BE AN ARTIST, DAMMIT!
Brand Integration Group's Brian Collins has a startling new message for designers: To really be an artist, work the hugest possible canvas.
Forget the puffery and fine, abstracted words, so common in discussions on brand: Brian Collins loves a summer blockbuster, a long, tingling-cold pull of Coke, his Mister Machine toy, the film version of Moulin Rouge, and the acreage of massive, blisteringly bright billboards in Times Square. There is nothing finer in his sight as a strong brand tied to a scene of real culture unfolding, chaotically, human-ly: say, a Nike swoosh ascending like an aegis over a community basketball clinic. Say it slowly with me: Collins likes art and commerce, chummily, together. He fully believes the world's most corporate-behemoth brands crave those labor-of-love works designers shunt into a secret drawer: those clearly Not For The Man. In his view, smart companies like IBM, Motorola, Coca-Cola, and Dove are now gravitating to brand messages that can be handmade, awkward, or elegant, but above all unfolding.
Art! Capitalism! Creativity! Money! If anyone else in the room feels confused, or hesitant, or even a touch nauseated, Collins and his raft of unruly mavericks at Brand Integration Group (BIG), do not. STEP visited BIG's offices just off Times Square for a taste of unabashed vision: a world where brands don't beam their messages unilaterally, but instead leap through the fourth wall, into the audience, where the stories are really happening.
1. BIG CULTURE
Follow the worn, ruby-red carpet down a hall and you hit a warren of rooms, all edged in blackboard and stacked with bulky movable clipboards, as if, overnight, someone madly removed every closet door in the house in an evolving brainwave. You get lost immediately and long, for a moment, for an ethereally spotlit reception desk, with its blood-edged tulip in a bud vase: the WELCOME mat most design firms roll out, if preciously. At least it's a clear marker of where you are, how to proceed, what to expect. Fine. Boring. Welcome to the new anti-minimalism.
Collins, executive creative director of Ogilvy + Mather, pops out with all the briskness of a yenta and gets me situated. In another recently evolving brainwave, his hair rises in tufts of bleached blond, a look both artificial and wholly natural, consistent with his stutter-start energy and quick, uncanny associations.
First, to define terms. Brand Integration Group (BIG) lives as a division of advertising agency Ogilvy + Mather, but positions itself as more of a design company than, strictly speaking, an advertising one. What on earth does this mean, practically? Collins explains it like this: "We didn't want to replicate what most advertising agencies are doing, which is a tired model—they're extinct volcanoes, in my view. Instead, we're sitting at the fulcrum of design and advertising. We're responding to the need to put storytelling back into design, to turn TV and print ads into experiences." Put in work-world terms, he continues, "BIG is a hothouse within Ogilvy in which people's career paths are not dependent on making a successful TV spot." Any other brand experiences, especially ones you've likely never thought of, are BIG's provenance.
He spreads out a series of photos: less theory, more meat. BIG's well-catalogued roster of successes include IBM, Motorola, Sprite, AT&T, Hershey, and more recently, Dove and New York City's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. The latter two nail BIG's often elusive new angle on branding: both campaigns bled easily into everyday culture, pulling audiences in to interact with, comment upon, even remake, a fresh idea.
2. OLYMPIC-SIZED CAMPAIGN
"The Olympic bid was the largest media play the city has ever done," Collins states flatly, then pauses. (Collins has a wholly absorptive pause, a breather amid the bursts of Ms. Piggy voices and drama and slicingly intelligent commentary.) "Every taxi, every bus, phone kiosks, posters in bodega windows, scarves, hats. Eighteen massive digital screens in Times Square, when the IOC [International Olympic Committee] came to town last February." The city-wide dialogue of images brought three enormous audiences together: native New Yorkers, visitors from around the world to the city, and the IOC, who made one official visit but unofficially hop the world's capitals constantly. "What's great here are the parallel values," Collins notes, handing me posters that read THERE WILL BE FRIENDS AND FRIENDS OF FRIENDS TO GUIDE YOU and RECORDS WILL BREAK. "New York is all about hope, ambition and internationalism. People come here from around the world with their hopes in their pockets to succeed. The Olympics are the same thing." The split icon logo, marrying the Statue of Liberty with a triumphant Olympian, brings these ideas into energetic friction.
It's a tough, if fascinating, slog, but the BIG difference slowly starts to gel. A brand problem without even a product at its center, just a collective energy that emerges out of real culture, absorbs and reflects it again? This would not be the usual branding challenge.
