The world will never be less chaotic than it is right now. That is so say, the complexity of life will continue to challenge us. In the presence of ever-expanding complexity, how do we get our story through the noise? How best to communicate our ideas?

A singularity of vision with a concise understanding of the problem solved is essential. The story must be equally comprehensible and told with economy.

The creativity is then free to become inventive. Creativity is the liberator of strategy.

Creativity has an obligation to deliver the idea fully rendered in the heart and mind of the audience. Clarity is actionable.

Complexity defeats clarity in the execution. The best creative talents understand this and labor to create clarity in their ideas and executions.

Visual clarity and written clarity combined to create conceptual clarity. The dual compliment.

Over written, over directed, over acted, over designed executions are warning signs. Perhaps the idea is weak and there is an attempt to prop it up. Or the creative team is letting their egos get in the way.

Maybe they lack the experience to know better.

Simplicity is recompense for years of effort.

In April Team Brandforming was on location in Florence Italy at the incredible Belmond, Villa San Michele, shooting our campaign for Monvieve.

Monvieve is a haute couture Italian Fashion Brand. Monvieve designs and handcrafts bespoke bridal veils in Italy. Each veil is a unique work of art, as fine and beautiful as you can imagine. Our client, is Alison Miller, the creative director, owner and driving force of Monvieve.

Villa San Michele dates from the 15th century, the Villa’s facade is attributed to Michelangelo. Step inside and you experience the ethereal beauty and solitude of a Renaissance monastery that is as much a part of Italy’s culture as her great cathedrals. Grazie’ a lei Clio Cicuto and the entire team at Villa San Michele.

For those who know me personally, you will immediately grasp the joy in this moment, a lover of art, art history and nearly all things Italian.  

To work with another Italian luxury brand such as Monvieve and to shoot in Florence, puts this gig on the top of my list of great experiences. Our photographer, Massimiliano Botticelli and his all star team did an amazing job. They flawlessly executed a long and intense day of shooting. His team hit every mark in our production schedule to take best advantage of the glorious natural light. Max did not stop until the sun was gone from the sky. Grazie’ a lei Max!

Composing images for our campaign #MonvieveMoments against a backdrop designed by Michelangelo was the culmination of a tremendous amount of work by our client. Team Brandforming was thrilled to play our part in bringing the story to life. It takes years of dedicated focus and talent to succeed in the fashion industry and Alison is on her way to her next great success.

Defining Moments is what Monvieve is all about and it is exactly what is achieved whenever a woman steps into a Monvieve product. It is a transformative moment, a defining moment, a #MonvieveMoments

Check out some of our production stills up on the Monvieve Facebook page. Follow Monvieve on Instagram. Please remember, it’s nice to share.

In the books Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, the authors explore the workings of the human brain. I think we can use their insights to help build #AHealthierNation, especially if we consider the workings of the Human Brain Vs. Pharma TV Spots.

Both authors point out that our brains are hot wired to detect danger before safety. We detect anger in others before joy. This extends to images and words, even those in abstract of a lived experience. For example, we can detect an angry face in a picture of a crowd of happy people faster than we can detect a happy face in a crowd of angry people. The mention of a word associated with danger, even in absence of that danger in the present lived experience, triggers lightning quick brain activity associated with a threat. This has been studied and documented with MRI data.

Kahneman points out the we live our lives as stories, collections of experiences and memories that ideally come to a happy finale, and this is what we remember. In a particularly interesting chapter, he explores the idea of duration neglect and how as humans, we will willingly endure protracted and difficult experiences if the goal, outcome and future memory would be a positive gain.

One example he explains is that of amnesic vacations. An oversimplification; the duration of a vacation ideally has an effect on its quality. I think we’d all agree that 6 days are better than 3. But if the last day of the 6-day vacation is a poor experience, the overriding memory will be one of an unhappy vacation, despite the duration. This is the peak ending and most dominant lasting memory. For more on this you can watch his TED talk here.

Both of these books are fascinating and entirely different, but with many corollaries that make them worth reading. The Master and his Emissary makes clear the right brain is dominant in the role of detecting the incongruent, new, exciting and dangerous. The left brain is dominant in breaking it down into known bits of lived experience and cataloging it so as to help us detect the new vs the known, different or dangerous. There is a mysterious beauty to the power of this duality and the yin-yang balance that it achieves to help us detect danger and feel safe. You can watch him illustrate this in his TED talk here.

