Design is the Future: How Unmistakable Branding Can Unleash Creativity, presented by Leo Burnett and Turner Duckworth was, by far, my favorite seminar.
They discussed how every aspect of a brand has to be seen as a creative opportunity.
Take Amazon, for example. They ship things that consumers buy from their online database. Now, it would have been super easy to put stuff in a brown box and call it done, but no! Duckworth saw that brown box as a canvas for Amazon to paint on. Originally it was just marked with the familiar smile from the logo. But if you’ve seen an Amazon box lately, you might recognize some cute little yellow friends causing mischief on the boxes. That’s right, the Minions have taken over Amazon’s canvas. So now, a regular brown box has become a visual asset that Amazon can rent out to brands.
Branding is about so much more than just a logo these days. The logo is simply a “visual receipt” for the client. As Duckworth put it, it’s about taking those visual assets and making them tangible, social objects. If a brand can pull that off, they can create their own material culture centered on their brand. If that happens, what they’ve done goes far beyond what any agency can do.
A brand culture extends to the consumer and invites them to contribute their own personal creativity to the culture. One of the speakers was flying into an airport for a conference when he noticed a billboard covered in Coke bottles. What was special about this particular billboard was that the negative space between the bottles spelled out the name of the city he was arriving in. He sent a picture to his college asking, “Is this ours?” It wasn’t. That billboard is an amazing example of what consumers can contribute when they are passionate about a material culture.
Turner and Duckworth also showcased a case study of my personal favorite brand, Coca-Cola.
They highlighted how they refocused the brand to maintain one solid, cohesive image and how that contributed to the brand’s unmistakable culture. (This was a familiar theme in multiple presentations from creative agencies.) Coke has proven itself as a creative and innovative brand that is dedicated to one simple theme of bringing people together. My favorite ad they entered at Cannes this year was of two hands reaching out as if to touch each other palm to palm. The outline of the bottle was visible in the negative space between their hands. How incredible is it that you can have such a powerful ad, that stays true to their values of connecting people, without even featuring the physical product! Unmistakably creative.
Stay shiny my friends!
xoxo,
Kelsie