that group. This is not an exact science of course, and often a release will travel in an unexpected way, and we’ll have to react accordingly.

Thinking of a single target audience on a brand brief is almost like admitting at the beginning that your idea is not going to travel beyond a single group! At the very least there should be thinking around where an idea is likely to start, and where it’s likely to go next. It should go hand-in-hand with careful monitoring of the campaign as you’re going along, and the ability to adapt what you’re doing at the last minute

5.  We are concerned as much with tone as message

One thing I struggled with initially in music was the role of the proposition on the brief to creative teams. I quickly realised that the typical approach of identifying a message and then using communications to amplify and exaggerate it wasn’t relevant. The message is nearly always, in some sense, ‘the record is out now’. What really mattered was defining the right tone for the artist – based on what’s true to them, and what’s appealing to the audience – and then thinking about how to use channels in a clever way to convey this tone. The answer we got to was that we needed 2 propositions; the ‘Artist DNA’ that defines the artist and the ‘Campaign Mission’ that defines how we use channels to communicate it.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a brand planner frantically searching for the message the brand should communicate. Maybe that energy would have been better spent thinking about how the brand should feel. When this is combined with great thinking about channels then the brief becomes – ‘please convey this tone for the brand and here are some ways to use channels based on what we know about the audience’. Maybe that’s a more liberating brief for creative teams to work with?

dan.hauck@sonymusic.com

@danhauck

Asher Roth is an artist who is uniquely in touch with his fans. After all, his brand was brilliantly built on the back of the web community Ning. This platform forged bonds and fostered conversations between Asher’s team and their fans. Since the end of his first tour, everyone was simply waiting for what he would do next.

So while this project arrived at an extremely busy time at BBH New York, the opportunity to work directly with an artist who encouraged creative freedom, and to experiment both conceptually and with new technologies, was super exciting; a luxury not often afforded within every advertising brief.

Luckily Asher, an incredibly web-savvy and prolific blogger knew what he wanted from the start.

“I want my website to really show my fans who I am. I want them to realize that I am just like any of them, and that I’m human. It has to engage them on that level.”

It didn’t take long before the idea for the site began to evolve. Of course, after some initial concepts were discussed, we had to make sure what we were suggesting was even possible, hence partnering with the geniuses at AID-DCC in Japan, a production company renown for pioneering the introduction of augmented reality into Flash.

The way the site works is simple; an illustration of the website is printed on a card around the size of a credit card. Whenever a photo is taken of the card by Asher or one of his buddies and uploaded, that photo instantly becomes the top-page of asherrothmusic.com. Meaning Asher can literally carry his website in his wallet and fans can follow him wherever he goes.

When fans visit the site, the first thing they see will be the latest updated picture, which could be anywhere from Asher holding the card on stage at a performance, to Asher watching TV with his buddies. Each image is dated and labeled, so fans can make a connection with the context in which the photos was taken.

Using FLARToolKit, the program tracks the design and shape of the card and then literally launches the site’s interface from its surface. Each graphic element then matches the exact color of the card therefore enhancing this illusion and giving the site a visually organic quality that matches Asher’s style.

The next step for the site is to connect with the fans even more and to get them to submit their own photos. The next album release will have the card featured on the cover. In this way, fans can become a part Asher’s site as well and help to build the already pretty crazy library of photos.

The platform is also totally geared to maintain engagement. Several sponsorship and competition strategies will be implemented over the course of the year, each providing both fans and sponsors a reason to keep coming back.

BBH-ers have worked on music projects before, not least for MySpace (see: http://j.mp/7nFiYF). But this project taught us many things about the music industry. While it’s a creative industry, for the most part, music labels tend to be a little old-fashioned and somewhat formulaic when it comes to promoting their artists. Even though an artist may be promoted via many channels and social networking platforms, sometimes the user experience can come across as a bit of a box-ticking exercise i.e. must have Facebook page, MySpace, blog, etc, instead of thinking an original way that the artist can legitimately connect with their fans.

With Asher, we were lucky to have an artist who is also a creative thinker and is willing to take a leap of faith in order to keep his brand authentic, especially since the technicalities of the concept were difficult to articulate in the beginning. On complex projects like this it’s easy to get bogged down in the minutia, rather than merely concentrating on the bigger picture. Asher really gave us some breathing room, and the project benefited greatly as a result.

