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New Cardiff City Logo is way off target

Every now and again I stray back in to a bit of 'graphics', and one of those occasions has recently been for The Barry Horns, who I've talked about before. So it is from that point of view that I write today.

Rebrands are always controversial, and a polar shift such as the one we've just seen at Cardiff City was never going to get through without a bit of friction from the huge and passionate supporter base. Personally, whilst I'm a firm believer in being proud of one's heritage, I can see the arguments for the switch. Ultimately, the club's future is a little bit brighter for the time being.

But Jesus - couldn't they have come up with a better new logo? I appreciate this is from the people who brought us the Cardiff City Stadium, but if you're going to throw out over 100 years of heritage for the sake of £100 million you could at least spend a bit more on a replacement?

A lot of football clubs have awful logos/crests, but that is because they were made in the old days. Keeping a tatty relic of a bygone age reinforces a club's working-class, flat cap rattle-enthused heritage, which is nice to remember in the days of mega clubs and oligarchs.

But now, the Club has re-branded to broaden its appeal in The East, and all we're sending over is this garish piece of clip art that looks like it was designed with the art director (if there was one) at the other end of a 2 minute phone call from the artworker.

When I think of a City like Manchester I think of a strong, forward-thinking 21st Century City founded on a rich and diverse heritage, and this for me is visually personified in the two football clubs' different approaches. Football spreads a city's name and image worldwide. When people see CCFC's new look, what will they understand about the City?

It doesn't suprise me that things have gone this way, but it's another example of a massive wasted opportunity for the City of Cardiff. Of course 'Cardiff' had nothing to do with the decision, but that just goes to reinforce the opinion of many of the fans that the club has very little regard for its tens of thousands of passionate ticket-buyers, who also need a prosperous place to live and work in the global 21st century.

Welsh cultures are flourishing from all angles at a grassroots level, but some of the institutions tasked with promoting and harnessing these progressions seem like they're stuck in smoky 1970s working men's clubs. Nothing sums this up better for me right now than the new Cardiff City Football Club logo.

Authenticity in service design

Federation Coffee is brilliant. It's a great place to go on a Saturday, have a sit, have a beautiful americano or two, take a notepad and scribble out whatever it is that's on your mind at the time.

It's a young and very genuine addition to these almost gourmet coffee houses that one isn't really prepared for coming from Cardiff. Last week I spent a bit of time thinking about the new coffee shop look; a sort of 'railway sleeper chic'.

I love how these places look. It seems to tie in with a fascination with fixed-gear bikes, beards and chrome that I picked up a few weeks ago on the Convoy blog. Musically, the aesthetic stretches to Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes and Seattle: a rainy, authentic tartan-shirted affair where you 'just know' what quality is, without really needing to be told. The standard and style of service and product are implicit in their presentation.

That, of course, is nothing new, it's a basic question of creating a unified brand to deliver meaning and drive take-up. People develop their own affinities based on the visual cues around them. But over the last few decades there's usually been a fair bit of signage or labelling to explicitly point out a product's key selling points. At the turn of the 80s/90s we had 'as seen on TV'; 10 years later we had the importance of a product story. And now it seems we're moving towards objects whose entire heritage is visible in the product themselves, or the environment in which they are served. You don't need to see little pots of coffee beans in various stages of roasting any more, or see extended menus outlining every single variety, ingredient and size. You just know.

I'm quite into this, but I'm worried that it's become the established look du-jour of the niche back street place that middle class twentysomethings show off to their friends about. Not for my own sake, but because I'm worried about what happens when the trend filters out to mass adoption.

Starbucks have already started removing their branding from some of their US neighbourhood stores, in an effort to appear 'more authentic'. In the UK, there was a bit of a humph a few years ago when McDonald's adopted a tasteful green façade on some of their shops. But in McDonald's case the neon counters and chip fryers at the back of the store stayed the same. As we move forward though I can see bigger chains adopting the distressed counters and coffee-crate looks that I love in small, independent outlets right now. What will happen then?

If more people feel comfortable in those environments, will they stay the same? What will happen when people apply their own ideals and heritage stories to things, that are different from those intended by their creators? Is that cool? And how will we differentiate, and will differentiation matter? 

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Mark Hadfield inspired me to use 'authentic photography' for this post, but it's only the ideas here that will degrade over time, not the pictures. 

