Barcelona is a textbook example of genius planning – but that doesn’t prepare you for the overwhelming sensation of being in the thick of it. I could describe the thinking behind the Barcelona superblock, the hierarchy of its street widths, the perfect interplay of the rigidly planned grids of Eixample with the more organic medieval maze of the Gothic Quarter, and the visible presence of stalwarts like Gaudì, Miró, and even van der Rohe. It would enthuse anyone with an interest in shaping the future of our cities but it would not capture the essence of the city.

Spending 24 hours in the city, on the other hand, can imbue a visitor with the intangible attributes of the city. The sights, the sounds, and the scents. The way the city nudges your journey through it as you attempt to traverse its incredibly different neighbourhoods. The planned chaos of the Ramblas during the day and the quiet introspection possible at sunrise on your way back to your hotel after the city has swallowed you up for the night.

You will go back home and realise there is more to be said than any amount of research in advance can possibly provide. This deep-seated culture, the way that centuries of planners and architects and designers have contributed their fingerprint to the way a city feels, is all part of the organic, yet completely coherent, construction of a city brand that benefits from the accumulated experiences of generations.

But what makes a city more than the collection of buildings and streets that are evidence of its physical construction? What gives it a distinct identity? As with any brand, it is a complex and multifaceted combination of the history, the cultural values, the traditions, and the aspirations of all the people who have lived in the city and who call it home today. It is the collective sense of ownership and shared identity that is felt by all of its inhabitants. And since it is so democratic, it isn’t the kind of sentiment that can be forced from the top down. It takes time, gentle nudges, deliberate interventions, and the will of the many to make changes to the brand of a city.

Is all the world one city?

I am speaking of the city brand because it is the easiest way to exemplify the notion. A country brand is just as important but, in the case of most countries, this tends to be fragmented and influenced by the differences between city identities. Milan and Rome, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Tokyo and Osaka… we can mention city pairs that show us how different a city brand can be from that of another city in the same country and how each is clearly distinct from the national brand.

Malta is a small country. Small enough, sometimes, to think of it as a compact city. But the realities of the country show us that trying to force a single communal brand to the entire archipelago would be to ignore the unbelievable diversity of attitudes and values that the tiny islands somehow present.

City brand by design

So far, the notion of a city brand may sound like much of it is left to chance. But it is the people responsible for designing the constructed environment that have the most impact on a city’s brand. Without deliberate intent, a city’s identity meanders through time, taking on the guise given to it by the next generation of planners and designers to make their mark.

There is a better way. As with a commercial concern, being deliberate about a city’s identity can provide a more fundamental and longer-lasting impact. It can shape the entire future of a city, committing great ideas to history. The design choices we make today, the ones that are so brilliant that they will stand the test of time, are the marks that our generation is responsible for committing to posterity.

We think of aesthetics when we think of deliberate design, but that’s just a logo. The real work contributes to the deep-seated narrative of the city and it is based on a thoroughly thought-out set of values, a deliberate contribution to the sense of place, and a democratic sense of what will create a better experience for those who live and work in the city.

Who’s cooking?

When we hear the words ‘city’ and ‘brand’ in the same sentence, we think of tourist boards. It is almost like they have been given the role of branding a city because no one else wanted to do it. It is also the most absurd place for this responsibility to reside. One must design and construct a city or country in a way that reflects its identity. Only then can we hope to attract visitors.

As self-evident as this is, we might need the numbers to back it up. The most visited country on earth is France, with 100 million people picking it as their holiday spot every year. France, the country that makes little effort to ask you to visit, has such a strong sense of national identity that we just flock there.

This places the responsibility of a strong and believable city brand firmly in the capable hands of designers, architects, and city planners. The tourist board will then package and communicate the result.

Purpose-driven design

Designing for a city requires intentionality that goes beyond the specific reach of the project one entity happens to be working on. It requires us to ask a set of questions that uncover the foundations of the city and lay them bare for us to respect and design for. It requires practitioners to think of the purpose of the space they’re working on and how it dovetails with the core values of the city. It broadens the question of who one is designing for, allowing the audience definition to extend beyond those commissioning a project. And perhaps even more crucially, it asks deeper questions about legacy.

When we consider the legacy of a city we think of functional buildings like residences or workplaces. But we must also think of third spaces – those realms that belong to everyone in the city and that are the in-between spots. City squares, parks, walkways, and even a tiny bench under a solitary tree. These are the spaces where connections are made. They are the spaces where we flourish as a species that is gregarious and that depends on human connection. The spots that turn a city into a living and breathing whole rather than a collection of unconnected individuals.

Design for good

There are more elements that go into purposely defining the identity of a city. As we evolve our notion of what constitutes a great city, we shift our performance indicators from those that were purely fiscal to ones that address the wellbeing of its inhabitants. We look at green infrastructure that incorporates flora and fauna other than humans, improving our sense of wellbeing as well as the air quality of our cities. We consider accessible and universal design that create connections for all, regardless of age or ability. We also think of a human as one that needs a healthy body for a healthy mind and create spaces and opportunities for activity such as walking, running, and cycling.

Mixed-use developments create more vibrant neighbourhoods by combining residential, commercial, and recreational spaces, and as we build denser cities these can just as easily be vertical. And the responsible preservation of existing structures serves to cement the history of the city while being sensible with the use of resources.

We’ve all got a part to play

Every aspect of city planning ought to be deliberate and every player can have a direct positive impact towards the construction of a city we can be proud of. We see it reflected, for example, in the work of companies like Furnitubes, a British supplier of urban outdoor furniture that prioritizes social connection and environmental responsibility in its design and manufacturing processes. They happen to be clients and our work within their organisation has given our agency first hand experience of how a thoughtful approach to the design of outdoor spaces can be a powerful tool for social good.

The city of the future

Ultimately, shaping a city’s brand is about more than aesthetics or economic development. A city, at its heart, is a collection of human stories. It’s the laughter in a playground, the quiet contemplation on a bench by the sea, the chaotic functionality of a flea-market, the shared experience of a community. 

Shaping a city’s brand is about crafting a legacy. It’s about creating a place where people feel connected, where communities thrive, and where the future is built on a foundation of shared purpose and thoughtful design. The choices we make today, from the grandest architectural gestures to the smallest details of street furniture, will resonate for generations to come. This presents an incredible opportunity: to design and build functional spaces that are also meaningful places which foster connection, resilience, and a legacy we can all be proud of.

The post Beyond aesthetics: Building a city brand for connection, resilience, and legacy appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

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The way we decide what to buy can be boiled down to two questions:

Does it make sense? (features and price)

Does it feel right? (brand affinity)

A lot of businesses tend to treat these separately. They have a product team that designs the product, and they have a separate team that tries to sell it.

Conventionally, businesses tend to use the first question as the point of departure, letting features and price dictate the end result. The second question is left to the sales and marketing teams to figure out – usually by trying to communicate said features and price.

The result is communication that talks about product features that, especially in a commoditised market, are probably the same as their competitors. Leaving consumers feeling fairly neutral about the brand.

What if ‘feeling’ was given higher priority? What if the point of departure of product design was value-based first?

What if what the brand believes in is given more priority than what the market demands?

That’s the story of Patagonia.

Patagonia’s journey began as ‘Chouinard Equipment Ltd.’, a small company that sold climbing gear to the founder’s social circle and other climbing enthusiasts in the US.

At one point, the founder – Yvon Chouinard – realised that the metal climbing pitons they produced were actually damaging the very rock faces they were climbing, which led to the very first values-over-market decision they ever made.

They stopped selling their best selling product, and swapped to a cleaner alternative that their users weren’t familiar with. All because Chouinard felt that preserving the rock faces for future generations was more important than his company’s sales.

But when environmentally conscious climbers understood the reason for the change, they swapped to the new alternative almost immediately. 

And, as a result, began to trust that the decisions that Chouinard and his company were taking were good for the environment. Sales of the new product quickly eclipsed the pitons.

This mindset continued through the founding of Patagonia. Rather than just reacting to commercial market demands, the brand has thrived for decades by letting their values lead the way, making sure to let their audience know what they care about, and creating products that align with those shared values.

They actively encourage repair over replacement. They streamlined production and distribution processes to cut down on resource waste. They focused product design on durability, providing customers with information on how to properly care for their gear. They pioneered the production and use of organic cotton. They developed long-term relationships with their suppliers to make sure overall standards are upheld, and helped those suppliers reach those standards when they weren’t.

And, essentially, they communicated all this through one of the earliest forms of what we call content marketing today – their mail order catalogue.

Printed mail order catalogues at the time were just that – product catalogues. Page after page of product after product. 

Patagonia did something a little different.

They used their catalogue to showcase their values first. 

They used beautiful photography of their favourite climbing spots. They shared articles about clean climbing. They petitioned their audience to contribute to environmental causes. They share stories from fellow climbers and adventurers. 

Then, they talked about their products. 

And even when they did talk about their products, they talked about the benefits that their core audience would actually care about.

