May 2012
15 posts
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Wolff Olins Learnshop: Rapid Prototyping
By Suzanne Livingston
At Wolff Olins London we are developing a series of LEARNSHOP sessions where we go out and explore an emerging technology, or bring experts in, or teach ourselves.
Last week, we tried rapid prototyping, courtesy of Chalk Studio Islington. We spent the week designing objects that would be useful to us in our daily lives at Regents Wharf. One was an innovation for the...
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In the collaborative marketplace, co.'s need to...
Strategist Nick Keppel-Palmer is in Fast Company this morning writing about how “Boundaryless” businesses multiply value. A version of the article originally appeared as part of our annual Game Changers report.
Nick says: “The brands that will have the greatest impact on all our lives are those that see themselves not as citadels that need defending but as causes that need...
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Why Brand Takes a Tweeting
By Rachel Blatt
This week, in his WSJ column, Ralph Gardner reckons with himself about why it’s taken him so long to get on Twitter and what motivates some of his younger reporter colleagues to tweet in earnest. “I appreciate there’s an ulterior motive here, though I can’t say I fully subscribe. It’s about growing the brand.”
Gardner admits slowly and...
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Trends in 2012 Elections Messaging
The Yahoo! Advertising blog recently asked several agency leaders one question: “What are some key trends you’re seeing in political advertising this election season?” Angela Riley, Strategy Director for Wolff Olins, talked about what brands and politicians can learn from each other to better engage consumers—-and constituents.
Here’s a snippet from the piece:
For...
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In NYT infographics, a lesson for brands
By Mary Ellen Muckerman
We know that the New York Times are infographics geniuses. They visualize data to track sentiment on a topic, while inviting you to participate in the conversation or even start a new one. Sorting features allow you to find “your people” and compare ideas.
The one above was an instant response to an extremely timely topic—that’s NYT’s bread and...
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How design thinking finds new answers
By Campbell Butler
The other day I sat in a brainstorm with a bunch of fellow graphic designers, discussing the future direction of an international business. Someone in the team made a flippant joke about the moment: Most of us had gone to art school, not business school.
As designers we sometimes worry about engaging in the “business side” of things. But today’s businesses...
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Salvador Dali's mark design for a bonbon and a...
By Marie Succar
I just came across an interesting story that involves Dali creating the design of the Chupa Chups lollipop mark. Chupa Chups started off under the name “GOL,” imagining the candy as a soccer ball and the open mouth a net. The name then evolved to “Chupa Chups,” from the Spanish chupar, meaning “to suck.” The lollipop, invented in 1958 and the first...
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Stick to your 21st century knitting
By Robert Jones
The book that first got me interested in the whole idea of management was Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, and one of its mantras was ‘stick to the knitting.’ But is that still good advice, 30 years on? Kodak, Xerox, Nokia, Kmart and Blockbuster all did, and look what’s happened to them. By sticking to their core activity, they failed to react to rivals coming from...
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WatchMaurice Sendak on Colbert Report
We post this in tribute to Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century. His books were essential ingredients of our childhood. Some of his brilliance and irreverence is captured above.
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Change the way we shop, forever?
By Owen Hughes
“Change the way we shop forever.” It’s a big idea, but can it really be done? Marks and Spencer seems to think so.
We know that demonstrating social impact is a big deal for commercial organisations these days, but social commitments can be quite hard to pin down, often too intangible, somehow peripheral to the person on the street.
Quite a lot was made of Marks...
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Connecting people to your future
By Manlio Minale
Brand architecture can make your future a reality
Many businesses miss the point with brand architecture and see it as an organizational chart and a way of tidying up their brand to save on marketing costs.
However when used in the right way, it can become a powerful business tool for connecting people, both customer and employees, to your future ambition, to help you get there...
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Occupy the Pop-Up
By Mary Ellen Muckerman
Popuphood, launched last year in Oakland by Sarah Filley and Alfonso Dominguez, is an urban planning project with an unusual strategy for revitalizing depressed urban centers: the pop-up store.
The WSJ explains:
“Ms. Filley and Mr. Dominguez persuaded a landlord to offer pop-up stores free six-month leases in locations that, in some cases, have been vacant for years....
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Q&A with Splash.FM founder Jason Fiedler
By Sam Liebeskind
Since Splash.FM had its public launch a few weeks ago, co-founder Jason Fiedler has been busy watching the start-up grow and making constant changes. A friend of Wolff Olins, he took a few minutes to chat with strategist Sam Liebeskind about the early-stage site and his plans to engage more listeners and brands.
If you haven’t yet read about Splash.FM in TechCrunch, Rolling...
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#GameChangers Breakfast
Last Wednesday members of London’s business community gathered together at Wolff Olins Kings Cross office space to hear Google, Zopa and Zipcar talk about how the five behaviours identified in Wolff Olins’ recent report manifest in their businesses. The lively breakfast produced rich learnings and ‘how to’s’ for the audience to take back to their day to day roles....
