PAUL ISAKSON

Your Culture Drives Your Brand

It's true. The energy, attitudes and effort of the people working on a product or service ultimately drive the brand's face in public. The more you care about what you're making and doing, the better you're going to make it. You want the people who experience it to love it just as much as you do.

The opposite is also true. When a job is just a job to get a paycheck, or to put a big title or big company name on a resume, or to get promoted on to the next role or brand, the less one cares about doing something that actually speaks to people. It's more about one's own personal situation than it is about getting others to love what you make or do. It's about doing only what you have to do to move on to the next or to stay comfortably seated where you are.

Great brands attract people who have passion for what their brands do or make. Great brands inspire employees to make their brands their own. Google is a good example of this.

More about the contest here and pics of more entries here.

via Brandchannel

How To Be Alone

This video has been making its way around a little. I like it. I think it's important to spend time alone. It's a good way to get to know who you really are. There is a balance to it though. You don't want to spend too much time alone. We need to be around other people. After all, we are social beings by nature. But I do enjoy my alone time to read or think or write.

Watching this reminded me that this is one part of going out on my own that I didn't really think that much about before leaving last October. I never really considered the significance of the social side to working in an office environment for eight-plus hours a day. Especially in a creative one. I don't know why I didn't think about it. I just didn't.

Thankfully I've been able to meet and work with some great people along the way and that's been fun in an entirely different and interesting way.

Anyway, I liked the video so I thought I'd share it...

How Low Can We Go?

This news clip appeared with some joking commentary in one of my social streams today. It brings up something that's been bugging me a bit lately.

There's a growing movement of making jokes out of well-meaning people and terrible things all for the sake of the person passing the link (or the people making the remix) getting some sort of attention for themselves.

This is disturbing in a couple of ways.

For the video of the seven year-old specifically, it tells this kid (and other kids out
there watching it) that doing stuff like this is funny and it will get you the attention you're seeking.

Speaking more broadly across these types of videos and their corresponding remixes, it shows how simple-minded and thoughtless we have become when it comes to what is really being said about us by the things we share and create.

These things aren't that funny when you think about it. And I think the fact that we're making jokes of them and the people involved in them says something sad and pathetic about the direction a large piece of culture is moving.

I guess by posting this, I am hoping that we can all (myself included) become more aware and thoughtful about the kinds of things we choose to share; but I fear we'll
only continue to see culture creeping to new lows as things like these keep getting
passed around.

I hope we prove the second part of that wrong.

Can't. Stop. Listening.

Speaking of waiting for things, this one certainly was worth the wait. I can't stop listening to it. It's too good. And the truth is, the fact that this took them just over three years to release a new album makes me appreciate it all the more. Thank you Arcade Fire. Your dedication to the craft is much appreciated.

Have We Been Using The Wrong Equation?

While driving lately I've noticed my own impatience with people when I really shouldn't be impatient with them. Why am I in such a hurry? Often there's not really a need to be. I mean, all the groceries I need at the store will still be there no matter if I get there in five minutes or fifteen.

Add to that my listening to the new Arcade Fire over the weekend and very much noticing the song "We Used To Wait" in relation to this same idea. In it, Win Butler sings about how we used to write letters and then we had to wait for the return letter to get to us. Part of the lyrics go:

I used to write,
I used to write letters I used to sign my name
I used to sleep at night
Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain

But by the time we met
By the time we met the times had already changed

So I never wrote a letter
I never took my true heart I never wrote it down
So when the lights cut out
I was left standing in the wilderness downtown

Now our lives are changing fast
Now our lives are changing fast
Hope that something pure can last
Hope that something pure can last

It seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what's stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive

We used to wait
We used to waste hours just walking around
We used to wait...

This reminded me of watching an episode of Who Do You Think You Are with my parents this past Spring when they were visiting. This particular episode was on Sarah Jessica Parker's ancestry. Somewhere early in the story, they discovered one of her past relatives decided to go from Ohio (I think) to San Francisco for the Gold Rush of 1849.

This trek took people just over four months to complete by covered wagon and it was a given that several people who started out on the trip would not be alive by the time they reached their final destination. When they talked about that, it made me pause and think about how we are today.

Now we complain if the flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco takes an hour longer than it was supposed to (around 4.5 hours average on a direct flight) and odds are pretty good that nobody is going to die on the trip.

I know, I know... progress and technology and all that have made this better.

But have they really?

One of the things I that I think helped get us so off course was the propagation of the idea that time equals money.

Somewhere back in the annals (wouldn't that be a horrible word to let spell check pass through as spelled correctly when you forgot to include the second "n"?) of history, time didn't equal money. Time equaled quality.

The more time you put to something, the better it was (presumably). The better it was, the more you could charge for it. You might not get rich monetarily from this approach, but you likely would be rich in other things—reputation, customer loyalty, assurance in knowing you were doing something worthwhile, etc.

While the idea that time can equal quality is still true (we still use the phrase "quality time" after all), the idea that time equals money has permeated every corner of our lives to a much larger degree I think. We can't get things done fast enough.