 
 

John Lewis Advert

I love this new ad for christmas 2009 by Adam & Eve. 

It's so beautiful - the targeting of the photography and music, alongside the products featured, seeming totally true to brand whilst also being quite cutesy, it's clever. Based on last year's one I'm guessing there wasn't much difference between the briefs, so it's inspiring to see a different angle on it.

What does social look like?

I attended IPAsocial last week.

As a recent graduate, and someone who doesn't even work in advertising I should probably have known better than to tweet a suggestion for a break-out talk during the second half of the evening.

But listening to the other subjects that came up, I do think there's some space in the debate for a consideration of the aesthetics of what we're all doing at the moment, whether we're working in straight up advertising or in a more productiony / content kind of place like public zone. The title I suggested was "what does social look like?"

I didn't really manage to talk about this much, but elsewhere there was a discussion on how clients could be convinced, and why they might be sceptical about using social media. There was also a lot of discussion on the more anthropological aspects of behaviour and imitation. You can read a lot more on the IPAsocial page

From my experiences so far, I'm not sure there are many sceptical clients. For me, it's been quite the opposite - nearly every project I've seen recently has had social media and engagement as part of the brief. They're all public service and voluntary projects, which might offer some rationale, but my feeling is that it's probably the same in commercial-land too. At least at the beginning of campaign discussions, people seem to be rushing to 'use' social media right now. I do feel it's widely accepted that it is changing the way brands and organisations need to operate, even though Will has raised some concerns that ultimately I do agree with.

My own concern is the speed that the transition to conversational marketing is taking place. The way that it's occurred within the lifespan of one visual trend; the Web 2.0 world of glossy rounded corners, big search bars and clean lines.

There's nothing wrong with these things, but I think it's going to put half-baked social media campaigns in a precarious position over the coming months and years. 

What I mean by that is that right now it's kind of ok to have a website screaming "share this!"... "add this!"... "tweet this!"... "facebook!", but this won't last for ever — It's always been the case that it's the ideas being conveyed that need to be social themselves to gain momentum and spread. So I'm worried that as clients come to the end of their transitions to adopting these new techniques, or at least thinking they have, their audiences will be on the way to turning off from the generic iconography and aesthetic that's been shouted at them for so long. People get bored.

Of course this transition won't be a one off thing, it will need to continually re-invent itself as new platforms and trends emerge. But there will be no point if people have got fed up with listening. And I think that for that to happen, we need to be very careful in the short term not to push 'social' into people's eyes. People know they can share, they have the tools to do it. Let's spend our time worrying about giving them things to talk about rather than whether they should or not.

Which kind of ties quite nicely back into Will's notion of brands just being good at what they do. As well as the 'technology changes, people don't' principle that Amelia wrote about a few weeks ago.

Yes.

Innocence lost, and other predictable headlines

This whole Innocent / Coca-Cola thing is tricky, isn't it? 

In case you missed it, Coca-Cola have bought into somewhere between 10% and 20% of Innocent, and I think on the whole I support Innocent for selling. Judging by how much trouble I'm having in deciding what I think about the whole thing, I imagine it was a pretty tough call for the founders to make as well, and what do I, or anyone else who doesn't work for Innocent, know about what was the right thing to do.

Picture borrowed from the Innocent Blog

We've already seen how hard it is to be a smoothie company in the UK, with PJ being discontinued by Pepsi earlier in the year, and I haven't heard much from their new Tropicana offering recently. With people cutting their spend at the supermarket and on the lunch hour, Innocent must have been feeling some pressure. 

So I'm glad they'll still be trading, and that they'll be able to continue to grow into continental Europe.

I'm sure a lot of other people are glad too. I hate that there are going to be a lot of rubbish comments on the Innocent blog and elsewhere that I don't think they deserve.

But people are bound to have a problem with this support coming from Coca-Cola, a company who have been linked to all sorts of ethical misdemeanours for many years past. They've been accused of using paramilitary squads to kill union leaders at the Columbian plants. They've been accused of draining and polluting groundwater (i think). They were a symbol of western capitalism for most of the 20th century. And they make rubbish drinks.

It's funny though, that if this were any other company, I wouldn't be the slightest bit bothered about their financial activities. If HSBC admitted they invested in Arms, whatever. If Gap bought a Somalian pirate clothing manufacturer, meh. There's something about this particular news that's catching my attention though.

