Design = Connection

One can argue—a lot of people do—that graphic design in the interactive age is developing an aesthetic that’s distinct from print. It’s an intriguing discussion.

Still, as a print guy, I can’t help still digging design rooted in traditional print media.

And really, in a lot of key ways, the ideas of good graphic design haven’t changed all that much since the early ’80s, when Jane Tilka founded her Minneapolis design shop, Tilka Design.

Though she and her five colleagues have certainly incorporated online work into their practice, the work is still rooted in what I’d describe as the dignity and classic architectural directness of strong print design.

(Indeed, one of Tilka Design’s practices is print publication work, notably Architecture Minnesota magazine. Full disclosure: The firm also has done collateral work for Delta Sky magazine, which is published by my employer, MSP Communications.)

“Dignity” might suggest stuffy distance to some. That’s not what Tilka Design’s work is about. Jane stresses how good design actually creates “connecting points” between a brand and whoever it’s seeking to reach, and wherever they can be reached.

That includes (as Jane notes) a quietly bold simplicity that cuts through the visual noise of the modern world. It also means collaboration with clients. (That almost self-effacing sense hasn’t kept Tilka Design from winning awards.) The office itself communicates an air of quiet thoughtfulness rather than hipster-geek exuberance. (Not that I’ve been to any of their office parties.)

The company has designed a number of recognizable logos—or, as Tilka designers would say, “visual systems”—for notable companies including Imation. (And dig the logo for up-and-coming Minneapolis-based film production company Werc Werk Works, which has a touch of ’50s beatnik.)

You can see this idea of intimate dignity in the brand development work Tilka Design did for chemical-dependency clinic and consultancy Hazelden. The old logo was perhaps too dignified—like lettering carved in an ancient Roman monument. In other words, a little forbidding. Not what an organization in Hazelden’s business should project. The new logo, introduced a couple of years ago, maintains a reassuring solidity combined with an open and transparent approachability through use of “lower-case” vowels.

The work doesn’t end with the logo. When Tilka Design takes on a project, it unites the visual definition, informed by the brand strategy, throughout all of a client’s marketing materials, from business cards to Web sites. (Those materials often have grown haphazardly over the years. Articulating the in-house use of a client’s visuals is typically part of Tilka Design’s mission.)

Nor does the work start with the design. Good design, Jane notes, requires good research. What are a client’s customers looking for? What are those customers’ psychological needs? In the case of Hazelden, Tilka Design discovered that Hazelden needed to be more direct about the importance of “lifelong recovery.” Research that delivers a definition of a brand strategy, Jane says, is essential before considering tactics about rebranding and design.

Hey, I dig hipster-geek exuberance. But old-school gravitas can certainly deliver an equally strong brand statement.

BTW’s on hiatus till the first week of January. Peace, love, and understanding to all.

Why Clockwork's Time Has Come

It’s right there on Clockwork Active Media Systems’ home page: “The Web has always been social.”

In a sense, the Internet is catching up with Clockwork. Or maybe it’s business that’s now getting on its time zone.

Cofounder Nancy Lyons calls Clockwork “an un-agency.” It’s a rather self-effacing enterprise: It’s not out to win big design awards, and doesn’t mind quietly engineering, designing, and strategizing for its clients behind the scenes. Nondisclosure agreements? They can live with them.

The 38–employee company’s home page summarizes its practice areas, and does so very clearly. Nancy also calls Clockwork a “user experience company.” To my non-geek mind, that means a focus on sites that are easy to navigate and (where appropriate) playful. And (if it’s a business site), not hard sell.

It’s a methodology tightly wound into the Clockwork culture. The company grew out of a legendary local online pioneer—Bitstream Underground, an Internet service provider that started out as an online bulletin board way back in 1994. Bitstream founders Chuck Hermes and Michael Koppelman hired Nancy a year later.

Back in those wild and wooly days, the Internet was profoundly social, with virtual communities like Bitstream’s and the WELL setting the scene. “The Web was fluid,” Nancy recalls, “before we were pushing commerce down everyone’s throat.”