By appealing to their audience’s values, they built a loyal following that believes that every decision Patagonia takes is in line with what they think is right for the world. Patagonia’s track record of having end-users either design or heavily influence their products also adds to that trust.

While features and price are still a key component of the decision-making process, the value match is a foregone conclusion so long as Patagonia sticks to this philosophy. The moment they sell out the brand for short term profit, that core audience will disappear, along with Patagonia’s future.

Naturally, catalogues are no longer the primary way with which Patagonia communicates with their audience. They use email, social media, advertising, ecommerce, etc., just like any other modern business. Yet, their philosophy of leading their operation, product design, and communication with what they care about hasn’t changed.

I recommend anyone interested in learning more about Patagonia’s journey to read ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ – a memoir and brand guidebook written by their founder.

As you consider your own brand’s path forward, ask yourself: does every aspect of our communication and service/product offering reflect our core values, as Patagonia’s does?

Does a quick scroll through your social media or website tell the story of your brand beyond the technical features of what you sell?

Are your core values properly defined and followed to begin with?

It’s not just about standing out; it’s about standing for something.

The post Patagonia & The Art of the Mail Order Catalogue appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you don’t have the time to read this article now, you can download the PDF version of Brand Storytelling Trends in 2024: Back to Basics for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Narrative is the most human trait. 

It defines us as a species – we are able to tell stories to each other with the intent of changing someone else’s mind. Without the ability to convey a narrative, we are just free-range monkeys.

Since it is that old, one may argue that narrative doesn’t change much – in essence it either tells us a story to motivate us (you will look great in this outfit) or to scare us (protect your business from cyberattack).

But the stories that surround us, the ones that get us to pay attention and eventually change our behaviours or beliefs, are the ones that are in tune with what’s going on around us.

The word on the street, the zeitgeist, the meme du jour, the trending tweets (fuck X), this hour’s TikTok dance… while these might all fit within the structure of a core narrative, they speak to us about what’s going on right now. 

And we live right now.

As 2023 comes to a close, here’s a look at the narrative trends that could shape 2024. 

After all, a year is just a collection of the stories that it leaves behind.

As always, strong narratives will win the game. 

When the ‘noise’ gets louder, as audiences are bombarded by even more messages from even more sources, it is the strong stories that will stand out.

Think of it as signal-to-noise ratio. Our stories need to be a strong signal if they are to stand out from the noise.

And it isn’t just about the narrative. It’s about how that narrative gets to where it needs to be. It’s about how that story lives in whatever medium it is told in.

Audience-driven insights

There are three underpinning insights that will most likely dominate narrative trends in 2024.

The general frustration in a post-truth era. 

Not knowing what narrative is true, having stories that reach us devoid of crucial context, and faced by an overwhelming stream of contradictory information, audiences will respond positively to anything that appears unequivocal. This is further complicated by the era of generative AI. As audiences are exposed to more content that’s generated by minds made of silicon, their ability to discern what’s real, what’s human, and what’s been made up by machines continues to sow doubt.

Lack of time, lack of interest

Consumers oscillate between being very busy or being bored – both states welcoming brevity over depth. While this has plenty to do with the behavioural shift towards doomscrolling, it still favours concise storytelling that grabs attention.

Data privacy determinism

Finally, there is the reluctance of audiences to go on trading large amounts of information about themselves in exchange for products such as social networks. This trend is, for now, on the fringe compared to the other two but it will have consequences on the way we tell our stories.

Market-driven insights

Particularly in B2B marketing, more marketers are citing a lack of resources as their major stumbling block. With an ever-expanding set of tools at our disposal, the spectre of a recession, and narrower margins almost across the board, this comes as no surprise. 

There has also been a steady rise in the use of paid media. While smart content marketing and first-party data strategies reduce the dependency on paid media, a surprising number of marketers admit to operating without at least a 12-month plan, let alone a strategy for sustainable communication.

On the other side is the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, giving small marketing teams the tools they need to punch well above their weight, saving money on content writing, planning, and even the need for additional human resources. This is a big thing – AI has become part of the marketing tech stack within a shorter timeframe than any technology has.

This time last year we weren’t speaking about AI unless it was in very specific and very tech-oriented spaces. This year, 3 out of 4 of those working in B2B marketing say that they use at least one AI tool at work.

As resources appear to shrink and new tools emerge to help the industry do more with less, we should be seeing briefer, more punchy pieces of content that, happily, suit the ever-shrinking amount of time audiences are willing to give up.

On top of this is the sheer volume of data that is available to anyone who wants to communicate. Narratives that are driven by data will be the ones that reach their target with the highest degree of precision, winning on cost-effectiveness and efficacy.

Narrative Trends in 2024

Trend 1: Inter-ACT

• Interactive content saw 52.6% more engagement than static content
• 52% of marketers find interactive emails as the most effective form of marketing.
• 88% of marketers see interactive content as a way to differentiate themselves

The data is clear on this and it isn’t surprising. In an era where most of our distribution platforms are interactive, there is little reason to produce static content, particularly when interactive content sees over 50% more engagement than static content. 

The same applies to interactive emails, with over half of marketers experiencing more engagement from interactive emails than static ones.

What is surprising about this trend is that it sounds obvious and yet marketers seem reluctant to go the extra mile and think in terms of interactivity. Broadcast media like TV and radio had a good run that lasted decades but their time as dominant players is over. Thinking like broadcast is the only method of reaching an audience is to remain stuck in a time when today’s tools aren’t available.

You’ve seen influencers try their hand at interactivity: “What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour?” As simple as this sounds, it is an invitation to interaction with the lowest barrier to engagement possible.

Let’s learn from this practice (but implement it better) by thinking of friction. If we produce interactive content, we must give audiences the pathway to reach out that has the least friction possible. Let us make it easy and interesting for our audiences to interact and be sure to offer a good reason (read ‘reward’) for them to reach out.

In a sea of one-way comms, interactive content is a chief differentiating factor. It tells your audiences that you’re up for conversation and, done well, it tells them what kind of chat you’d be happy to have. It turns your brand into that person we’d meet for a coffee, knowing a good conversation is to be had. 

And that’s the start of a friendship right there.

Trend 2: Authentically Human

• 51% of marketers consider differentiating their content the biggest challenge with the rise of AI tools.
• 54% find the amount of content available overwhelming, but find the quality lacking
• 31% of marketers find AI-generated content quality to be lacking

During the time when fast-food restaurants were on the rise, traditional restaurants tried to differentiate themselves by writing ‘home-made lasagna’ on their menu boards. 

We knew it wasn’t true but we willingly bought into the distinction.

As AI-generated content improves in its coherence and quality, it is becoming harder to tell what’s been made by a person and what’s been generated by an AI. Meta has launched a series of AI influencers, each able to interact with millions of humans at the same time without missing a beat.

The chances are that a third of the content you’ve read today has been, at least in part, created by an inanimate device. And this is set to increase as more and more of the workforce climbs over the perception hurdles and adopts this tech in some form or another.

The result is that there will be more efforts to distinguish AI-made content from human-made content. 

And content that can be verifiably created by a human will score points for authenticity.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with machine-made content. It is simply an echo of the way humanity reacts to new technologies. When every leather handbag was stitched by a human hand, there was little to distinguish one from the other. Now that machines stitch most bags, the handmade becomes more valuable.

This blog was written entirely by a pair of human hands and a kitten’s paws      sfl,,,,,.                                 Bv jik eeeerrrrttt

Trend 3: Brevity is the soul

• 94% of marketers agree that short articles is the most popular form of content
• 95% of all content distribution happens on social media
• 47% of marketers put all their content in images

We are all competing for attention all the time. We are also afflicted by an epidemic of ever-decreasing attention spans.

This ushers the era of short headline-style content that conveys as much information as possible in as short a consumption moment as possible. By ‘headline-style’ we mean any form of content that one can consume in a very short time. Memes, gifs, zero-click content, images, and short videos all qualify. 

What about long-form content? Longer reads, in-depth podcasts, long-form video, and other forms of narrative that are involving or longer to consume still have their place in telling a complete story. 

We just need to lead to them with a much shorter hook.

This should not be an issue for content creators. It is good practice to find the shortest possible way to convey a message while retaining clarity and all necessary information. As the trend towards brevity gains more traction, cunning storytellers will find new ways of telling short-form narratives.

Ultra-short form, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it form of content, is something of a novelty in mainstream comms but it has been quite standard in niche and closed-group circles, especially those composed exclusively of Gen Z and younger individuals. The move from niche to mainstream is inevitable and we will see more content that’s ultra-brief, usually depending on a link to an established narrative that we, the audience, are already aware of. Think of this kind of content as a mass-appeal in-joke.

Another useful angle to this trend is the creation of micro-moments within longer narratives. These serve as little breaks, giving our audiences a short reprieve from longer form content in the shape of a snack-sized piece of content that’s there to distract for a moment. Micro-moments can be informative, entertaining, or even a simple change in content delivery method (like a 5 second video within a blog post) and that help keep our audiences engaged for a little longer as they skip down the path of your defined user journey.