I don't doubt that there will continue to be amazingly tasty drinks with witty innocent labels on, and I look forward to enjoying them wherever I travel in the future. I hope that the amazing work they've done on recycled packaging rubs off on other manufacturers as Innocent gain market share. I hope, also, that they make it to the States and blow all the stupid pseudo-health 'added vitamin blah blah blah' drinks brands right out of wholefoods.

Rubbish American drinks, pic borrowed again, from Fitsugar this time. Ironically, I think Odwalla is owned by Coca-Cola.

The statement from founders Adam, Jon and Richard says lots of things about the company not changing, which, if they say so, I believe to be true. And they deserve this recognition for 10 years amazing work. Really amazing. 

Amazing!

But I do think something will happen in the minds of even Innocent's most loyal customers now that this news has broken, and I think it's a shame. In the long run it might have wider implications for people's outlook on things.

Tony Blair outside 10 Downing Street on May 2nd, 1997, pic The Guardian

I'm finding it hard to not liken this a bit to the effect of the Iraq invasion by Blair's Labour Government. Here was a hugely popular government who many people felt a lot of enthusiasm for and who many would openly and proudly support in conversation. There are less of those people after Iraq. The amount of people in the States that I told about Innocent, and the enthusiasm with which I told them, well, it was a lot of people and I was very enthusiastic, because I love the brand. As we're always told, word of mouth is hugely influential and a brand asset that can not be undervalued.

So I wonder how many people are going to continue to really love Innocent, and be proud to talk about them, and make such an easy choice at the chiller cabinet. Before this week, it was pretty simple; all other drinks bad, Innocent good. You could rant lyrically about the labels, the foundation, the cow vans, and encourage your friends to get involved. 

Now, I think I'd be worried that people will just say 'yeah, but aren't they owned by coca-cola?' and there's not going to be much to respond with. Maybe I have an optimistic view of the power of branding, but I feel that there's one less thing for people to really believe in now.

Whatever the intricacies of the deal, the variation of different products, I'm worried that people are just going to end up thinking that fruit drinks, just like cosmetics, ice cream and chocolate before them, are just like politicians. They're all the same really.

Smells like teen advertising

Adverts aimed at teenagers are some of my favourites. There are some beautiful ones, but the real reason I like them is just that they're so shameless in their technique.

What I mean by that is that they all seem to position their product as a chance to get closer to the person of their desires. Got spots? Well, you can't go to the party. Used Lynx? Then obviously, the girls of Nuts Magazine will soon be chasing you down the beach.

Pic borrowed from The Inspiration Room

I'm not saying that the rest of ad land is devoid of sexual positioning, but I can't recall a teenage ad (maybe with the exception of Frank) that hasn't used it. And in older-positioned ads it's sometimes a little more subtle. I'm totally ready to be proved wrong on this, but I can't think of any right now.

So anyway. Recently,Chewing Gum adverts are the ones that are getting to me.

That's the latest advert for Wrigley's extra.

The irrelevance of this ad is stifling my ability to write cohesively about it, but suffice to say I don't think it's very good. If they're saying that you can 'get closer' and live some sort of West Side Story dream, then the previous ads were probably better, no?

A similar thing was going on in New York last Summer. 

Again, fail. It's a neat idea (is it?), something about giving and receiving, link to kissing, or something, young people, email, text messaging, youf, but there's no connect with Dentyne chewing gum. And what's with that font? 

I had a better pic of this campaign which focussed on that panel at the back with all the copy on it, but I've lost it. It was some sort of Howies-esque 'log off and spend more time together' kind of message.

[edit - here it is!]

What these brands are really selling is confidence. The teenage market being as transient as it is, it's probably been ok for marketers to repackage the same ad as new generations come through.

I'm really torn between wanting to give young people a little credit for being a bit more sophisticated than these ads make out, and between giving a lot of well-paid marketers and advertisers a little respect for deciding that these were the best responses to the briefs.

I'm wondering, though, if someone could benefit from doing 'a Dove'. It may not sell product in the short term, but it must be in everyone's best interests for a brand to just encourage everyone to chill out a bit? 

Perhaps, after that, we could start to see some really inventive work.

re: What is a brand?

A school colleague of mine, Stacey Jenkins, posted a little blog tonight about brands, as a result of the work she's doing for our latest project. You can read it here.