Human Brain Vs. Pharma TV Spots

If we apply these findings of the workings of the human brain Vs. Pharma TV spots, it would suggest that ending a commercial with 30 seconds of “fair balance” that rattles off all the negative potential consequences of the therapy is not a good idea if we want people to seek out, consume and adhere to that treatment.  What memory are we left with? What is the cumulative effect of these negative associations to the psychology of Americans, to what is now decades of exposure to often potentially life threatening consequences of treatment? We are putting our minds on high alert and then leaving ourselves with negative memories.

The FDA lives a paradox of endorsing the use of effective therapies that are proven safe and at the same time controlling how they are promoted.

The use of Fair Balance was deemed a reasonable solution to keep some checks and balances in the system. One early justification for direct-to-consumer advertising for healthcare products was that it would help make people healthier by helping them recognize health issues and solutions to what is ailing them. That said, I would argue it is not working entirely as hoped. Direct-to-consumer advertising has certainly proven to sell more drugs but is it really helping? Adherence and compliance rates remain terrible. As a nation we are not among the healthiest, despite having the one of the best healthcare systems in the world. I can’t help but feel that there exists an unintended and negative consequence of bombarding our culture with therapy risk profiles instead of more positive educational messages about living a healthy and happy life.

I’m not suggesting that the problems of adherence and compliance have been caused by advertising, they certainly predate it. What I am suggesting is that advertising executed in this way has become just another part of the problem and it’s time to consider alternative approaches that not only make us aware of solutions but improve long-term outcomes for #AHealthierNation.

Advertising is part of the brand experience and nobody wants to experience side-effects, even in the abstract. Patients need to be educated about the potential risks of any treatment and there are other and potentially better ways to provide this learning. Awareness advertising by its very nature employs both reach and frequency to achieve its goal. The persistent drumming of risk factors in combination with how our brains are hot wired to detect risk is a perfect storm. Our abilities to detect risk and the frequency of exposure caused by this type of advertising may be creating strong negative associations with these brands specifically and perhaps more detrimentally, pharmaceutical therapies overall.

On any given night during a TV commercial break it is not uncommon to see 2-3 pharma spots back-to-back. This results in approximately 1.5 minutes of nausea, hives, Arrhythmia, trouble breathing, night sweats, diarrhea, dizziness, life threatening rash, allergic reactions, suicidal thoughts, dry mouth, internal bleeding, increased blood pressure, stroke, liver damage, heart attack and other potential drug-drug and dietary interactions that in rare cases have caused death.

This parade of alarm bells is made no less volatile by the mostly generic visual backdrop of smiling happy people and the sometimes over-qualified claims of efficacy. Remember we’re hot wired to detect risk before all else. How’s that for a side effect? Human Brain Vs. Pharma TV could be a perfect storm of unintended consequences. June 2014 saw the beginning of OpenFDA an effort to make accessible the FDA database of side effects, drug labels, warnings, food recalls. This project is still in Beta but it holds great promise to help us better manage and understand the insights available through this repository and how insights gained across drug and device class can inform #AHealtherNation and perhaps will give us opportunity to create better, more positive and educational TV spots.

As communicators we can do better to create a #AHealthierNation and support our Physicians and other healthcare workers to help us live healthier lives.

When you are looking for something new and different and captivating, look to your right. When you are looking for something familiar and undifferentiated and understood look to your left.

When thinking up ideas and reviewing concepts and potential ways to execute them it is essential to consider the inherent tension in the idea, the contrast.

This is the thing that drives an idea, its internal flame. Great brands thrive on one insightful point of tension that the product or service can overcome. And the campaigns that deliver these ideas with great creativity propel these brands to stardom.

Volvo cars thrive on the idea of safety which resolves the fear of injury or death.  BMW thrives on its idea of the ultimate driving machine, casting itself against dull imperfection, sensory deprivation and blandness. These are emotionally driven ideas, that touch the heart. Achieving the whitest whites in your laundry is not simply about whiteness, it’s about knowing you’ve done the best job you can, of achieving a visible perfection.

But why do ideas like these work? Why do campaigns like these hold our attention? It all comes down to the way our minds work. The left brain-right brain functionality forever studied and in some cases grossly oversimplified, hold the key to understanding what make a great idea — great.

The functionality of the right brain is dominant in alertness to new, different, incongruent and more “emotional” points of tension that appeal to our emotional self. The left brain functions as a sort of running catalogue of all things known, understood and expected. The left brain is so good at this that it gives the right brain the full freedom to perform the major task of keeping us alive to anything new at all — good or bad – it is our early warning system. The scanning, searching, emotional nature of the right and the deconstructing, comparative, analytical left come together to define the essence of who we are and our relationship to the world — our ego. This coming together to form what I’ll call the ego-energy of left and right brain function is very much a complimentary end game. Failing to satisfy one, comes at the risk of losing the other.