April 2012
32 posts
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Sacred or profane? Technology in your museum
By Sam Liebeskind
Visual art museums–Should they be a peaceful sanctuary to escape from the always-on, back-lit, digital world in which we all now work and play? Places to appreciate the spiritual energy of something raw and “real”?
Or, should directors and curators be looking to integrate cutting edge technology into museum spaces- to make the experience somehow more educational and accessible,...
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(This is the fourth Future Patrol, a monthly series of macrotrend posts by WONY Strategist Emily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)
#Hyperloyalty
I. What it is:
Loyal3, launching in May, is a new startup that enables consumers to buy shares of companies (really $10 fractions of shares) directly on Facebook, an idea CEO Barry Schneider is...
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“I know it's 2012, but it feels like 1984 in this...
Some facts about CISPA:
Despite a veto threat from the White House on Wednesday, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act passed in the House last night by a vote of 248-168. Its goal is a more secure internet and it’s been endorsed by a lot of the heavy hitters in business, media, social media, and telecommunications. But privacy groups and the ACLU worry the measure breaches...
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Wolff Olins is a Top 40 Business in the GOOD... →
Get to know the GOOD Company Project’s top 40 businesses in a new way.
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Robert Jones and other experts at Guggenheim Forum
Robert Jones is participating in a live web conference about naming things, this Wed at noon EST, hosted by the Guggenheim Forum. The Forum is a continuing series of moderated online discussions catalyzing intelligent conversation on the arts, architecture, and design.
On the simplest level, a name takes an object from an undifferentiated mass and makes it something individual—something unique....
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Watch
Green is Universal
By Tiziana Huag
After creating the corporate identity system for NBCUniversal in 2010, we set out to rebrand all four initiatives within the company’s Integrated Marketing group (Healthy at NBCU, Women at NBCU, Hispanics at NBCU and NBCU Green is Universal) to establish a consistent look and feel.
Dear to our heart was our work on NBCU Green is Universal (see the video up...
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Scroll down
By LA Hall
The web has always been prime experimental space for trying out new designs and interactions, whether purely expressive or truly functional. We’ve come a long way from the days of Netscape, blinking links, Flash load bars and animated 3D GIFs (or have we?). Browsers have evolved to let the imaginations of developers and web designers run wild. Google’s Chrome browser led...
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SHARE: Ale Lariu of everybody SHOUT
By Thao Nguyen and Rachel Blatt
Born in Brazil and now native to the digital space, Ale Lariu considers herself a “geeky jungle kid.” We see her more as a spunky guru for creatives in digital, marketing and advertising. Our friends at Fast Company would certainly agree; they chose her as #29 of the 100 most creative people in business in 2010, topping Tom Ford, Jamie Oliver and the founders of...
Opening: Strategy Director, NYC
Wolff Olins is looking for a Strategy Director. Our strategy directors are responsible for delivering thought leadership, client strategy and developing new business opportunities.
This position requires dynamic, self-motivated, opinionated individuals who will have responsibility for both bringing in and managing big, meaty pieces of business. From crafting new business pitches to designing...
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Your Money, Easy as Pie
By Melissa Andrada
The world of personal finance is unnecessarily complex and overwhelming. In November, I wrote about Simple, an up-and-coming startup that hopes to turn the banking industry on its head. This week I wanted to highlight a few other startups that are simplifying and humanizing the way we perceive and interact with money.
Venmo: Transactions Made Easy
Need to split up the...
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User Experience Is The Heart Of Any Company
“If you start with ‘useful’ as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first,” writes Wolff Olins head of strategy Mary Ellen Muckerman in an article in Fast Company this morning.
Muckerman continues:
“The principles and theories of UX have created a new normal in terms of brand delivery and interaction. They state that how...
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Brick and mortar as marketing tool. Online as...
By Marissa Vosper
A “Match Made in Merchant Heaven” was the headline this morning on Forbes, describing the recent partnership/funding announcement between upstart menswear e-retailer, Bonobos and department store darling, Nordstrom. Or as Evelyn Rusli of the New York Times termed it “a symbiotic deal,” whereby Bonobos will aim to illuminate the Nordstrom execs on all things online in exchange...
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Craft your culture to shape your brand
By Amaris Singer
I recently read a fascinating interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, a provider of note-taking and archiving technology, about how he’s sculpted his company’s unorthodox culture. Libin has structured Evernote’s two offices and employee benefits around the idea of facilitating achievement, and he holistically considers the factors that may further or inhibit that goal in...
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Back on the Grid
By Melissa Andrada
Three months ago, I quit Facebook (and wrote about it on this blog). I had my sister change my password, so I couldn’t log into my account. It was a social experiment to understand the value that Facebook brings to the way people connect to each other.
After a two-and-a-half month hiatus, I am back on.
What inspired me to log in again was my birthday. Engagements, graduations,...
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Tug of Store is a new project by OKFocus, the digital agency responsible for dump.fm, Is the L Train Fucked?, and other good web sites.