I'm sure a lot of readers here will be pretty bored with the 'what is a brand' question, but, as a student, I think it's important that my peers and I get to grips with them in our own minds so that we know what's being asked of us when we go and work in the big world. As Stacey rightly points out, "It's not just the logo".

I would have posted what I'm about to say as a comment on her blog, but for some reason the captcha wasn't working, so I couldn't post. I'm sure she'd love to hear your thoughts too, if you can get it to work. Otherwise, I'd love to have comments here, it's all good fun.

So, once you've read Stacey's post, here's my response:

"I don't really understand what conclusions you are making, but an interesting and fulfilling read none-the-less, good work.

"For me, I'd probably take it one step further and argue that brands are really just delivery mechanisms for a much bigger set of meanings and messages. They're like a little package of goodies shared between a company or their product, and the end consumer. The company can try once in a while to put new goodies of meaning into the package, and the consumer will take out what they feel is appropriate to the product or service in question.

"That's when examples like First Great Western, who you mentioned, get interesting for me. They're a service that relies so much on staff and other companies. For example, a key brand attribute, punctuality (or lack of!) is more reliant on Network Rail. And their on board staff have so much power in brand-making. That's probably why the brand is so bland and generic! At least nothing can go wrong that way.

"I don't see your other examples as particularly strong brands, maybe not even brands at all. They're an interesting choice to use. It's semantics I guess. But there you go...

"I think the confusion of logo/brand probably stems in large part from the FMCG landscape, where a lot of meaning-making has to go on through television campaigns, or outdoor, or whatever. But the companies want people to remember all that when they come to make a decision in store, so the logo becomes the unifier, the big label on the 'package' saying "remember all this extra amazing stuff!". Or maybe the logo will utilise specific design conventions to give instant stand-out for specific demographics, i.e minimalism, greenwash, budget, or what ever. So people start to see the logo as 'the brand' when in fact it is merely the signifier for the brand.

"The Innocent 'dude', for example, really has very little to do with healthyness, tastyness, being welcoming, friendly or approachable. But through considerable effort from everything from labelling, advertising, quality of product, and social good work, Innocent have built this amazing brand. And it's all packaged up in the dude.

"What really excites me is the opportunity to use all this cut-throat marketing and design practice to inspire wider social change. I think people respond to little else these days. We've seen it in Obama and Make Poverty History, I hope it happens more often from here on in! 

Being cynical, I'd say that the 'Product (Red)' is just an opportunity for existing and weakening brands or product lines to add someone else's meaning and ethics. It saves the brand time and commitment, by not having to do any build-up or development work themselves, and it doesn't really give the kinds of consumer pay-off that an initiative like that should. By that, I mean that it's not really encouraging anyone to engage with the issue of Aids, or really change their consumption behaviour. But that's just my opinion.

"You should try to get hold of 'Lovemarks' by Kevin Roberts, if you haven't already, it's a really good read.

Apologies for the slight rant. You'll understand now why I was a bit gutted to not be able to submit my comment on Stacey's blog! 

Labour List

Labour List launched in beta last week in a not overdue attempt to bring 'labour-minded people' together on the internet.

MASSIVE FAIL.

One of the things that draws me to the party locally is that our elected representatives here are pretty much in tune with the needs of the area and are able to lobby and vote in our best interests. Towards the start of their reign one got the feeling that this was repeated in Westminster. 

A party with such social roots, clause 4, etc. should have been the first on the social internet scene. Especially considering how young some of the researchers and party staff are. Sadly it was not. But I really would have thought that with two or three years to think about it, they could have done better than this.

The post on the front page at the moment is nearly 1,500 words! And then there's the link to some anonymous  petty 'spoof' david cameron twitter feed. It just, well, it just doesn't feel right.

That this group blog was launched after the Obama / online fund-raising spectacle had been fully absorbed is even more concerning. Labour is crippled by debt. Is this site supposed to bring people together and realise that the party is worth donating to and campaigning on the doorstep for? The design is lifeless and outdated. The posts are long, boring and monotonous, and their comments are unhelpful and angry. It will do nothing to enthuse anyone, even Labour supporters, that the party is the vibrant, forward-thinking grassroots-led organisation it currently aspires to be.

State your order!