In essence, however, brevity is an ever-appreciating commodity:

1. Scrap useless words (or scrap words completely)
2. Lead with a benefit
3. Consider the appropriate platform
4. Link to a wider story
5. Grab attention in 5 seconds or less

Trend 4: Data destiny

• Data storytelling has increased by 233%.
• 93% agree that data storytelling boosts revenue.
• Consumers are 63% more likely to remember data if it’s presented as a story.

We’ve had accurate and real-time consumer data available to us for decades now. We’re used to data feeding into accurate targeting, consumer insights, and campaign optimisation, to mention just a few ways in which data carves the messaging we create. But having much more data available to us is not enough to form an emerging trend.

The trend is being shaped by data storytelling itself. Presenting data alone isn’t enough. There is no story to a statement that says “62% of consumers prefer this drink to its competitor”. A story alone is interesting but it is much more captivating when backed up by real numbers. And this is the basis of data storytelling – the way we can use data as a component of an engaging narrative.

Over the past 5 years, data storytelling has grown by 233%. Which forms the shape of a gentle trend but this is set to grow significantly next year as the technology that’s available to us boosts this trend from multiple angles.

The intelligence that was needed to properly harness data for storytelling purposes was reserved for companies with deep enough pockets to afford powerful Business Intelligence and market research capabilities. As AI services become affordable to all, the ability to spot behavioural patterns in huge datasets reaches the masses.

Tugging this trend from a completely different angle, but pulling it in the same direction, is the ever-increasing epistemological crisis – we simply don’t know what the truth is any more. Data-driven storytelling is one way to let the market know that what you’re saying is rooted in an unquestionable truth.

Another way of looking at this trend is a shift of narrative from the ‘what’ to the ‘why’, particularly in the case of B2B narratives. It takes us from “this is what people do with this product” to “this is why people change their minds and here is the data to prove it”.

Finally, there is much to do with the way our brains are wired. While we tend to understand the numbers, we don’t remember them. We are 22 times more likely to recall a story than numbers alone. The linking of story and data is a combination that bends credibility with memorability and it is this confluence that will create powerful narratives going into 2024.

There’s more

The trends that have been shaping up over the past few years are digging in deeper and turning from trends into mainstays of commercial narrative.

The desire for authenticity and transparency isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it is being reinforced by the difficulty our audiences experience with being certain about what is real. Deep fakes, AI personalities, the distorted narratives around politicised events, and all other forces that distort the stories that describe our world raise more questions than they answer. Demonstrable authenticity, aided by data-driven storytelling, will form the mainstays of the stories that matter.

This demand for authenticity will favour human-led narratives and put even more value on the local and the hyperlocal. The closer to home a story appears to be, the more likely we believe it to be authentic and relatable.

In the same vein, the humanity of our narratives, the ability of our content to be consistent with who the organisation is, what it stands for, and how it is different from all others, will be the currency by which the greatest stories are measured.

Finally, we remain ever hopeful that this will be the year of A/V/XR, the year when the market finally sees excellent VR hardware at mass-market pricing, paving the way for truly immersive content. Apple’s launch of their high end device is little more than a proof of concept and was aimed at studios and content developers but a launch of this nature usually portends a shift towards a more widely accessible product. When it happens, a third dimension will really be added to the content we produce and consume.

2024 the year of human lore

The art of storytelling won’t suddenly become more important in 2024. It has always been the way we stood out from the rest of the animals on earth and will continue to do so.

But there are trends that will define the year and they will be greatly influenced by the tools we have at our disposal and the general behavioural patterns of the market.

More than ever before, stories backed by facts and figures in a post-truth world will win on authenticity. We do have more data available to us. Let’s use it wisely to reach the right people with the right message.

The right message is never noise – it feels personal and stands out from the rest of what’s being said by appealing to us in a way that’s respectful of our time (brevity), of our intellect (clearly useful to us), and of our identity (a match in fundamental values).

The right message is also one that honestly promotes diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DE&I). While this was a brand trend a few years ago, it has gone from the fringe to the boardroom and that will strongly influence the narrative of 2024.

And while this is nothing new, we must endeavour to differentiate by telling a unique story. It seems like one out of every two pieces of content is a repost from another channel. And half of that again is a poor rehash of a trending topic. In a sea of sameness, the original will stand out.

Keep it short. Keep it relevant. Keep it human. Keep it unique.

The post Brand Storytelling Trends in 2024: Back to Basics appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Not the first rodeo

This phenomenon of double releases has happened multiple times before in cinema and other platforms like video games. It has been dubbed in the Cambridge dictionary as – Counterprogramming, when two completely different things are available at the same time, to attract an audience. Some notable instances of counterprogramming include:

• Mamma Mia! And the Dark Knight on 18 July 2008
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons and DOOM Eternal on 20 March 2020 
• Warm Bodies and the SuperBowl XLVII on 1st February 2013

Barbenheimer was one of the larger-scale cases of this phenomenon, during the social media age (although “gimme gimme gimme a Dark Knight after midnight” should’ve been a thing in my opinion). This can mean more deliberate attempts at counterprogramming down the line, following this massive success.

Barbie’s aggressive approach

To get to their 162 million dollar opening weekend, they used a lot of unusual methods of marketing to target audiences, and not just their intended audience. A lot of it came through collaborations. Some include:

• Fashion brands like Forever 21, Zara, H&M, Aldo, Crocs etc. 
• Other collaborations like:
  • AirBnb for a recreation of the Malibu DreamHouse
  • Bumble for dating tips from Barbie and Ken
  • Ruggable for Pink machine-washable rugs
  • And god knows what other collaborations happened.

In their teaser trailer i.e the parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Space Odyssey, Barbie showed the world that the movie is not going to be a pink filled nostalgia cash grab. In a later trailer, they even mentioned the slogan “If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you”, implying that they wanted everyone to come and watch it.

The movie also generated a lot of hype on social media. They had AI filters to turn people into Barbie characters on TikTok. There were also countless memes and posts from users, especially from TikTok. According to Comscore, Barbie’s video views on Tiktok were around 243.1 million, compared to the 92.4 million of Avatar 2: The Way of the Water, one of the most anticipated releases of last year (This included content mentioning “Barbie movie”, “barbiemovie” or “Barbie the movie” or “Barbiethemovie” or “Barbie Pelicula”)

Barbie wanted everyone to be pulled into Barbieland, even those who don’t want to.

Silence speaks

Contrasting with Barbie’s colourful immersion, Oppenheimer was much more enigmatic in its approach. It certainly is tougher marketing the father of the nuclear bomb as a movie than the childhood dolls made by Mattel, and Oppenheimer’s trailers and teasers were limited in material, piquing curiosity rather than awe.

However, Oppenheimer has an advantage that few movies ever can use, which is their director, Christopher Nolan. You know, that guy who made blockbuster movies like Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy, Dunkirk, The Prestige and 50 other godly movies. When you have a director with such a reputation and track record, everyone is practically going to want to know what’s going on.

The movie’s Twitter feed (Or is it X?) in fact, mainly is composed of shots and teasers of the movie and its star studded cast with some reviews by magazines like People. In addition, there was an online countdown to the 78th anniversary to the first nuclear explosion. Much more lowkey and reliant on the cast than flashy tik tok filters, collaborations and much more akin to the traditional style of marketing a movie.

Fusion and Fission

Normally, two movies coming out on the same day happens to create a rivalry at the box office: the larger movie appealing to a wider audience, whilst the smaller movie would appeal to the underrepresented group that would not normally go to the larger movie.

However, in this instance, it endorsed more of a double feature i.e people watching them both. With the internet going mad on this with more memes, merchandise and user-generated content that most movies can hope to dream of. According to Wikipedia, Vue International stated that 20% of people who bought tickets to Oppenheimer also bought a ticket for Barbie.

This was further fuelled by the fact that some of the casts of both movies actively encouraged to watch both movies, with other actors like Tom Cruise jumping on the trend as well.

It works because they appeal to such different audiences and yet they both played off it. They both inadvertently played into the joke and social media further fuelled it with what social media does best. Both movies knew what their audiences wanted and in return, gave them engagement and revenue that exceeded expectations.

Multiple instances of counterprogramming happened before this, yet this one was the most prominent despite Oppenheimer having an enigmatic approach and the cinema yet recovering from the pandemic and with the problem that are Marvel movies.

What we can learn from Barbenheimer

This instance of movie greatness (yes, I have watched both and they are amazing) can be applied to businesses, obviously in different levels and depending on the size of the business, in the form of collaboration and memes.

Some events happen outside of your company that you have zero control over and still affect your brand. For better or for worse, reacting to these unexpected events quickly and creatively can foster engagement and give you an opportunity that normally few companies have the privilege of benefitting from. Outright ignoring the conversation around the brand can lose golden opportunities or even damage the reputation of the brand itself.

Memes on the other hand can be a way to create a lot of engagement with a company for low costs and yet show a human side to the company. It can help to build hype, build relations with people who interact with the post and make people feel like they’re “in on the joke”. When done right, they can be a method of achieving business objectives like no other.