Effectively engaging both could be considered as producing a whole brain affect. The significance of this can not be overstated when it comes to creating ideas, because this is the terrain of the big idea.

Let’s consider the ubiquitous “Pharma Beach” ads. I’m not sure who originally coined this phrase. It started as a slight to the ever present execution of people on beaches in pharmaceutical advertising and now seems to have grown in meaning to include all the usual slice of life stuff we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing day in and day out. Pharma Beach must be a pretty big place, maybe even bigger than the Hampton’s.  At this point there are so many people enjoying Pharma Beach that it would seem we’ve all been cured. Unfortunately that’s far from the truth, and for advertisers “Pharma Beach” has grown so familiar it is not the best place to attempt to differentiate your brand.

Ideas that wash up on Pharma Beach are known and easily broken up into familiar catalogued bits by the left brain, filed and put away — a place for everything and everything in its place. The right brain has little time or attention to give to the familiar and generic. It looks past the known and understood — the generic. Why create a generic campaign for a branded product?

This is why so many campaigns fail to deliver the true potential of a brand— they die of boredom, sequestered in the left brain catalogue of “I’ve seen this before.”

The capacity of the left brain to break things down into the known and understood can cause a kind of circular thinking; its constant need to dominate the world by manipulating it into known components can hold us back from creating and trusting differentiated ideas.

Like victims of Stockholm syndrome we grow sympathetic to our captor and are held by our left brain’s incessant desire to break everything down into known bits, catalogue it for us and keep our world nice and tidy, and we like it.  This functionality of the left brain helps us reside comfortably in the known world but it can also keep us from breaking free.

If you want work that breaks through, then we need to break-through to the right brain. There are no formulas for this, no secret ingredient that will make you successful. There is only the need for a commitment that goes for the heart, that stirs the emotion that appeals to the ego. Ideally this is supported by a brand essence that embraces a meaningful incongruity that can only be resolved by the product or service itself.

It is hard work but when you Head For The Heart, great things happen.

This compilation video offers a nice snapshot into the connectivity we discovered between the creative pursuits of these artists and the work they do 9-5, in short, creativity in the workplace. If you have not seen the show at the Spring Street Gallery in Saratoga Springs you should stop in to the gallery. The show will be up a few more weeks, catch it if you can. The video linked here is a compilation of videos about the show, you might enjoy watching it. It’s too short for popcorn but important enough to leave you with something stuck in your head, if not your teeth.

For the first time in recent history the CLIO Awards integrated Healthcare into the overall show. As an Executive Jury participant, it feels like an epic moment, not just because we had some really strong work to debate again this year, but because in the context of the entire show, health, if not healthcare specifically, was well-represented globally. The CLIO Awards are getting healthier.

It is long overdue that the creative industries take on healthcare and apply its vast wealth of talent to help solve the world’s health problems. Kudos to CLIO for leading the charge in contextualizing the work within the industry. With the integration of healthcare into the show this year we achieve not only the recognition of great work but more importantly, how this work stacks up to other health and wellness work not submitted into the healthcare category. Work such as the simple, powerful project for 28 Too Many is brilliant for its insight and simplicity and absolutely riveting execution. It achieves in a series of deceptively simple images what a 50-page website could never do. I say this not in disregard to the power of digital but in homage to the incredible power of an idea that succeeds because of its intelligence and its sparseness.

End FMG everywhere. Donate Now.

Ogilvy & Mather, London

In an age when it often feels that one surefire path to an award is to orchestrate an event, film that event and then share it across social media, the work for 28toomany.org defies present convention. The work is executed with great empathy and delivers a tearful blow to the pride of nations who dare look away… and it does it without relying on the gaming of social media to prove its point. I will suggest this is a very analogue idea — a bit of old school brilliance. I tip my hat.

As an industry, I think we have an obligation to keep health and wellness on the top of the agenda because it benefits all of us and with more of us doing it, the more we’ll get accomplished. The work for 28 Too Many delivers on all fronts, regardless of the category it was entered into.

In my former gig as a founder and chief global creative officer Palio, I traveled the world for both research and creative development. Health and wellness is one of those topics that unites all peoples around the globe and it is one area in which we have many more commonalities than we do differences. Keeping it in a silo only makes it harder. Let’s mix it up, think and behave differently about health and wellness — this is one of the motivations behind my new company Brandforming — to tap the broader talent pool and leap boundaries.

