identities / communities / experiences by tim kane building brands

It’s not advertising. It’s not public relations. It’s not corporate identity or interactive design. It’s not copywriting or art direction or programming or planning or any of the other labels that we use to separate our business and segregate our thinking. It’s none of the above. It’s all of the above.

1.Defining the Absolute Value of X 5. Creating a Culture of Collaboration 2. Mobilizing Gearhead Nation 3. Revolutionizing Retail Banking 4. Building a Community of Hope

How do you express the value of new ideas? How do you symbolize things that no one has ever thought of before? XShares Advisors is a creator of astonishingly sophisticated financial products -- families of exchange traded funds based on proprietary indices such as European carbon allowances and diagnostic technology futures. Unfortunately, the company’s communications were nowhere near as sophisticated as its products, and the XShares brand had become lost in a tangle of amateurish product logos and individual fund websites. The solution sprang out of a dim memory from one of the high school math classes I’d managed to stay awake in -- a symbol that both expressed the idea of XShares, and laid a foundation for a new brand architecture for all of its products.

Rather than maintaining an individual site for each fund, xsharesadvisors.com is now a portal to linked micro-sites. Each site has sufficient separation to satisfy all the regulatory requirements, but now can share features such as dynamic share pricing, RSS feeds and a single source CMS.

Each new fund family has its own individual identity and promotional messaging -- but always within the context of the overall corporate identity and branding architecure.

A Gearhead isn’t just a guy who likes to work on cars. He’s a guy who’s lusted for the flash of chrome and the smell of squealing rubber pretty much from the So when Mobil asked us to introduce their new extended-performance motor oils (a total gear-head product from the world’s biggest gearhead brand) it was clear we’d need more than just a logical discussion of product superiority. Our campaign -- The Oil That’s Changing Oil -- used all those great old toys in PR, events, ads and the web to build a new community around Mobil’s new oils. And to remind our guys that we are all card-carrying members of Gearhead Nation. first day he blasted out of the womb. While other little boys might ask for bicycles or baseball bats, the young gearhead is always begging for slot cars or Hot Wheels or the latest version of Midtown Madness .

Broadcast advertising, trade print, online promotions and blogging were backed by high-profile PR programs: Las Vegas taxis were painted to resemble Mobil slot cars. The Mobil-NASCAR Slot Car Challenge pitted local children against actual NASCAR drivers.

We like to tell our clients how tough it is to come up with The Big Idea. You’ve got to think really hard. You’ve got to dig really, really deep. Inspiration is 99% perspiration, right? And yet, every once in a while, all you have to do is tweak a few words … and there it is. Washington Mutual wanted to try an experiment in select local markets: If you opened a new WaMu checking account, you’d be able to use anybody’s ATM for free. It struck me that, with just a minor word change, you could create a new radical movement: Open a WaMu checking account, and all the ATMs will be free . And after that, the aesthetics and the tactics were easy. Which we made damn sure the clients didn’t find out.

Events, street media and guerilla PR help create a sense of a political movement; mock-demonstrations and ATM Aid concerts drive attention in the mainstream media. The result: A highly- targeted, yet low-cost promotional template that could be applied to any local market.

The web is so full of communities of misery -- social sites devoted to the discussion of devastating disease or the latest affront by the pharmaceutical companies -- it’s become almost impossible for a Colo-rectal cancer is one of the most easily-detectible cancers, but because of the unpleasant nature of the test (enough said), few people undergo regular screening. But Quest Diagnostic had developed a simpler, cleaner test; if we could just get the public’s attention, many thousands of lives could be saved. site dedicated to positive news, hope and good humor to break through. Our campaign was Web 2.0 at its best: A goofy little viral video. An unforgettable URL. An email challenge. And an online PR push. In just six months, doyouhavetheguts.com has grown into a vibrant online community of 175,000 -- sharing stories, sharing hope, and testing themselves, their friends and their families.

Doyouhavetheguts.com asks visitors to email this goofy Happy Healthy Colon video (produced by a Roumanian puppeteer) to their friends and family, to help spread the word about regular screening and the availability of Quest’s new colo-rectal cancer test.

Most people have a romanticized image of Science: the solitary genius, stumbling onto brilliant discoveries in his lonely lab. But the truth is the opposite. The success of a scientific enterprise is almost entirely dependent on collaboration. It’s interaction, not individual brilliance, that is the true soul of any technology brand. BioTrove’s new CEO asked me to break down the walls, and create a culture of collaboration. To define a new vision, create a new identity, and extend it into new brand experiences. Even their website was divided in two. Biotrove, a company that specializes in nano-tech platforms for life science researchers, was not so much a single organization as an uneasy alliance of two fiercely independent divisions. They had two technology platforms, so naturally they had to have two mar- keting groups, two logos, and two color schemes.

Featuring actual employees and an interactive white board on every page, www.biotrove.com creates the experience of collaboration among researchers; visitors partner with BioTrove staff to design custom technology platforms.

kanemania@optonline.net / 914.238.5789 tim kane / creative director