Barbenheimer is not just a coincidence that happened to generate extra revenue. It is a case study that shows that through quick reactions with some creativity, you can help get increased awareness and engagement with your brand.

Meet the author

For the past three months, Ranson’s been interning at Switch and working on all kinds of projects. From campaign shoots to merchandising to manning activations and writing blogs, there’s nothing Ranson won’t do, with a smile and with the same boundless enthusiasm that propels him through gruelling gym sessions. A University of Malta graduate in accounting and marketing, he’s now looking to start a Masters and has about ten thousand ideas for a thesis hashed out in between gaming sessions.

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AI is going to take our jobs. AI is a bubble. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner. AGI will never happen.

In reality, there is a little truth in all of the statements being made about AI but neither can be completely accurate because, like every industry caught in a frantic rush of development, it is impossible to see where all the pieces will land.

The AI space is vastly unpredictable

Even when the pieces land, the landscape will shift. AI isn’t a destination. It is a journey that our species will forever be intertwined with. We didn’t stop inventing machines when the Industrial Revolution had blown its last puff of steam. We kept inventing and aggregating. It’s unlikely that the inventors of the steam engine would have predicted Boston Dynamics and their robotic dogs but we can trace the lineage from one to the other.

Perhaps even more pertinent is the nature of the industry and the complex web of moving parts that it encompasses. Medicine, finance, search, advertising, aviation, energy, blockchain, imaging… the list of activities impacted is multiplied by the number of technologies being developed by all the established tech companies, universities, startups, and even individuals to leave us with so many moving parts that we can’t really nail anything down.

To add another layer of unpredictability, we must not forget that we are dealing with an intelligence. It keeps surprising us and bewildering is as we develop it. The idea of a predictable or explainable AI continues to largely elude us. While we know what we ask of an AI and can see what results it gives us, the inner machinations of deep neural networks that we have developed is too complex for us to understand. Add to this the “oh shit!” notion that we are using AI to develop better AI and it should cause us to pause for a moment before deciding that we know what’s next.

If there is one certainty, it is that this industry will keep surprising us.

Let’s look at jobs. As horrible as it sounds, some jobs are almost immediately at risk. And these are the ones, quite predictably, that most commonly resemble the tasks that the newly emerging AI models perform so well. But first, we need to have a shared understanding of what AI we’re referring to.

So what’s an AI in this context?

Let’s for a moment qualify what we mean by an AI.

An intelligence can be described as any entity that has the ability to choose a better outcome from a possible list of outcomes. The more intelligent this entity is, the more outcomes it can choose from and the better equipped it is to pick the best possible one. Using this model, an ant is not as intelligent as a mouse, and a mouse is not as intelligent as a human.

Humans have a broad spectrum of intelligence types – the same person can ride a bicycle in a city, write a novel, peel an orange, and flirt with another human using subtle, non-verbal cues. And the same human can generalise intelligence very quickly. We only need to burn our fingers once to know to avoid all flames, no matter what the source of the fire is.

Artificial Intelligence and the neural networks they run on, at least the ones we have access to today, work differently. They take a huge amount of training to generalise knowledge. Tesla have billions of miles of training on their self-driving car models to approach a reasonably good driving AI while it takes a human a few hours of lessons to achieve the same ability.

And they have a narrow spectrum of intelligence. The AIs at our disposal are really, really good at one thing. They are far superior to any human at that task but that’s all they know.

Armed with this knowledge, we can make a few assumptions about what tasks we will be passing on to AI or at least working with AI to help us do our job much better.

AI will help us do our jobs (and relieve us of annoying ones)

Let’s take a day in the life of a content writer or a designer. The day is usually split into many different ‘jobs’ or tasks. There’s some time dedicated to research, some time dedicated to thinking and putting ideas together, and some time devoted to actually creating something new. But there are also parts of the day that are relatively repetitive – the kind of tasks that we do without really needing to think too hard.

Let’s say a beautiful piece of artwork has been created. Now it is time to resize it to fit a pretty standard set of assets.

Or a wonderfully crafted blog post has been written and now it’s time to summarise it into brief captions for a handful of different social media platforms.

Both of these can be offloaded from our mind and given to a machine that has learned how do one of these tasks and to do it quite well. It’s been trained, by assigning weights to successful outcomes, to perform in a way that we like best. It is equipped to learn our preferences and to keep working that way. So, both of these creatives can work side-by-side with an AI and spend the time they’ve saved just enjoying their lives.

Now if there is a person whose job it is to do just the task that’s repetitive and that we would rather give to a machine to do, then that person’s job can be replaced by an AI. This is not to say it will, but it is possible.

But let’s take a plumber. They come home and troubleshoot the most bizarre of faults that we, messy humans, create in our own homes. They use their experience, their tools, their hands, and their ability to take instant decisions on the most practical outcome to get the job done and restore order and harmony in our homes.

Carry this over across all jobs that require skill and we can see that these jobs are safe for now. It will take us a while to implement the broader kind of intelligence needed to do these jobs and to build the robots it takes to give this general intelligence a useful corporeal form. To be more precise, the tech we need to build this robot probably exists, scattered around industries and intellectual property licenses, but it would cost as much as the GDP of a small nation to put one unit together and that’s not good business. For now.

It’s the mid-level white-collar jobs that are at stake.

Wherever there are groups of people in a bullpen doing what is mostly repetitive work that can be passed onto an automated system with a narrow but deep intelligence, the likelihood is that the populations of these bullpens will be the first to start thinning. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to your personal ethical standpoint and the subject of a significantly deeper discussion than this brief blog can go into.

A good point of departure is to think of the fate of the ecosystem around horse-drawn cabs at the dawn of the popularity of the motor car and work your way up from there.

We’re all coders

For a long time – meaning for all the time that computer code existed and all the way until a few months ago – programming a computer to do your bidding was the reserve of the coder, the software engineer, the guys and girls who knew languages that were esoteric to the rest of us. Now, we can address some of the most powerful computers out there by just typing a sentence into a chat box. In essence, every time we ask a chat-enabled AI for something, we are writing a little single-serve app and asking it to do our bidding. The more creative we are, and the more complex the task, the more useful and productive is the result of our interaction.

This means that natural language is already the de facto programming language. And as the AIs available to us get even more powerful, the need to use the programming languages of old (they’re so last week) will dwindle into obscurity. If you’re a sub-par coder, you’d better watch out because there’s a grandma out there doing a better job than you are and all she had to learn was how to write in English.

Symbiotic relationships are desirable

When we think of symbiotic relationships we usually go to that bird that eats the insects on a crocodile’s back as an example. The bird is fed and the crocodile isn’t itchy so both live quite happily. It’s an old definition of symbiosis but for the sake of this article we can put up with eye-rolling of biologists.

The happy relationship we’re referring to is the one between carbon-based lifeforms (us) and silicon-based brains (Artificial Intelligence).

The abilities of the systems that are available to us are quite staggering. They far outstrip the ability of any one person because they have been trained on gigantic models, huge data sets that represent the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of humans. They run on GPUs (the computers that power AI) that just love parallel processing and do so at outrageous speed. This means that, unlike us, they think of multiple things at the same time and do so thousands of times every second.

The highest ideal is, therefore, a human-machine tandem. A carbon-silicon creature that thinks with the value system and ambitions of a human and does so at the speed of a machine, drawing on a data set that is much broader than any amount of swotting for exams can achieve.

Think back to the industrial revolution. A lot of back-breaking work done by humans was replaced by machines that didn’t suffer and that could be significantly stronger than any one human. One man can carry one brick for so many metres but a steam engine can carry many, many bricks for as long as you can feed it coal.

What you want to be in that situation is able to drive the train or perhaps to repair it.

It takes skill to get the most out of any device, and AI assistants are a perfect embodiment of this maxim. Consider a camera. The same camera in the hands of an experienced photographer and in the hands of a complete novice will not produce the same photos. Give me the full set of paintbrushes that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling with and I will produce an unholy mess that no pope would bless.

Embrace the race

Leaps in technology follow a pattern that echoes the one that came before. We’ve seen figures that show how long it took for radio to reach 80% of households and how that time was much shorter for TV, and even shorter for mobile internet.

And there is a pattern in the narrative, too. Early adopters tout a new tech as a panacea, gilding the advance with an unrealistic set of expectations of what it will do. Laggards and those afraid of change are vocal in their objections, with a handful of versions of ‘this tech will never catch on’ or ‘this tech is evil and should not be allowed’. While both positions are heartfelt, neither is entirely true of almost any innovation.

Photography purists are bemoaning the fact that some artists won photography competitions and immediately after they did, they admitted they’d created the images using Midjourney. What they’re angry about is that they didn’t have the ability to discern the difference themselves. ‘AI art isn’t art’ is an echo of the reaction that artists who had honed their skill at oils on canvas had when photography was invented. They argued that ‘photography isn’t art’ because photographers hadn’t bothered learning how to use a paintbrush. If an inkjet print of a photo fetches a couple of millions at the better galleries, why would an NFT of AI-generated art not do the same?