During the pre-Y2K era—and this is your humble scribe speaking, though influenced by Nancy’s ideas—the Internet realm was dominated by people who made the online world into a mysterious realm that the great unwashed couldn’t possibly “get.” Hey, it’s technology. It’s supposed to be complicated. Techies were a higher level of being. You people just sit passively and giggle at the sock puppet. The Great Oz has spoken!

When Bitstream was acquired by Gage Marketing in 2002, the threesome started Clockwork to recreate something of that the intimate, innovative, down-to-earth approach to interactive that Bitstream embodied in the ’90s.

Now (as Nancy paraphrases Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), the Web has become a utility. It’s becoming an essential part of daily life. It’s not just on your big old computer—it’s on your laptop, it’s in the palm of your hand. And fewer people are willing to wait for a Web site’s fancy Flash stuff to download. That’s one reason why Twitter has become a big deal—it’s simple. But a sophisticated simple.

(A quick plug here for a Clockwork side project called the Geek Girls Guide, which “seeks to demystify technology for non-technical audiences.” Check it.)

Clockwork recently created a social-Web tool of its own called Tweetwally. Typically, it ain’t rocket surgery. It’s just an easy, unflashily stylish platform for events to let them show what’s being tweeted about them on a wall or screen. Simple—and spreading worldwide.

A lot of companies are, understandably, still uncertain where to go with this social stuff. (Not that all of them have to jump in.) It doesn’t seem like real, grown-up business somehow.

The Clockwork people insist that the social Web isn’t a toybox. Done right, online can solve business problems and generate bottom-line results. One of Clockwork’s focuses is gathering and managing online data in order to help clients better dig what their customers seek.

But this new realm is kind of complicated, in this sense: The easy, familiar old model of pushing messages onto a silent, pliant herd of “consumers” is being booted off its long-held throne in the interactive age. Consumers are less interested in being passive. And in this strange new world, Clockwork—in its appropriately hipster-industrial workspace in Nordeast, which it moved into in February—has been growing fast the past couple of years.

Business is getting that “commerce,” as Nancy put it, “is a product of relationships.”

Deep in December, it’s nice to remember to follow: @clockwork_tweet, @geekgirlsguide, @TCBmag, @generebeck.

Interactive: B2B or Not to B2B

I have an article on business-to-business interactive marketing in the latest TCB. As usual, there were numerous splendid insights from sources that I didn’t room to use.

In an interview a little earlier this year, Chris Schermer of Minneapolis interactive-branding firm Schermer Kuehl offered more thoughtful ideas on interactive B2B than I could include. So here are some “outtakes.”

The upshot: A lot of B2B companies have made the Internet the hub of their marketing. A lot still don’t. Maybe they don’t believe they need to—it’s not how they meet their customers. But more and more of those customers are changing how they buy, thanks primarily to the information-rich environment of online.

• “There are a vast number of companies that still employ this strategy of: ‘this Web site is about our company, and you’re coming here wanting to learn about us.’ That strategy has pretty much been proven to be ineffective in today’s marketing environment, where people have an expectation of: ‘You’re going to provide me with information that helps me make my decision whether to hire you.’ And when you think about it in that respect, the purpose of the Web site changes significantly.”

• So why do many B2Bs stick with so-called “brochure ware”? “I think part of it is the expense of creating a truly interactive experience that is well designed in terms of user experience, has deep and dynamic content. The resources you need up front to invest in it are significant. And then the resources that you need for its continuity going forward are even more costly. Once you establish that type of Web site where you’re constantly bringing content out, you’ve made a commitment to the marketplace and to prospects and customers that that’s what you’re going to be doing for them. I think a lot of companies just don’t have the bandwidth, the expertise in house, or the resources to devote to it.

At the same time, “technology is now becoming more affordable, and the creation of those types of online assets is more affordable, and there’s more experience with it, both on the corporate side as well as the agency side.”

• “In B2B, people still think this is a belly-to-belly sale . . . I think that people realize that a Web site can cut down on the amount of time that salespeople have to do cold calling, cut down on the length of time that a company is actively working with a prospect, and accelerate the process from prospect to lead to sale.”