As technology continues to topple old barriers almost as fast as we can name them, it is time to apply the learnings of all the fun and fascinating applications to do some truly heavy lifting and solve real problems, not just for the entertainment value . And with that, let’s consider Lucky Iron Fish, the 2015 Grand CLIO in Healthcare Innovation winner. This work astonishes with its simplicity because Lucky Iron Fish excels not through some fantastic application of technology, but through the power of its cultural insight and a few pennies worth of scrap iron. Another powerful analogue idea. Visit their website and learn their story http://www.luckyironfish.com/

Insight into action

Lucky Iron Fish – Ontario

Lucky Iron Fish was developed with great cultural sensitivity that unlocked an insight that placed the Lucky Iron Fish into the heart of every home and improved the quality of health. For this very reason this same work also achieved legendary status at the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this year.

World health data offers the promise of incredible perspective, if not insight, into some really pressing global health challenges. Many of these very same challenges find their way right into our daily lives; yet we persist in acting as if these problems belong to someone else. The recognition this year to Dr. Mickey Chopra, CLIO Healthcare Honorary Award for his service at Unicef as Chief of Health and Associate Director of Programs at UNICEF’s NY headquarters, acknowledges the profound impact he has had in shaping policy into action for maternal, newborn, and child health, immunization, pediatric, HIV/AIDS, and health systems. To Dr. Chopra, we all matter, the world over.

Healthcare advertising and communications have come along way in the U.S. but still has much further to go to achieve the kind of impact these campaigns deliver. The very regulations we rail on about are a trap we set for ourselves when we insist on following the same old well-worn paths. Just because we are allowed to do branded promotion for healthcare brands in the U.S. doesn’t mean it is the only tool in the box. At this point it is abundantly clear that all the advertising and promotion for products here in the U.S. has not done much to improve our health or drive down the cost of healthcare. Americans are not among the healthiest people and as we know all too well, the cost of and access to healthcare has become one of the biggest burdens we face.

I’ll leave us today with another CLIO winner that Heads For The Heart with humor and takes on the Affordable Care Act

Not so funny but no joke

The Affordable Care Act from Funny or Die

Ar+Work, September 26, 4-7 PM Spring Street Gallery

It would be great to see more people expressing themselves through the arts, to put away fear and self-doubt and to create for the simple act of creating itself. It is powerfully liberating. The journey of any passionate artist is one of both refinement of skill and changing conceptions. Skill and creativity do not necessarily travel hand-in-hand. Some artists are much more advanced in their skill level than others but this by no means diminishes the power of self-expression of artists with lesser skill.

I’d like to personally thank the following people and organizations for their help and support in bringing this show together; Charles Wait, Chairman and CEO of Adirondack Trust Company, Mayor Joanne Yepsen of The City of Saratoga Springs and Angelo Calbone, President and CEO of Saratoga Hospital, their employees and in particular their internal communications, HR and marketing people who’ve been instrumental in getting the word out. Lori Goodale was not only one of the catalysts in the creation of the show, she has also been integral to the successful implementation, execution and coordination all communications with the participating organizations, as well as external media relations. Thank you Lori, for wearing so many hats, including the time coding of the video edits.

I also have to give thanks to Augie’s Restaurant for agreeing to supply their great food so we can all sup while we enjoy the show.  Thank you to Gabby Delattibodier Wright for her art promotion and event planning support in bringing needed resources to the show. To Benj Gleeksman for picking up the ball and running with the design of the promotional materials to bring further awareness to the show — go Benj! Thanks also to Belinda Colon, for her excellent sense of story and translating that to the mounting and exhibition of the show. This is no easy task with a mix media show such as this. I hope you take the time to appreciate not just the work but the presentation as well.

Thanks too, to Ed Murphy, Executive Director of Workforce Development Institute for the enthusiastic support of his team as well as their financial assistance to offset some of cost of the show.

Thanks to these members of the extended Brandforming team,  Erica O’Rourke and her team at Social Radiant for taking on the task of sharing the idea and promotion of the show through social media channels. Thank you to John Wager and his team at Galileo Media Arts for lending their talents to film the leadership interviews and other certain aspects of the show. Thanks in this regard must also go to Hudson Payer a very talented senior at Saratoga Springs High School, who jumped in last minute and agreed to film some of the individual artist interviews.

In many ways, this is a show about community, about the people and organizations that make Saratoga Springs such a wonderful place. Spring Street Gallery is a unique space, that is entirely not-for-profit. This makes it very liberating but also challenging for Maureen Sager to achieve the kinds of results that she does; shows that are wonderful examples of art, artists and the relationship of art to our lives. Shows that wake you up to the power of the arts, that challenge thinking and that inspire you to walk out a bit differently then when you walked in. This is one of the great purposes of art curation, if not of art itself. I, for one, walked into Spring Street Gallery a different person than I am today and for this I can not thank Maureen enough for her trust and her steady hand as she continues to guide, challenge and inspire me in all aspects of this show.

