FBlog

The past week, as deemed by Forbe’s Mike Issac, has apparently been re-branding week. My_______ and Gap headlined the show, with a whole host of lesser-known brands populating the news. For the most part public outrage and heavy criticism is what really pushed the stories to the forefront, but even in the case of the logos that the public approved—or just didn’t care about—the e-readers were still clamoring. What was curiously absent in most of these articles? The agency.**

For some reason, we understand that only brands get mainstream coverage. Apple tweaks the look of iTunes and its front cover of the Journal. Football players wear Pink and Tim Hasselback is all of a sudden relevant. The Hartford Whalers—the Hartford Whalers– brandish a new logo and NBC is on the case. All the while the agencies behind these moves are out of sight and clearly out of mind.

Sure. Brands, especially consumer brands, are a bit sexier than indices and reports (Depending on who you ask; Personally, I get a bit excited about the CBI). The question is, outside of supplying expert opinion on a new identity distant to the clients we actually work with, why can’t the branding agencies be newsworthy? Thousands of wildly creative individuals worldwide come up with the most brilliant strategies and designs for brands, but they don’t have a story to tell a reporter?

Having lived PR for the last few years, I tend to look at everything in the frame of persuasion, i.e. what will make someone else care. The glaring lesson to be learned in that arena is that journalism (and quite often sales) comes down to the basic question of “How does this affect me?” Do I need to know something about what branding actually is? Does the work that goes into it touch me? Do branding agencies have some sort of super-saiyan-jin-voodoo-master powers of communication that make me willingly stand in line for fourteen hours at the Apple store just to get my iPod battery replaced?

These are the tales of intrigue that get coverage. Yes, it’s not the conventional stuffy and often unimaginative approach to thought-leadership that tends come out of consultancy environments, but maybe it’s time to give journalists the laugh they need to get through that deadline or whatever other emotion that will turn them on to our story. What they really need, nay, want to know is that what makes the work we do, not just the end result, so damn compelling.

**Okay, the agencies that screw up horribly tend to take a flogging too, but that really shouldn’t provide any comfort. Maybe some humor, but no comfort