Asher has really opened a window so that he could share his day-to-day life and experiences with his fans. It’s a direction that many others in the music industry could learn from. Of course, it helps a great deal if the sentiment is as sincere as his.

Overall, the site is far better represented by exploring it for yourself, in which case we hope you do.

It would be great to hear any feedback as it is in a constant state of development.

But before we go we’d just like to put a big thanks out there to everyone that made it possible.

THE TEAM

Creative Directors: Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland

Art Directors: Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland

Technical Director: Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha)

Designers: Yuri Morimoto, Masayuki Nishimura

Business Director: Brad Haugen

Account Director: Lindsay Kopec

Content Director: David Wilsher

Project Manager: Yoko Yamazaki

Flash Developer: Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha), Kenji Mori

Programmer: Masaru Kinoshita, Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha)

Illustration: Yuri Morimoto, Yumi Yamada

Music: Asher Roth

Production: AID-DCC, Katamari

We like the ethereal music mashed up with something that is, essentially, destructive. Violently elemental. Yet beautiful.

For best effect set to HD and then go full-screen. Turn it up.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

He notes on his Vimeo page (full of other very cool projects – check it out):

—

“So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

Wish I had more time. I missed all the cool Lightning and the Lava of the first eruption. But I figure this will just be a trial run for another day.

I am of course accepting sponsors to send me back there for more please…!! haha

Music: Jónsi – Kolniður (jonsi.com)
Canon 5d mkII
HUGE thanks for the Motorized Dolly via MILapse (vimeo.com/milapse). Details are to come soon so stay tuned…

© Sean Stiegemeier
in-perfidia.com

—

Many thanks to @finnbarrw for the heads-up.

‘Myspace is dying’. How many times have you heard or read that in recent months? It’s not a hard conclusion to reach from recent visitor trends.

But speak to some of the guys here at BBH London and they’ll tell you a different story. For the past few months they’ve been working with our Myspace clients on the UK relaunch of Myspace Music. It’s a revolutionary platform for the stream and share generation, and they’ve created some really smart and engaging work to promote it. Will that be enough to kickstart a turnaround? Only time and data will tell. But it’s a good excuse to share some wider thoughts on the kind of work we get excited about at the London office.

The campaign started back in December, when 9 artists revealed the music they love in a series of interactive films showcasing the new music player. The idea was to bring fans closer to their favourite artists, reinforcing the core Myspace offer of music community.

Building on this idea, the team have created a new set of films starring Fiddy, Florence, Furtado – and you. Visitors to Myspace.com/fanvideo can create a playlist of videos, log in with Myspace ID or Facebook Connect, then sit back and watch as the artists take turns to make a personal dedication. If you’re feeling friendly, you can also give a load of your Myspace / Facebook pals the super-fan treatment.

Sure, most of us have seen personalised video apps before. But I do think the Fan Video app moves things on a bit. In fact, I think it’s made with three fresh ingredients that will be part of the mix in most of our best BBH London work this year.

1. LOVEABLE MAGIC

Agency types get very excited about whizzy new technologies. Apparently, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And boy, do we love magic. It’s what our clients pay big bucks for. We spend countless hours trying to conjure up little bits of it. So when ACME Tech serves up another massive blob of ready-made magic there’s a rush to give it a branded twist. AR bog roll? Awesome!

Problem is, some of this pure techy magic is losing its allure. Out in the real world people are suffering innovation fatigue. They’ve seen a thousand tech firsts and the give-a-fuck bar is iPhone high. You can dress that bog roll up in in AR magic clothes, but it’s still just bog roll. Where’s the good stuff? The funny, emotional, cool stuff? What’s there to LOVE?

With the Myspace Fan Videos, the magic isn’t in the tech. It’s in the moment when 50 Cent hangs a picture of you on his wall, or Alicia Keys sings you a song. Sure the magic is tech-fuelled, but it’s the twisted cultural content, the playful reference to things I love or hate, that really makes it. Tech is the means, not a magical end in itself.

Tech magic is out. Loveable magic is in.