I watched the first part of Garden State last night. I love the little details in it that seem to come together to build the characters and plot really quickly. I guess that's the same with a bunch of films. You probably have to enjoy a film enough to watch it again, which is when you pick most of these things up.

Anyway another thing that's always interested me is branded spirits. I get that some spirits are nicer than others (for the record, my favourites are Havana Club 7 Year, Tanqueray, Macallan, and Sailor Jerry), but it's the ordering part that bugs me. Like, ordering by name. Whenever I'm behind the bar I usually try to offer a choice, bit of an up or down-sell, but all the customer has to do is ask for 'dark rum' or whatever. If I'm honest, people who ask directly for a brand, unless it has it's own specific qualities (Sailor Jerry), I usually think nasty things about them.

Which is why for the first time I really liked the characterisations in one of the first scenes of Garden State.

They're more about brands in the States, sure, and more direct, but I don't think these guys would be nearly as annoying if they didn't order 'Ketel Redbulls' and a 'Ketel Cosmo'. It's like those adverts for 'SoCo' that completely failed. Especially the cosmo one, the taste is going to be so much more dependent on the barman's skills than on the minute intricacies of the vodka.

It's such a small part of the film, and they're really minor characters, but they really wound me up. Good writing.

The soundtrack's good too.

Riffing on Woolworths

I had the pleasure this week of visiting Clwb Ifor Bach to support a friend's first foray into live music promotion. 

Clwb was one of the first clubs I became a regular visitor of, and also where I played my first gig, which, writing this, I've just realised was nearly 10 years ago. I also was pretty privileged to be asked to play with Ozomatli at the venue a few times. After coming off stage with them on one occasion, I was asked to join Shootin' Goon, and the rest was (pre-myspace website-building) history. Sort of.

Shootin' Goon, me on right. pic © Andrew James 2003

I still love our music, but The Goon were notoriously ropey during live sets. We all had our moments of string snapping, part-forgetting glory.

If you have ever been to see a band where there's been a local support, you'll probably know the kind of thing (mp3 link): A song finishes, and the singer announces awkwardly that there are 'a few technical problems' before breaking into some kind of jam session with the drummer while the offending player repairs their kit.

Please do stick with me, I will make a point soon…

It's classic local support behaviour. The problem comes when you play away and become tour support. In my own experience, Shootin' Goon were given pretty much the best start to a career we could have been offered when we secured 10 UK dates with Reel Big Fish.

They blew us away. No string breaks, no set lists, all completely professional, rehearsed, funny, and a pleasure to watch. At the time we called it "SLICK" and aspired to do a similar act from then on, with limited success.

I was reminded of all this the other night. Headliners Romeo Must Die really acted like the headline band and played a blinding (and deafening) set. They worked the small and bored crowd as if they were playing to Wembley but in such a humble way as to get even the likes of me bopping my head by the end of their set. The same could not be said for their support bands.

It's kind of the same for brands, isn't it?

I was thinking about all this talk about brands focussing on their core activities. Staying on message. All that is fine, but what about between songs? A band's core activities are obviously their songs, but if they mess up the inbetween bits, it totally falls apart. 

By the way, if the earnings model for music is going to move to Live, then those bits are going to become even more important. Keeping the energy going, maintaining the atmosphere, offering up more than what the download could.

For a brand, exactly the same. All those car manufacturers with rubbish local dealers. 'Classy' nightclubs with shoddy POS. Commercials that offer no resemblance to the actual christmas shopping experience. 

So my point is, at a live gig, people don't give as much attention to the supports. They automatically expect the standard to be lower and it's not really what they came for anyway. They're like Woolworths. No one bought into it because it was a bit rubbish. 

Picture from Russell's site, sorry. hope that's ok.

If only they'd made that their brand. It could have been kind of like the Great British Seaside, but for shops.

I know tons of bands that have huge gaps between songs, where they talk, joke, whatever. In a kooky kind of way, unprofessionalism is kind of what makes conversational brands like Innocent so endearing. Even though Innocent obviously have pretty slick supply chain management gubbins to get fresh products out so regularly, and their drinks are amazing, I bet people would be totally cool with it if once in a while their favourite wasn't available because the factory had run out of oranges or something. At Woolworths, if you'd visited at all, it would have just qualified for a 'tut' and then walking out wondering why you'd thought to bother in the first place.

Little Chef should take note.