Midjourney won’t be replacing Saul Leiter’s colour work but it can already create passable street work that, at a glance, is coherent and convincing.

It is up to every one of us to land on the side of this story that is committed to history. A sensible place is to embrace the race, to get acquainted with the immense potential that these emerging technologies have to offer while being acutely aware of their limitations. This allows us to stretch the tech to its maximum, harnessing its power to make our lives easier and the output of our work even better. It also keeps us from falling into the trap of unrealistic reliance on a tool that has its inherent limitations.

Once again, this is an echo of past wins and losses with new tech. The ones who said new tech will never catch on died like Kodak did. The ones that put far too much faith in new tech died like so many of the tech startups at the dawn of the internet. The ones that embraced change and pivoted are still doing what they set out to do. We don’t think of IBM as International Business Machines any more but that’s what they are and they remained true to purpose. From cash registers when those were relevant to desktop PCs and laptops and all the way to Watson, they weren’t married to a specific technology but considered their purpose as delivering the machines that ran the business of the day.

We speak about being true to purpose at every opportunity. We also speak about business agility until someone tapes our mouths shut. But they are two maxims that have historically led to robust, sustainable business models.

Opportunity and agility

Opportunity lies in what you are already doing for your customers. Agility means you can remain valid to them, no matter what changes happen around you. Having your purpose clearly in mind means that you can be valid for as long as it takes us humans to evolve into a different species and that will take a while.

This means that to stave off redundancy, we need to be absolutely sure of what we are giving our customers. Let’s take Amazon as an example. They offer low prices, a wide variety of goods, and rapid delivery. Three fundamental pillars that humans will always want. In the words of Jeff Bezos:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.

It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now.

When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

This could be one interesting approach about your business to keep in mind in the face of a sea of uncertainty: What’s going to be constant in your space over the next ten years? What fundamental human need do you serve? Therein lies your opportunity and it takes all the agility you can muster to dance to the changing landscape and keep your operation relevant.

What should we be doing about AI?

If there is something we’ve learned about tech it is to never say never. ‘Never’ stems from fear of change. It is a wholly unrealistic standpoint and this is more true today than ever. The money pouring into silicon that can think is staggering. The parties at play mean business – quite literally. The quicker we accept and move ahead at the right pace the better. You don’t want to be the company that said “We don’t need to be on Facebook because it will never catch on.” Neither do you want to be the investor who put all their eggs into MySpace. But you do want to watch this space with a healthy balance of caution and optimism. Caution about the unrealistic claims and optimism about what machine learning systems can bring to your business.

If you’re recruiting in areas that are repetitive, consider investing in tech instead because automation of anything we humans do more than once will come sooner than we think. This isn’t new – automation has been around for almost two centuries now – but now it takes a deeper meaning. It goes beyond a simple ‘if this then that’ and delves into repetitive decision-making within narrow or specialised fields, especially when this thinking involves drawing on an overwhelming dataset.

Whatever your area of practice, there are Machine Learning systems being developed or already deployed, albeit at varying stages of maturity. Seek them out. If they appear underdeveloped or the results are as yet sub-par don’t dismiss them. Use them for inspiration. Riff on them. Perhaps more importantly, learn about them while they’re still embryonic and allow your learning curve to naturally grow with the tech.

When those who have taken the option to wait for some unspecified time in the future to figure out where the dust will settle, you want to be miles ahead. You want to have found the best way for silicon brains to do your bidding. The prosthetic superpowers we were promised in sci-fi narratives since Jules Verne put pen to paper are finally within reach. We’d be fools to leave them to others.

All images were created using Midjourney.

Here’s a little exercise. If you’ve gone through the cycle of being amazed at what ChatGPT 3 (and now 4) can do and then realised that it’s writing is completely devoid of humanity, read a paragraph of this blog at random and try and spot what it is that makes you think it was written by a human and not by ChatGPT. Put a reminder in your calendar for one year from the day you read this. On that day next year, look up a handful of blogs and do the same. Odds are you won’t be able to make this distinction any more.

The post AI have no idea what’s coming, but it’s coming appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

When you think of a brand, what do you think of?

Visuals come to mind. The components of the brand’s visual identity. We think of music associated with it – McDonalds’ ‘da da da da daa’, Burger King’s big booming sweep of neu-jazz, the reverb in Apple’s Macbook Air reveal. 

Put it down to a vote, and people will tell you a brand is made up of its colours, its logos, and the latest advert that they remember. Some people might go deeper, tell you that the sum total of a brand identity is what it stands for: the morals it aligns to. 

All of those are good answers.

But one of the most crucial aspects of branding is how the brand sounds. 

A brand sound isn’t exactly the tone of voice. 

It’s related to that, and to personality, but a brand sound is how your brand approaches communication. It’s how your brand looks at the message it has, and how it crafts it to appeal to the audience that it wants to cultivate. 

It’s how the brand talks. 

It’s how it thinks. 

And it’s critical to creating a brand that stands out from the rest. 

World Snapshot 2022

There are an unprecedented number of brands all active today, and all of them are talking at the same time, on the same platforms, and, often, to the same small slice of the world. 

In theory, modern technology should be a boon to any communications agency since it allows them to tap into audiences around the world instead of focusing on small, and local, community ties. 

In practice, because there’s so few lines of separation between brands, the conversation has frothed into incomprehensibility. 

Here’s a question for you. 

When was the last time you heard a brand slogan and remembered it not because it was bad, but because it was good, and memorable? Because it had personality? Because it made you think?

Because it made you laugh?

If it’s hard to quantify, that’s understandable. There’s a lot of brands talking to you now, and their voices get muddled in the message – but that’s part of the problem. 

There’s a lot of brands talking now. 

Their sound doesn’t differentiate them from other brands. 

Therefore it’s harder to pick them out of a line-up. 

And so they need to do more to stay relevant. 

Copywriting should help with this, but a lot of modern copywriting has gone the way of modern design: safe, clean, and with absolutely no nuance that could be misunderstood. Part of it stems from the fact that the internet is poised to strike at things that it doesn’t understand – a complicated message or a tone of voice that doesn’t fit the zeitgeist, and it can do just as much harm as it does good. 

Part of it is that the widescaling of marketing needs to break somewhere, and where it breaks is normally the sound. 

But there’s a way of changing that. 

Sound of the Brand

When you think about your brand, how does it sound?

Does it like to talk at length, or are short sentences more its style? If you had to pick between two words, one complicated and one easy, which would your brand pick? What sort of references does your brand use? Who is it talking to? What is it saying, and how?

Brand sound takes all of that into account. 

It looks at what kind of brand you have. It looks at the personality. It looks at your audiences, who you’d like to communicate with more, who you want to keep loyal. It looks at what your brand knows, and how it would respond to external stimuli: current events, a joke, a meme that’s trending on Facebook. 

The sound of the brand fleshes your brand out like a real person. It works the personality and the brand identity into a formula that can talk for you – and a formula that can stand out. 

All brands have a sound. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are reasons behind why you use the language you do, why you structure the way your brand talks the way you do, why you have that sound in your head. 

Let’s go deeper. 

Switch: Sound of the Brand

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the way we write our content has changed. 

Here’s a paragraph from an old blog: 

Outrage marketing builds on the fervour that social media can ignite when a cause people feel strongly about is brought under attack. It’s a way of flipping over the table, drilling buckshot through it, and trying to attract like-minded people to also flip over tables and pump it full of buckshot, because your business keeps it real.

And here’s a paragraph from a blog written a few weeks ago: 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

There’s a big difference between them – and that’s deliberate. Between 2018, when the first blog was written, and now, our brand changed. The way we looked changed. How our goals aligned changed. How we worked changed. 

The way the brand sounded had to change too. 

It’s not to say that the first excerpt is wrong. At the time, Switch had a different personality and a different tone of voice: light, irreverent, larger-than-life. You can see it in the phrases we use, the run-on sentences, and the very liberal peppering of slang. 

Compare it to the second one. 

There’s space to think. Switch 2.0 is frenetic; there’s no room to stop and absorb the information you’ve just learned – that comes later. What it does ask you is that you hold onto the sentence as tightly as you can, and go along for the ride. 

The new brand voice has space. Between one sentence and another, you can sit with what you’ve just read. It’s not rushed. It isn’t asking you to speed ahead. 

There’s more. Run-on sentences work for brands built on urgency; brands where the information they tell you doesn’t need to be absorbed and kept. In 2018, we wrote blogs to talk about things we find interesting. 

We still do in 2022. But we want to explain why we find these things interesting. 

Run-on sentences don’t work for that. You can only keep track of so many words before the beginning of the sentence no longer makes sense, and for Switch’s rebrand, we wanted to make sure that whoever was reading our blog would stay with us to the end – and would understand what we were getting at. 

To that end, there are few run-on sentences in the new Switch sound. 

But there is flow. 

Flow is tricky. It’s not necessarily something you’ll run into in billboards or online ads – though you might, if they bring back long-form copy (here’s hoping). In longer works, like blogs, flow is how the sentences work together; how they lead into each other. 

