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 proprietaryindices 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.co

m 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

promotion

al

messagin

g -- but

always

within the

context of

the overall

corporate

identity

and

branding

architecur

e.

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 anew 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.co

m 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