• “Prospects don’t want to hear from you how great you are, which is the traditional purpose of the corporate Web site. They want to hear what others have to say about you. That’s why word of mouth is the number-one method of making a purchase decision, so the ability to capture and share customer feedback and recommendations is a powerful resource for B2B marketers and a powerful strategy for B2B marketers—if they have the confidence to expose the conversation.”

• “The B2B company, in order to be a part of [the buying] process, has to be on the buyer’s terms more often. And the buyer’s terms are, ‘I expect information, I expect that if you want to do business with me, you’ll provide me with a certain level of it for free—not impede my search, not impede my buying process or my information gathering process. And not inundate me with marketing materials or sales calls until I’m ready to identify myself as an active prospect.’ It’s been a seismic shift.”

The View From Brew

Michelle Fitzgerald, partner and connection strategist at Minneapolis branding agency Brew, is far more of a foodie than I am. (My idea of fine cuisine here.) Thanks to her, I now understand why more and more fine-dining restaurants—like Bank in the Minneapolis Westin—have a kitchen that’s highly visible from the dining area. Rather than toiling backstage, unseen by the public, the chef has become a star of the show.

This summer, D’Amico and Partners took over the restaurant at the Chambers Hotel. The hotel called on Brew to do some print ads. But Michelle and Bruce Bildsten, her business partner and Brew’s creative director, saw an opportunity to whip up what she calls “an amuse-bouche of content” online.

“People in the Twin Cities are so passionate about food,” she notes. Brew suggested a “peek behind the curtain.” The result, in Bruce’s phrase, is “culinary voyeurism”—live online video “feed” (pun intended) from the restaurant’s kitchen during peak hours. Brew also set up a video blog by D’Amico Kitchen’s executive chef, John Occhiato.

Michelle and Bruce opened Brew in the fall of 2006. As with most small but busy marketing-creative agencies in the Twin Cities, Brew’s niche can’t be defined. And like so many local new-agency founders, Michelle and Bruce have Fallon embossed on their résumés. Bruce was the driver and creative director for Fallon’s groundbreaking BMW Films campaign.

But despite innovations like this, Fallon was at heart a traditional ad agency. Michelle and Bruce saw that marketing was heading in many creativity-stimulating and business-model–bending new directions. They believed that a smaller agency, one where the principals worked more directly with its clients, could nimbly navigate the unpredictable twists and turns in the marketing road ahead. As Michelle notes, “Nobody really knows where it’s all going.”

So Brew provides what she calls “solution-neutral” marketing—whatever works. TV spots? Billboards? Print? All doable. But more and more roads are leading to what Bruce calls “the richer world of the Web.” The D’Amico Kitchen print ads and billboards all drive viewers to the Net, thereby creating greater intimacy between the restaurant and the diner.

Brew can do all of this and more out of a modest but up-to-date office—really a large, open room with no cubes. The in-house staff consists of eight people, who work primarily as strategists, project managers, and creatives. When Brew needs a Web developer, a trend analyst, a publicist, or even an architect, it can summon senior freelance talent all across the town and the country. Brew describes itself as a “creative collaborative,” and not only asks its freelancers for execution but also includes them in every step of the conceptual process.

Some other recent dishes from Brew’s kitchen:

• Néve (pronounced NAY-vay), a high-end ski apparel company in Colorado, has tapped Brew to update its logo, its printed materials, even some of its apparel in order to help raise its profile beyond dedicated skiers and the U.S. Ski Team.

• In the past few years, Target prepared to open stores in Hawaii and Alaska. Seeing these were states that tend to suspicious of what they perceive to be big boxes, Target went outside its usual marketing channels to get (as it were) an outsider’s perspective from Brew. Brew dug into the ethnographies and co-developed marketing ideas meant to help Target “fit in” with the local culture. One small example: aloha shirts for Hawaiian-store staff.