Tug of Store is simple: A picture of an item pops up, and you click on the left side if it’s crap, on the right side if it’s cool, tugging against whoever else is clicking on the site. After a hundred clicks, the verdict flashes on the screen, and...
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Instagram, the first step in a new strategy for...
By Richard Chinn
Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is a good buy. Yes, it’s a defensive buy, but in the purchase, Facebook secures both tactical and strategic benefits.
Facebook’s success to date has been anchored in the desktop. For many Web users, Facebook has become their OS. As Facebook has integrated everything from YouTube to Spotify and NetFlix into the feed, it’s become the way...
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Three thoughts from a strategist
Melissa Andrada, Wolff Olins NY strategist, is a contributor in this week’s issue of Three Thoughts On, a site that invites guest writers to share three thoughts on a topic that interests them. Its most recent issue features Melissa on “Brand as Action,” as well as other POVs like “On Execution” by Charles Lee, CEO of Ideation and “On the Little...
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Some ways to fend off growing pains
Groupon, the daily deals provider, has generated so many customer complaints about how it markets its deals that it could face legal action unless it improves. Why? The portal maintains that rapid growth is at the heart of its problems - its internal processes and procedures had struggled to keep pace with its expansion. This is certainly not the first time a brand has become a...
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The guy behind the people who make it happen
By Paul Forbes
Someone, obviously a man, once said, “Behind every great man there’s a great woman.” Well, behind, besides and often in front of the guys who deliver great work to our clients there’s a team of people who create and deliver the experience of being at Wolff Olins for us and our clients.
These guys don’t just make sure the coffee machines are full, the bins are...
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Is the Goldman Sachs brand broken? Not yet.
By Charlie Stott
Brand is bigger than one man. In Goldman Sachs’ case, in fact brand is bigger than two men and a vampire squid.
Greg Smith’s open letter of resignation; Lloyd Blankfein’s tongue in-cheek comment that he is “doing God’s work”; and Rolling Stone’s assertion that the bank is a vampire squid wrapped around humanity, sucking the blood from anything that smells like money; have...
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The true driver of great ideas isn't customer...
By Ije Nwokorie
I love this Facebook spoof. Favorite line, describing what they refer to as “TheFacebook.com”: “This is a digital online internal computer web sightseeing you can open with your website browser to…visit the world online.” It was created by some clever person(s) called Squirrel Monkey.
It shows what Facebook would have been if it was invented in the...
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Senior Account Manager opening at Wolff Olins, NYC
At Wolff Olins, a Senior Account Manager provides crucial support to the client leads and project teams from pitch and proposal thought to final delivery.
This role is both an external and an internal one; balancing the needs and requirements of the client with the needs and requirements of the internal team (and any partner agencies/vendors) to help ensure that the quality of the work is high,...
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Senior Strategist opening at Wolff Olins, NYC
Wolff Olins is looking for a strong strategist to join its New York strategy team. This position requires a dynamic, self-motivated individual with experience in understanding different types of business models and challenges, analyzing large amounts of content to develop cut-through insights, and connecting these insights to clients’ business and brand opportunities. In addition, our senior...
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2012 Summer Design Internship at Wolff Olins, NYC ...
About the internship:
We’re looking for a crazy, innovative, digital savvy Design intern to work with our team in New York City.
There are no “junior” designers at Wolff Olins. Even our interns require a certain instinct and raw skill from the start. The work we aim to deliver is bold, ambitious and different. The primary role for the designer is to explore. This is the creative position...
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Why can’t I find international brands from the...
By Marie Succar
As brand designers and consultants in the Middle East, it’s our everyday challenge to push our clients’ boundaries and help them take a quantum leap into the future. With our work with Aldar, one of Abu Dhabi’s largest developers, we challenged conventions and told the story of people and quality of life. With the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and the Qatar Foundation...
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Liechtenstein for all, by all
By Moussa Beidas
Bordered by Switzerland to the west and south, and by Austria to the east, this small principality is dubbed by most as the Monaco of Eastern Europe. It shares a lot of similarities with its French namesake, including the second lowest unemployment rate in the world (Monaco is 1st) as well as the highest gross domestic product per person anywhere. But thats probably where the...
March 2012
32 posts
4 tags
Sincerely Anonymous
As an exercise in visual language, our senior designer Mads Jakob Poulsen, recently decided to explore what it might look like if Anonymous ”went corporate.”
His website describes the project:
“With the group being more and more in the media they could need to button up and streamline their appearance to appear more professional whilst unifying the brand experience.
...
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(This is the third Future Patrol, a monthly series of macrotrend posts by WONY Strategist Emily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)
#Immortal Consumers
“I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die.” – Joan Didion
This post is one in a series of sketches that will look to extreme consumer behavior to see what ideas they open up for...
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Share: Room for service
Paul Westbrook believes that “Life should be about finding the intersection of the world’s greatest need and your greatest passion.”
As that’s not too far from our own views here at Wolff Olins, we were excited to have him join us at last week’s Share to talk about his new business offer, Westbrook Consulting.
After spending 27 years working for The Ritz-Carlton, Westbrook recently...