We have to check our email when we should simply be enjoying an evening with friends or family. We are in a rush to get from point A to point B because the time in between them is just a waste if we're not being productive. If the person in front of us at the light sits still for two seconds after the light turns green, we're jamming on our horns.

We're constantly in a hurry to get to the business of doing business, or whatever else is so important we can't spare a few minutes.

Is the idea that time equals money behind all of this?

Is this why we've made the trade-off for eating things that are worse for us over things that are better that we'd have to make? Is it behind the problems Apple is being called out for on the iPhone 4? Is it why Toyota ran into issues this past year? Is it at the root of the debacle that BP created?

What would the world be like if we never invented the equation that time equaled money and instead left it as time equaled quality? Would we take more time to do things right? Or is it just our nature to not want to put in any more work on things than we have to?

Anyway, just some stuff that has been rolling around in my head over the past few months as it relates to time. Most likely because my perception of time has shifted now that I have had to learn to master all of it instead of having a lot of it mastered for me. Would love to hear any thoughts you have, if you have any on it...

Men and Dirt

Along a route I often walk to get coffee or drive to meetings west of downtown, they've started to do some demolition of an old building that sat beside the train tracks. Almost every time I go by, there's some guy leaning against the guardrails of the bridge, watching the excavator knock things around or dig something up.

Sometimes it's an older man. Sometimes it's a couple of younger business types who live in the lofts near by. Without fail, there's almost always at least one guy standing there watching. I've even stopped a time or two myself.

Women, not so much. They just keep walking by. Well, except for one that I saw. But she had a little boy of about 5 years of age with her who was lit up like Christmas watching it all.

There's just something about big equipment, dirt and demolition that speaks to a man's soul, I guess. It makes me think of some things that have come up over the last few years around the decline of masculinity in our culture (U.S.)—how having to sit behind desks inside cubes has stripped many men of a core part of who they are.

As I stop to watch, it reminds me of summers growing up on the farm, spending sun-up to sun-down on a tractor in the corn fields. Even more so of a couple in college where I got to operate big machines moving piles of dirt.

There was something fun to it at the beginning; feeling all that power under your control. But then after a while it became monotonous and mind-numbing and I would grow to resent having to sit out there doing the same basic tasks over and over.

When I was running big equipment like this for summer jobs in college, I would begin to dream about working in advertising and never having to be on one of these things again. Now? Well, I love what I do but it would definitely be fun to jump back in there and start knocking things around...

Oh, Hello

Andy asked me if I was done with this a week or two ago. While this is definitely the longest I've gone without writing a post in a long time (if not ever), I told him I didn't think I was. It was just that I was tired of writing about marketing and brands and advertising and well, all of this stuff really.

I think I might start writing about those things again. But not just those things. You might notice I've stripped off any sort of "title" to this page now. Now it's just me. Sometimes I will write about marketing and business and such. But not always. It's tiring to write about that stuff and quite frankly, there are just too many people making noise about that stuff for the sake of themselves and that just makes me not want to be a part of it all. Anyway...

I'll write about more than what I used to. Sometimes that will be about life. Sometimes that will be about faith. Sometimes about random things I think that I just want to get out of my head. Sometimes about nothing much at all or something little perhaps. I guess what I'm saying is that this will become more of all of me and less of just the work/career part of me.

That's all I have to say for now. On with it I guess...

A Modern Campaign Approach: LEGO® CL!CK

Another one that's popping up again after its initial appearance in early January—a fun and well done video for LEGO® by Pereira O'Dell. The corresponding site is also interesting and entertaining. Given the creative nature of LEGO fans, I like that they've got an place where the purpose is to share inspiring and imaginative creative content.

In going through the LEGO CL!CK posts on Pereira O'Dell's blog, it's interesting to see that they launched this campaign with their iPhone app. Following that was this short film and the site. 

For those of you who have been thinking about the "modern campaign," I think this is a decent example.

It's no longer led with a big national TV commercial -> follow-up with at least two more TV commercials of the same ilk (afterall, you've got to have three to enter it as a campaign for all the award shows) -> supported by print, OOH and maybe radio... oh, and better get a micro site up too.

The modern campaign starts where ever it makes the most sense to start based on the people you're trying to connect with and the behaviors of theirs you wish to influence. It then goes where the ensuing reaction from said people takes it. It's about the brand playing a bit of idea volleyball with culture. One inspires the other and a "conversation" of sorts naturally happens.

That's all I have to say about it for now, but more will probably come up later...

A New Voice For Apple?

I've seen this iPad commercial the last few nights. I can't help but feel like it's just not Apple. I get that the iPad is a different experience than the iPhone or a laptop, but it's still an Apple product. To me, the tone of this spot feels more like a commercial for a Ford F150 than the Apple iPad.

Am I off here? What do you think?

On another note, surprised (but not too much) to see that Apple turned off the comments to this commercial on the YouTube page for it...

Adobe Responds to Apple... With A Banner Campaign

Just came across the new banner campaign from Adobe to defend Flash. It's kind of funny to think that an open letter on Apple's web site from Steve Jobs now has Adobe running an ad campaign.

The question is, is Adobe doing more harm than good by being so defensive?

On a related note, the banners are in Flash, so they can't be viewed on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Ha.