Last and most certainly not least — but most of all  — thank you to the brave and creative artists who put their heart and soul into everything they do. 

Head For The Heart.

We all know the story about how creative we are as kids and by the time we’re adults most of us lose it all. The arts in our schools are often the first thing to go when budgets are tight and the emphasis has always been in favor of the other core disciplines. But now it seems we’ve taken it all a bit too seriously and downgraded the arts in school to the point that is becoming a blind spot on the national agenda.

The major effort in our schools is to ground our children in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, STEM for short. This is a great curriculum with a noble goal, to make sure our future leaders are at the top of their game to help keep our country and our economy a vital global resource. There is only one thing missing from this concept and that is the arts. STEM to STEAM is the mantra many have adopted to overcome this direction. But are the arts and creativity really missing altogether, or just under appreciated?

To put the Arts back on the table as a priority for our children we need to recognize the arts as essential in driving creativity across all disciplines. I hope when you see the show and read about these artists that you will see for yourself the important connection between the arts and these other forms of knowledge that are represented by STEM. By leaving out the Arts we are in fact doing a great disservice to our children and our future. It is for this reason that the show will benefit our local schools through a matching donation to the Saratoga Foundation for Innovative Learning.

The program is the spearheaded by Michael Piccirillo, Superintendent of Saratoga Springs City School District, and it was borne out of the need he and his team identified to push the envelop and constantly look for ways to innovate in the education of our children.  I had the chance to spend some time speaking with Mr. Piccirillo and I can say we are very fortunate to have him at the helm of our schools. Mr. Picirrillo is full STEAM ahead. You can see the discussion here. I hope you’ll come to the show and drop a few dollars in the bin so the foundation can keep doing great things for our kids.

In addition to seeing Mr. P’s video, check into our social media and keep an eye out for a series videotaped discussions with a few of the artists in the show. These video discussions will become available during the lead-up up to the show, follow the story here.

We solicited participation of artists from three large employers here in Saratoga, The Adirondack Trust Company, The City of Saratoga and Saratoga Hospital and we started with the leaders of the organizations. Through a series of one-on-one conversations with the executive leadership it was immediately apparent that not only did they enthusiastically support the idea and the participation of their employees in the show, but that they were highly attuned to the benefits of the arts and creativity in the lives of their teams and their organizations as a whole. You can see the conversation here.

To date, we have work from more 50 artists enrolled in the show with a healthy mix of creativity from original music to painting, photography, poetry, quilting — a tour-de-force of artistic and personal expression.

To be continued…

 

Earlier this year I was asked to curate an art show. I’ve never done this before, and leapt at the opportunity to get involved.

Over lunch with Maureen Sager of the Spring Street Gallery and Lori Goodale of PALIO we talked about creativity.

People who don’t work in traditionally defined creative roles are quick to point out how little creativity they have, in a very self-diminishing sort of way. This became the inspiration for our show.

We are all inherently creative and even those of us who work in jobs and careers that are not defined as creative, use creativity every day. To be human… is to be creative.

Many people go through their day-to-day lives without noticing just how creative they are and how their creativity helps them with everything from washing dishes, to driving the car, to helping their children with their homework. Creativity, in one very big sense of the phrase, is problem solving and how we innovate. Certainly, this is how it is thought of in commercial terms. But in a purely artistic sense, as a mode of expression, it gives us so much more. Not enough of us engage our senses in the sort of self-expression that makes the arts such an incredibly rich part of world culture.

Some people are much more tapped into the energy of their creativity and express themselves in all the ways that society enjoys so much through the arts.  Most of us sit on the sidelines because it takes a great deal of courage to express ourselves in this way. Perhaps by drawing out the connection between the arts and creativity and the jobs and careers so many of us have, we may gain deeper insight into who we are and inspire more people to express themselves through the arts.

The creative work in the show is the product of individuals who are inspired by their own need to create.  These are individuals that have overcome the self-doubt and the insecurities that hold so many people back, especially when we’ve been taught from a very young age that perhaps we are not very creative. I’d like people to think about this when they see the work because the show is going to feature the creativity of people who are not normally considered creative, especially in their day-to-day roles. We’re going to explore how the creative work they produce informs their day jobs, be they bankers, surgeons, nurses, tellers, engineers…whatever they do during the day…they are artists through and through.

To be continued….