• For the past few years, Brew has created materials for the Ivey Awards, which annually recognized notable achievements in the Twin Cities theater world. Some images from the 2009 promotion:

The notion behind Brew’s marketing “solutions” is to create a closer interconnection between the audience and the “performer”—the stars, the brand, the product, the company—instead, as Michelle says, of “simply delivering creative executions.”

Met | Hodder’s Changing Channels

Full disclosure: I don’t own a TV. But the flower of my youth blossomed viewing Gilligan’s Island and The Beverly Hillbillies. As with all of us, TV is a particularly woody strand in my cultural DNA.

However complicated and stressed the TV industry has become in the cable-and-Internet age, it’s still a huge and influential business, and the supreme marketing medium. (This article helped get me up to speed.) And if you really want a good sense of where the TV business may be heading, much better to tune in to Kent Hodder.

National television isn’t all about the Coasts. Kent’s Minneapolis agency, Met | Hodder, produces on-air, DVD, and online content primarily for ABC; other clients include NBC-Universal’s USA and SyFy channels.

Kent cofounded Met | Hodder in 1987 (with business partner Nancy Bordson) to produce specialty film and video for corporate clients. Over time, the agency’s work expanded to specialized on-air and online productions for cable and network television channels. About five years ago, Met | Hodder parlayed its TV industry contacts into a new revenue stream.

Sometime shortly after the holidays, the ABC megahit Lost will premiere its final season. Before that first episode of the season is broadcast, there will be a one-hour program that will untangle Lost’s complexly interwoven story arcs so that new viewers, or those that have been away for a while, can tune into for that final season without being utterly mystified.

That one-hour special’s producer: Met | Hodder. This kind of customized “catch-up” programming—along with video extras on series DVDs and the like—makes up about half of its work now, and its portfolio is extensive. Kent believes that his agency is the largest producer of such programming in the country.

And while Met | Hodder does have an office near L.A., in Burbank (one of the centers of television production). And while it does a fair amount of its shooting there (and New York, and elsewhere), the front-end and postproduction work is done in sunny Minneapolis.

Angelenos often ask him: Dude, um, Minneapolis? But Kent believes his firm’s Midwestern sensibility makes its programming more suitable to most viewers. It’s not caught up in an “industry” sensibility. It knows viewers are more interested in story and character than in flash and glitter.

The other half of Met | Hodder’s business is content for digital signage networks (and other digital platforms like mobile). If you’ve been in a supermarket or a gas station or a health club and seen a television there with specialized content, that’s what it is. Met | Hodder’s clients in this realm have included grocery giants like Kroger and Safeway and other retailers like Best Buy and regional supercenter Meijer.

Kent calls his firm’s work “marketing-nuanced content”—content with an underlying marketing agenda. Content that is designed to inform or entertain, but with some form of association or sponsorship or adjacency to a commercial (or commercial network).

Food courts in malls, doctors’ waiting rooms, health clubs, the backseats of New York taxicabs, even gas pumps—all becoming home to TV screens. For many people, this kind of information and entertainment can be a nice way to learn things or fight boredom. Others of us might see this sort of TV, TV everywhere as annoying.

Kent believes advertisers know this: “People really don’t want the sponsorship to get in the way of the viewer’s entertainment or information.” Younger generations are so used to advertising and sponsorship that “they accept it as part of all the different platforms”—the old-school box, the Internet, the smart phone screen: “But they don’t want it to get in the way.”

Newer content platforms mean “advertisers don’t have to be quite so much in people’s face, because they’re probably dealing with a more targeted, receptive audience to start with.”

As for “regular” TV, Kent sees Met | Hodder’s work as “taking an experience that people for 50, 60 years have called ‘watching television’ and transfers it to all these different platforms.” Hulu’s just part of the story. How about adjusting shows so that they make sense on your Android phone’s screen? Television, Kent believes, will need to adapt to the users’ needs in terms of time and place. Lost is miles away from Gilligan’s Island.

However horrified many old-school network execs might be contemplating the future, here in Minneapolis, Kent notes, “We’re actually very excited by it, because I think of us as fairly nimble.”