For Switch’s rebrand, we wanted to mimic music. 

It’s an old writing trick. Varying your sentence length makes your writing infinitely more interesting – and makes it read a lot more naturally than if you kept to a certain sentence structure. 

Let’s take the second excerpt. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

Look at the first sentence. It’s six words. 

The second one is twelve, more than double. 

The last sentence is five. 

It follows natural progression. The first sentence hooks your attention and posits a theory. 

The second sentence expands on the argument. 

The third sentence ties it together. 

Most of Switch’s blogs are written this way: short sentences, long or medium sentences, and short sentences again. The idea behind it is that short sentences are near impossible to lose track of, and once you’ve read to the end, it’s easy to keep going, easier to understand, and it makes sense to your brain. 

When we say, vary your sentence length, we mean ‘write like music’. 

Let’s rewrite the excerpt to six words only, each. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s the same-old, same-old. 

This is how Hellsite High brings money in.

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

Short sentences work for brands whose speed is their biggest asset. It makes for quick reading, if not necessarily interesting reading, and it can be worked in ways to make it interesting. 

For Switch’s sound, though, it doesn’t quite work. The sentences are flatter. It’s harder to keep track of what you’re reading. There’s a clear line between sentence one and sentence four, but it doesn’t compel you to keep reading. 

Most of all, it doesn’t sound like Switch. 

That’s the other thing about brand sound. Your brand sound sounds like you. 

Switch’s sound is its people. None of us are brief people. We like to talk, and we like to talk at length, and we use difficult words and throw in oblique references. When it came to making Switch’s brand sound, we wanted to bring that to the front. 

Is a brand sound necessary?

No. The same way a logo, colours, or a brand image aren’t necessary, a brand sound isn’t something you have to have. 

What we can say is that a brand sound is cohesive. It makes you memorable. 

As we said at the start, there are thousands of brands out there today, and all of them are talking to the same audiences. They’re using the same collection of colours. 

They have, if not similar logos, then logos that blend. 

How do you stand out?

The way you sound. 

Language is limitless. The same sentence can be reworked and broken into a thousand different ways, all of which will differ. It’ll read different to the audiences you’re speaking to. 

It’ll sound different to you. 

Think of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.

It could have been ‘do it now’. It could have been ‘just start’. It could have been ‘the first step is now’. 

All of those sentences mean the same thing – but the first one is strict, for professional athletes only. The second one is encouraging, for those who don’t have the experience to work out; it’ll never be a professional brand. The third one makes you think of a self-help line. 

Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, as it is, unfilled, is tough, but not impossible. When you see it, it makes you want to try. 

It’s the same with your brand. The words you choose, and how you use them, will change your sound. 

And your sound will stand out. 

How do I start with brand sound?

Go back to personality. 

Look: brands all have a personality. They have a way of speaking. Sound is correlated to that. 

When we talk about brand sound, we look at the brand personality first. Is it kind? Is it brief? We look at industry. We look at who the audience is. We look at everything that has come before. 

Think of a make-up brand. The audience is primarily, for this brand, teenagers; it’s not a professional tool, it’s for teenagers who want to start out using makeup. When you write that brand, the sound has to fit – it’s light, it’s bubbly, the sentences are longer rather than shorter. It references music and universal experiences. Words are easy to understand. Complication is low. 

Now think of a professional, luxury brand. It’s the same tenet: you want longer sentences, to evoke that luxury, but you can go deeper than the first. Use the sentences as an extension of senses. Talk about scent and feel. Go for multi-syllabic words that sound like velvet. 

Sound. 

It’s an incredibly evocative sense, and one that translates to words beautifully. If you’d like to see how, look at our work on Tepia. 

And if you want your own sound, drop us a line. We’re always happy to talk. 

The post You know what a brand looks like. But what does it sound like? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you’re not paid to do anything creative, please move along. Turn the page. Click here if you have to. This one’s not for you.

If you’re still reading, strap in for a bit of an angry ride.

How often do you see a joke on something like @designershumour on Instagram and feel like it totally describes an aspect of your day at work? The ones about being asked to design something/photograph someone/take an art commission in exchange for exposure. Or the ones about the seventy-eight rounds of changes that a client requests before they finally accept the work. And by ‘the work’ we mean a version of the original so watered down that it looks like those painting-by-numbers sheets you buy at the Van Gogh museum gift shop.

I recently saw one that struck a chord. The €500 client is the one that acts like they now own your soul, feeling free to call after office hours and to make unreasonable demands and that will pay your fees begrudgingly, often several months after they’re overdue. The €50,000 client (I know, this was on an international channel) is the one that just sends the payment and accepts the work.

This got me thinking. It’s not about the size of the account. It is about the maturity of the client. The small client hasn’t understood the value of creative while those entrusted with massive accounts usually do.

Let’s start by a rudimentary definition of what we could call ‘successful creative’. This isn’t meant to go into a dictionary. It’s meant for us to have a phrase that we can work with for understanding the context.

There is everything we are familiar with. Bread and butter. They go together and we can all see how. Then there is the totally uncomfortable and unfamiliar. This is the stuff we don’t like and don’t want to think about. The creative will take a couple of different ideas and mash them together so they retain enough familiarity for us to see a completely new link between the ideas. If the link is really great, it pushes us just towards the border of the uncomfortable. And the closer it gets, the better the creative.

But, I hear you scream, what’s familiar to me is not familiar to everyone. And what’s uncomfortable to me is not uncomfortable to everyone.

This is where the good creatives excel. They understand their audiences. They know who they’re speaking to and who they are leaving out. They refuse to dilute their messaging to the point where it becomes familiar to absolutely everyone. Because that, by definition, is not creative.

So, backed by experience, fortified by intuition, equipped with years of education, driven by the desire to create beautiful and beautifully functional communication, the creative gets to work. This means hours or days of research, sketching, writing, scribbling, finding inspiration in the least likely of places, digging into ideas that have been squirreled away for this very moment. It means losing track of lunchtime and bedtime because the right way needs more refinement. It means taking honest criticism from colleagues and peers and the humility to act upon it…

It also means coping with the gut-wrenching knowledge that if it takes a hundred ideas to get to the right place, ninety-nine of them will have to be cruelly culled. They’re your ideas and you get to kill them.

Finally, thanks to this ineffable blend of intuition and training, to the careful pirouette between fact and feeling, and to the tango that form and function so elegantly dance, the work is done and ready to be presented.

Presented to whom? This is where it gets messy.

The recipient of your creative work is the steward of the brand. They know what is brand-appropriate and what isn’t. They are also humans, with a lifetime of experiences behind them. And, more often than not, they will not take the time to approach creative objectively.

This is inevitable. Our lives are experienced subjectively. But when we’re at work we must take an amount of objectivity with us. We can’t react emotionally to management accounts even if we want to. We can’t react emotionally to health & safety regulations. We must retain the objectivity we need to think and act in the best interest of the organisation and of the brand.

The best outcome for a meeting of minds between those proposing creative and those approving of it is a piece of communication that stuns your audiences for all the right reasons – a persuasive piece of beautiful communication. It ought to look great and it ought to do the job of changing people’s minds.

This means that those approving of the work need to be comfortable with feeling a little uncomfortable. The best creative does this. Every time you see the work presented at the Cannes Lions or the stuff that does the rounds with comments like ‘this is a brilliant piece of marketing’ you should be thinking “that’s a brilliant collaboration between clever creative and brave client”. 

Because it takes two to win at this game. It takes a creative who is willing to be brave and to have the smarts it takes to produce work that will work, not just look good. And it takes a client who knows to keep their personal preferences out of things and to look at the work based on its ability to work for the brand.

A bigger logo doesn’t make communication any more effective. If you hate the colour blue it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t feature on your creative. If you’re allergic to cats they could still help tell a good story.

This is not an easy ask. It takes discipline and restraint. It takes working through the cognitive dissonance that good creative often puts forth. It takes bravery and the will to fail once in a while. It takes away the safety net that playing safe provides. 

It does lead to greatness though. It means that the brand will be known for great stories. No one remembers the brands that play safe. It also means you’ll encourage your creatives to produce even more stunning work rather than bludgeoning them into a permanent semi-coma. 

If you’re not paid to do creative and you’re still reading this you’ve noticed this one is also for you. If you’re reading this after the warning not to, it means you’re curious about breaking some rules. So be brave, be that rebel who sticks their neck out in the name of a good story that’s well told. Your brand will thank you for it and you’ll have made a creative happy and fulfilled. And we’d have postponed this call to arms for another day.

The post Creatives, designers, copywriters, this one’s worth getting angry about appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Unless it’s Pride. 

Then it’s all hands on deck to push out rainbow everything before the month ends and they can move onto something else, like Thanksgiving or Black Friday. 

Rainbow biscuits. Rainbow mouthwash. Rainbow sandwiches. 

If it can be marketed and sold, it gets the rainbow on its skin (or else it gets a makeover again). 

It’s bad design, lazy marketing, and terrible storytelling.

And this is not specifically a Pride problem. 