2. COLLABORATIVE CRAFT

One of the things we’ve become more and more sure of as an agency is that we can’t do everything. Not on our own, anyway. And certainly not to the ‘best in class’ standard our clients demand. We’ve got bags of creative talent in the building, but to make truly awesome, loveable magic, we need the help of great craftsmen from outside BBH. These aren’t just suppliers or production companies. They won’t settle for a white label. These are creative partners who respect the vision, shape the execution and share the credit.

I spoke to Dom Goldman, the BBH Creative Director on this project, and it was refreshing to hear him say that the Myspace Fan Videos couldn’t have been made without Pulse Films (who shot them), Absolute Post (who did the post production), and Domani Studios (who built the application). More importantly, they couldn’t have been made without genuine collaboration between that network of partners. Let’s call this process ‘collaborative craft’.

If you watch the Alicia video carefully, you can see the reflection of your Facebook profile pic in the glossy piano surface. That isn’t off-the-shelf tech. That’s collaborative craft. Dom’s creative team obsessed over those art directional details. Absolute advised on special filmic effects. And Domani coded away until they were subtlely, perfectly achieved.

3. SIMPLE SOCIAL

We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that people can’t wait to participate in marketing, and will happily jump through branded hoops.

Most personalisation apps I’ve used in the past have asked me to answer several questions or find and upload an image. Sharing has tended to mean entering lists of email addresses or choosing from lists of buttons. Those are pretty big demands at every step of the experience.

By focusing on the simple and specific request for your Facebook Connect login, the Myspace Fan Video app makes that experience faster, simpler and more spreadable (auto-post your fan video to newsfeed, batch-create fan videos for your friends). The use of Connect also amplifies the magic. You don’t know the app has scraped your Facebook profile image until you see it spinning round on David Guetta’s turntable.

Stepping back from the content, it’s just very cool to offer Facebook login for a Myspace promotion. That’s confident, user-centric behaviour. It makes my life a little more convenient. It says “we’re not trying to replace Facebook, we’re different”.

And isn’t that all Myspace need to say, really?

Check out the work here and let us know what you think:

myspace.com/getrealclose

myspace.com/fanvideo

Taped Together entry for December 17

2009 undoubtedly has been the year when the ‘crowd’ really came into its own.  As the year drew to a close, it seemed like it might be a fun (okay, also possibly foolish) idea to attempt to create the world’s first crowd-curated holiday playlist.

Whilst I’d tinkered with this in fairly samizdat fashion at the end of November, the idea properly came to life when Maria Popova (@brainpicker) – the undisputed queen of online cultural curation and author of, amongst other things, Brain Pickings – got in touch. She suggested we create an audio tumblr together and see if we could find 31 people to curate one, great, vaguely seasonal track for every day in December.

So far, 24 days and around a 1000 plays later, it’s a fairly diverse collection of music and commentary: by turns happy, nostalgic, darkly funny, triumphant, moving, warm, sad and – if you ask us – all of it pretty downright wonderful.

We hope people have had as much fun as we have getting involved and watching it unfold.  Maria and I will say thank you properly to everyone when the project completes at the end of the month, but in the meantime please keep checking out the site, listen to the smorgasbord of tracks we’ve had in so far and read what the curators have had to say about the music they’ve chosen.

For more about Taped Together, check it out here.

The full and final playlist will be made available as a download to anyone who’d like one, please check out the site for details at the end of this month.

Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone.

This (below) is an incredible piece of film. It’s from 1973 and shows Ralf & Florian just noodling, in some cases with non-electronic instruments (shock, horror) such as flute. The homemade drum machine looks fairly lo-fi; quite a lot of tinfoil being used there too.

We also stumbled across a couple of other short films in the YouTube crates. First an amusing documentary clip about ‘Autobahn’ from 1975. “Next year Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether and build jackets with electronic lapels that would be played by touch”.

And then this 10-minute clip from a 1973 French documentary.

Brilliantly evocative films from the birth of electronic music.

Thanks to Paul Matheson for sending the Tanzmusik piece.

But what’s also really interesting is that it’s coming from a financial services company: mint.com

mint.com’s service – already brilliant on the web, and on a very strong iPhone app, now seems to be extending into data visualization and cultural commentary.

We’re major fans of LEGO here at BBH Labs. In fact, we spend far too much of every day actually playing with it.

This is great. 1500 hours of investment to deliver 3:49 worth of joy for LEGO lovers of all ages. Truly awesome.