3. BEYOND COMPARE
BIG designer Leigh Okies joins us to discuss Dove's "Beyond Compare" campaign. Okies has an old-fashioned Olive Oyl-meets-tomboy air, with curling short dark hair and a wry expression. Previously a costume designer, in many ways she exemplifies Collins' typical team member: as he puts it, "gifted, talented misfits, people who have not been through the [brand identity] sausage factory." Launched in Canada and now traveling in Europe on its way to the U.S. this fall, "Beyond Compare" consists of a traveling photography exhibit and accompanying book, highlighting the beauty of ordinary women. The traveling show featured donated photographs by Annie Leibowitz down to emerging photographers and bypassed galleries for more democratic spaces like shopping malls and parks. Thumbing through the exhibit book, I see a woman struggling out of a burka, strongly backlit in a nimbus of dust; elderly, former burlesque star Dixie Evans on a late-afternoon beach; two twin girls gazing heavy-lidded at the viewer, enigmatically titled "Friends and Enemies (Anne and Bayley)".
"It just has so much integrity," Okies remarks. "It's simple, not design-y. Dove took a different idea of beauty as a base point." She smiles at the idea of designing for crassly commercial zones like malls. "I love that it's commercial art," she offers. "A museum is a dead space, a graveyard, but a billboard is a living thing. It's a sampling of our visual language today." You can easily imagine how this brand experiment hooks into workaday life, how it could furnish stories over the supper table. You'll never guess what we saw at the mall today!
"As some brands become pan-generational, that's when they take on a religious quality," Collins notes. "They become part of rituals. Rituals have evaporated in our culture to the point that, the rituals we have left are heavily loaded. So. My sister Maureen is getting married. I go to Barnes and Noble and there are, like, 50 wedding magazines." His fingers fly in ten directions at once, pantomiming overload. "Bride! Getting Married! Your Wedding! Wedding Tips! [That's also] why we're so fascinated by the law, and court TV shows: Judge Judy! Judge Jimmy! Going to court calls on a clear set of behaviors, visuals, processes, that we all understand. We like rituals, we need them, because they elevate you into a different, somewhat sacred space," he notes. "Some brands do that really well, like Nike. I was at a women's basketball clinic recently, and when that Nike swoosh went up on the wall, it's no longer just about basketball, it's about the quest for achievement. Nike, the goddess, has been called upon. The activity is the same, but the experience is totally elevated."
"Storytelling can be experiential, even spiritual, like that," Collins continues. "Storytelling through design and advertising is less about problem-solving and more about inventing. Not just communicating - but actually creating the value. If you look at Coca-Cola, the roots of that brand's humanness is found in its signature - it's handmade, it's a piece of exquisite calligraphy! It's almost erotic. You can see someone's hand in that work. Compare that to Pepsi's logo." He sniffs extravagantly. "It looks like it's cut from machinery. It's so easy to make an impersonal brand—just make it slick. That doesn't require judgment, or an idea. But to make a brand human— something with cracks in it, that feels empathetic—that requires imagination and a leap of faith."
4. MARRYING HIGH ART AND COMMERCE
It's almost too delicious, this world Collins holds out for my delectation. The globe's most well-heeled corporations, yearning for our stray sketches and oddball conceits. It's tempting to take his words lightly, or to imagine them floating nicely in the ether, well above the fray of making brands that actually sell. On the contrary, Collins describes a world in which brands are pragmatically drawn to culture-making now just to fight facelessness, to continue to matter to a society that is increasingly suspicious of advertising and media-overwhelmed. Not coincidentally, his brand exercises are remarkably cost-effective, further underlining the reality of his predictions. The Hershey's candy-factory store in Times Square began life as a living experience of the brand, but it's also a self-supporting business.
"We should go back to calling ourselves commercial artists," he remarks suddenly. "I have no problem with that." He leans in urgently. Collins has caught hell for speeches like this before, but his emphatic delivery marks him as someone obliged to tell an unlovely truth. "For some reason, our best and brightest [in design] fetishize the obscure," he says. "It's as if, the only way your individual voice comes to life is in these arcane, twee little projects that no one outside the design profession ever sees." He gives a fluttering golf-clap, chin aloft, mouth pursed. "Very, very nice! What ironic layers of veiled meaning! Such clever recontextualized vernacular idioms!" He stops clapping on a dime. "But so easy to do."
Collins levels his gaze and speaks deliberately. "There is a larger prize to be won. Our best and our brightest need to understand that working with massive brands, on work that is seen by the world—that is where we need them! We need to think more like artists and less like scientists. In five years, everyone will be able to be a designer; the barriers in the software will be completely removed. So, we need to invent like creators, and respond less like 'problem solvers', simply accepting the agenda we are handed. We need to answer questions people didn't even think to ask." He rolls into a champion pause and stares me down. "We need real artistry soon, stories and imagination; that's how brands will have to live in the world. If we don't think of themselves as real artists, too—responsible for adding to the culture as well as to their business—they'll be irrelevant. And soon. "
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design, July/August 2005
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