We’ve seen this happen with other movements: Women’s Day and Black Lives Matter, battling child hunger, raising awareness for the gender pay gap. If there’s a brand that needs money or goodwill, they’ll find a cause that needs supporting for just long enough to raise that money and glean that goodwill. 

Once the month or the day ends, they move on. 

Does it work? 

It used to. 

It worked when brands were closed off to outsiders, when social media wasn’t so everywhere, when you didn’t need to show your allyship in tangible ways. 

It doesn’t anymore. 

The problem with pride design

If the extent of your Pride campaign involves launching something limited edition or slapping on a rainbow, you are part of the problem. 

It’s lazy. Anyone with Photoshop and a specific set of brushes can create a rainbow overlay, or add a supportive hashtag to the bottom of an image. People really good with the Adobe Creative Suite can go a step further, and make it a little more sophisticated: turn the rainbow into a gif, or create a five second loop of the most aesthetically pleasing shot of a Pride parade with your product carefully slotted right in the middle. 

Good ads tell a story. 

The best ads tell a story with a deeper meaning. 

Adding rainbows to a brand does neither. 

Supporting a cause

When you support or align yourself to a cause, you’re supporting people. 

It’s easy to forget that when money is involved. 

Causes such as Pride and Black Lives Matter are created for a reason. LGBTQAI+ people still experience persecution in parts of the world, and black people are frequently victimised, criminalised, and demonised by institutions and by individuals. Children are starving. Women still have to worry about losing their rights (or have already). 

When a brand supports a cause or aligns itself to a movement, the general understanding is that it supports that cause, it wants to draw attention to that movement, it’s making a statement. 

If there is a line drawn in the sand, it’s stating definitively what side of the line it falls on.

That isn’t necessarily a problem. 

It becomes a problem when brands only support that cause on paper.

We’ve written about pride before. 

The sentiment we spoke about there still stands. 

If the extent of your Pride support is bringing out something limited edition and rainbow – without following it up with donations or actual help – maybe skip Pride this year. 

Campaigns that don’t work

Burger King ‘Love Conquers All’

Burger King and McDonald’s rivalry is the stuff blogs are written about.

For Pride, they set their rivalry aside and came out with this ad.

There’s nothing wrong with the design in theory. It wasn’t, and won’t be, the first Pride ad to go this route. 

What’s wrong with it in principle, however, is how lazy it is. There’s no narrative behind it besides ‘oh! we support men kissing!’ 

Produced even ten years ago, it probably would have been interesting enough to cause a reaction. 

Produced now – when this kind of advertising is everywhere on a daily basis – it’s just boring. From the overused hashtag to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rainbow underneath, it commits the worst advertising crime there is: being utterly forgettable.

Skittles Grey Out for Pride

Slightly higher on the spectrum (get it?), Skittles’ 2021 campaign for Pride rehashed their campaign from 2020 (and 2017) by removing their colourful packaging for grey. 

This didn’t do well when they did it the last time, so why they’re still beating this particular greyscale horse is incomprehensible.

At least they’re putting their money where their mouth is by donating to GLAAD.

$100,000 out of an estimated $3M revenue.

Beyond that, the Skittles campaign falls underneath the same problem as Burger King above: it reuses the same ‘safe’ narrative that other brands all fall to when they absolutely don’t care about Pride, but want to commemorate their brand as an ally, which makes it boing, and once again, utterly forgettable.

Campaigns that do work

Bubly’s ‘Out At Night’ campaign

There are always going to be terrible stories.

But there are always going to be better ones, too. 

Pepsico’s Bubly brand opened up their Pride campaign to include the reopening of the NYC nightlife, days after New York dropped their COVID-19 restrictions. 

Similarly, it shrank its viewpoint to just one tiny fragment of the LGBTQAI+ community: the queer dancers and revellers that frequent Henrietta Hudson, a 30-year-old lesbian bar, and one of the last three remaining in New York City. Featuring Lisa Cannistraci, the owner of Henrietta Hudson, mixing a cocktail using Bubly’s blood-orange drink, the product placement takes second stage to the personalities brought in for the spot: Aquaria, Ty Sunderland, Gia Love. 

In addition, Bubly donated $15,000 of their profits to help Henrietta Hudson recover from the pandemic. 

Here’s why it works: it’s hyper-focused. It looks at the history of the movement. It’s trying to keep an aspect of queer NYC nightlife alive. 

Henrietta Hudson is an iconic bar. Donating directly to it means that thought went into what they wanted to support, specifically, rather than going for the most well-known charity, the one that’ll bring in more attention. 

Reebok’s ‘Fierceness Isn’t Born. It’s Made’

There’s a huge chunk of queer history that never makes it to the front: the safe spaces and the good spaces, the places people went to enjoy themselves when it was still a risk. Stonewall has now become public knowledge; other queer history focuses on the struggle. 

After all, Drama is far more memorable than joy. 

However, Pride campaigns across the board try to focus on brighter stories. 

Reebok’s Pride 2021 campaign partnered up with House of Ninja, a 1982 ballroom and vogue empire, pioneered by Will Ninja, to create a short film documenting ballroom culture. Like the Bubly ad above, it isn’t trying to talk about Gay Experiences At Large, but shrinking its scope down to a segment: the safe place where queer Latinx and Black youth could go to feel included and protected. 

Safety. Inclusion. Exploration. 

The themes for ads that work and ads that don’t are similar. 

It’s what brands do with the story surrounding them that matters. 

Reebok used those themes to highlight an aspect of queer culture a lot of people don’t know about. That makes this ad work, both to champion a cause and as a story. 

I want to support Pride! What do I do?

Figure out why. 

Every cause a brand champions has to have some reason why it champions it. What do you want to support about Pride? What story do you want to tell? How do you want your brand to move forward when Pride Month is over, and there’s no longer any monetary reason for support?

It’s easy to stamp a sticker with a rainbow and call it a day. 

It’s also the wrong way to go around any cause marketing effort. 

Any cause marketing your brand does has to be done with the intention of change: changing your brand, changing yourself, changing an aspect of your community. To support a cause for money only isn’t just lazy storytelling, it’s short-term. People will notice. 

And once people notice, the goodwill you’ve gained through supporting a cause will drain away. 

Here’s a few tips to keep in mind for Pride marketing. 

1. Show your work or shut up. If you have no intention of actually making changes to your organisation beyond ‘Yay! Rainbows!’, just don’t say anything. Nobody’s going to pat you on the back for putting a rainbow on your storefront. 
2. It’s 2021. #LoveWins happened in 2015. Stop holding onto it. There’s better stories to tell than ‘gays can get married now’. 
3. Think over the rainbow.  Pride Month happens in September (for Malta) and June (everywhere else).  What’s going to happen when Pride Month is over? Regularly scheduled programming? Or a legitimate, dyed-in-the-wool change?
4. Stop using queer pain to bolster your narratives. See point two: there’s better stories to tell. 
5. If you have to justify that you’re doing something for Pride Month, you’re probably better off pretending September is Annual Trade Fair month or something. 

Advertising for Pride isn’t a unique set of skills or a particular way of telling a story. 

But brands are sloppy when it comes to Pride advertising. A rainbow and two long-haired women or two obviously gay men are enough. 

That leads to bad design, lazy marketing, and terrible storytelling.

And you can do better. 

You have done better. 

So do better.

The post Over the Rainbow: Pride Advertising 2021 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

It’s fine if you’re not sure. 

Take a minute and think about it. 

Think about what you sound like: the words you use, how you phrase things, where you think a sentence should end. Are you the kind of person to talk until they run out of breath, or use short, sharp sentences? Do you like complicated words – halcyon, justification, superimposed? – or do you prefer simple? Do you think one way, and structure your sentences that way, or do you think about what you want to say, and pick through your sentence carefully, discarding things that don’t work?

The way you say things is your tone of voice. 

And brand tone of voice is just as powerful as brand colours and a logo. 

The value of a strong tone of voice

Social media has never been so busy. At any given moment, there are several thousands online, posting on the same platforms that everyone else uses – the numbers speak for themselves. 

And in that environment, with the rest of the global population, brands need to talk. More importantly, they need to be heard. 

Brand tone of voice can help you do that, but you need to know what your brand tone of voice is first. If you don’t have one, you need to figure that out, fast, because a good brand tone of voice makes the difference between a memorable brand and something that jumps on a bandwagon and strangles a trend to death. 

We’ve all seen those emoji-choked posts on social, the ones that crop up with young, fast startups and proliferate Facebook feeds. 

Now picture a luxury brand doing the same thing. 

Most of the time, it won’t work. Your brand tone of voice is going to get in the way, and that’s what it’s supposed to do – without a brand tone of voice, something that pins down exactly what makes your brand stand out, your brand disappears into the noise. If Louis Vuitton sounds the same as Charles & Ron sounds the same as Chanel sounds the same as the 3-for-2 T-shirts you pick up at the flea-market, then the only thing that really differentiates them from each other is price. 

And price is a dicey foundation on which to build a lasting connection. 

So you need a tone of voice you can get behind. 

You need a tone of voice that stands out. 

What (not) to do on social media

The problem with social media is there’s just too much content and too many things going on all at the same time. Standing out is going to be difficult. 

The second problem with social media is this: relying on talking the talk on social is going to backfire on you more than it’s going to help you. Like memes, social media language changes so fast that by the time you’ve got the hang of one turn of phrase, ten more have cropped up, and the one you’re using is dated. 

Think of it this way: when was the last time you heard someone say ‘groovy’ and mean it seriously?

Social media is a way of communicating. The language it adopts comes from everywhere, and it’s finite in its lifespan and reach. 

A lot of brands don’t seem to realise that. 

Brands that lean on a social media platform tend to end up adopting the way the users talk. For users, that’s fine: the only issue is that you get typecast (literally) into ‘just another X account’. 

For brands, being known as the brand that’s trying to pander to the younger generation is a warning note. Users on social media, no matter their age, are very, very used to being pandered to, and they’re very smart at figuring out when and why they’re being pandered to at that moment. Once they figure that out, it’s difficult to win back their trust – that’s if you’ve earned it the first time around. 

Diluting your tone of voice just to talk the talk, and still not managing to stay relevant, doesn’t help your case on social. It just leaves you with a lot of nothing to show for it, and a brand identity that’s now starting to wobble. 

And once your brand identity starts to wobble, the problems come in fast and hard. 

Your brand has to be strong. The brand values it carries, what it stands for, how it helps the community that supports it: those need to come out loud and clear and bright as neon, and you can do all that with tone of voice. Diluting it never helps your case. 

And ‘fitting in’ on social media doesn’t mean changing your voice. It means relaxing the rules about how you communicate – dropping a fullstop here, going for an extra comma there – not wholesale copy-and-paste mimicry. 

Here’s a cheat-sheet for what you shouldn’t do on social media: 

1. Try to use the trending word or phrase of the day. This changes too fast, and by the time it’s been approved by who needs to approve it, chances are that the language has flipped around completely. 
2. Load up your posts with emojis and gifs. You want to fit in. You don’t want to turn everything you say into a game of ‘guess what?’. 
3. Use the social media pattern of speech that individual users use. There are outliers who do it well, but that requires a level of creative freedom and a social media person that is always online, so it’s hard to pull off. Your best bet is to relax your rules, not drop them completely; to talk like a human brand, not one person left alone with the login. 
4. Change your tone of voice. Just no. Unless your tone of voice has grown stale, or you want a change, your tone of voice is your tone of voice, and you should use it. It’s the only thing you have if you want to avoid stamping giant logo watermarks on all of your images. 

What to do on social media

For all the problems that come with social media, there’s a lot of good in it too. It provides almost unfettered access to an audience that genuinely wants to communicate with you and your brand, that sees your brand as worthy and human and something to support. The best advertising in the world can’t build that sort of connection as quickly as a good social media community can. 

But you should use social media the way you, a person, uses social media. 

The difference between humans and brands is scale. It’s not always possible for people to see a brand as truly human – not when there’s the internet, and the internet will tell you everything you need to know about any company in the world. A brand is always going to be a brand. 

People still humanise them. And that humanity is what you need to build on. 

When it comes to social media, building that humanity is a little easier than any other way. 

Here’s what you do:

1. If you’re going to talk like a human, then talk like a human who’d work at your brand. Dropping your tone of voice completely isn’t going to work; it just makes you blend into the background – but softening it works well. Relax your grammar, type longer sentences. Humans are wordy creatures, and they like to talk. Use that. 
2. Drop your ‘brand can do no wrong’ mentality. Brands are going to fuck up, and they’re going to fuck up badly. The more you try to hide this, the worse it’s going to get, and no tone of voice in the world will help that. Build a way of speaking that doesn’t use that narrative: apologise when you make a mistake, reach out to users and talk to them in the comments, use a voice that’s humble. 
3. Add a little humour into how you talk. Brands that take themselves too seriously don’t tend to work on social media; a joke here and there helps to lighten up your tone of voice without actually dropping it wholesale, and it makes enough of a difference that it stands out against your more professional ads. 
4. Adapt the way you talk for the platform. Don’t copy what you just posted on Facebook for Instagram or LinkedIn: they all have different tone of voice requirements. Instagram is snappy sentences and less-is-more, Facebook goes for plain-speaking, LinkedIn is long and a little dry. Figure out how that works for your brand. 

Tone of voice is valuable. Using it on social media allows you to amplify that tone of voice onto the world’s and make sure people who have never heard of your brand hear it and listen to it. 

Make sure that what they hear is worth listening to. 

The post Your tone of voice on social: what to do, what to avoid appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

But it isn’t just about a television show. 

FRIENDS has moved past the point where you can call it a television programme; it’s become a cultural phenomenon. It’s a television show that survived the fall of television, found a new home in streaming, and keeps producing tie-in deals with big corporations who otherwise have no link to the television or entertainment industry. 

It defies age. You can’t pin a FRIENDS viewer down by class demographic. It goes beyond simple nostalgia. 

What FRIENDS does have is good writing and humanity. 

FRIENDS: the Brand

It’s not a leap of logic to assume that the people who watch FRIENDS also own at least one piece of FRIENDS-themed paraphernalia. 

Take it a step further: there’s at least one FRIENDS quote or episode you can recount verbatim. 

Without prompting. 

Without looking it up on Wikipedia. 

It’ll be something innocuous – looking at a specific shade of purple, watching a pair of movers load a sofa into a house, or listening to a British cook talk about trifle. Suddenly, your brain makes the connection. 

The rest of the episode plays out in your head involuntarily. 

The FRIENDS branding machine isn’t a complicated one, but it’s effective. 

More importantly, it’s memorable. 

From the title cards to the pops of pick-it-out-in-a-lineup colour to lines perfect for a soundbite, FRIENDS’ greatest asset is its memorability to the point where the show can really be considered a kind of advanced form of advertising jingle. 

You’ve heard of ‘Have a break, have a kitkat‘. 

Imagine it as an entire programme. 

Why should agencies care?

The true value of storytelling and good design is hard to measure. When you have an industry that relies so strongly on both, identifying what makes good design and what makes good storytelling shouldn’t be like finding the .psd file in your recent saves. 

Sometimes, it is. 

And it will continue to be. 

Good storytelling relies on understanding your audience and understanding what your audience wants to see, and on telling a story they want to hear. 

What FRIENDS does well – what FRIENDS continue to do well – is to tell a good story. 

The audience want Ross and Rachel to get together. 

They get together in the end. 

The audience want a reunion or a movie. 

The reunion is happening now. 

It’s important to clarify here that good storytelling does not mean a good narrative. Good storytelling is more a case of mechanics: how memorable is it, do people care about what’s happening, how does it work within your larger world, is it going to outlive you, is it going to be unseated when the next hot thing comes along. The narrative matters only as much as how you choose to tell that story, and to what point you allow your audience into the narrative creation process. 

Brands work the same way. 

When you tell your story to your audience, are you actually telling them a story they want to hear? Does it feel like a story?

Would you get invested in it?

Would you care if it was over?

Friends: the Story

The story of FRIENDS resonates with people who were born even after the show was finished. When we ran a FRIENDS-themed quiz night way back in 2018, the winning team was made up of teenagers who’d never really tuned in to watch it or understood the shift that FRIENDS introduced in the television industry, but they knew more than the people who did. 

Why? 

They learned about it through the people they cared about: their family members, their friends, their siblings. They learned about it through memes, side-references, jokes about pivotal moments. 

At the core of FRIENDS, there’s a distinct, intangible humanity. 

When combined with the eminent memorability of FRIENDS, you don’t have a show: you have a brand that keeps on giving. 

Can agencies pull off the same thing?

With good storytelling, agencies can do a lot more than they think. 

With beautiful visuals, good storytelling, and a compelling narrative, agencies can transcend the limitations of just ‘pushing’ a brand. 

But it’s not easy. 

It’s not just a case of understanding your audience anymore, or really just a case of telling a good story. 

You have to back up your story with good. You have to be able to withstand the pressure of understanding that every bad decision you make will become public knowledge — and to understand that it’s still worth doing things, even with that risk. 

You have to understand that you need to do things. 

Not-for-profit things. Not-for-PR things. 

The storytelling will come later. 

But you need to act first. 

And you need to act outside of being a brand. 

Consider it this way: television comedy shows didn’t start and end with FRIENDS. 

Frasier. 

Cheers. 

Everybody loves Raymond. 

Everybody Hates Chris. 

There’s thousands of others that we can keep listing here, but only one is a 17-year-old television behemoth that still brings in profit, that still gets people talking, that still remains strong enough to sell tie-in products. 

And that’s the power of good storytelling, of humanising a brand, and of knowing when to act. 

If FRIENDS can do it – a show that hasn’t aged well, a show that’s only surface-level good, a show that even its fans admit is dated, even while they extoll its virtues – why can’t you? 

And the answer to that is this: you can. 

But you have to take risks. 

And you have to trust in the story you tell. 

The post Lessons Learned from Friends appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.