Lunch with the DFW AMA

On June 26th I will be part of a 3 person panel with Cortney Nicolato (Senior Manager – Strategic Alliances, American Heart Association) and John Pozadzides (CMO, Layered Technologies) to discuss Web 2.0 – Using Social Media In Business. I will be adding perspective on how clients can monitor social networks  and track brand perception. I think this will be interesting because the landscape shifts by the moment. The tools change daily and leapfrog each other. In fact, I will issue the disclaimer now that anything I say as part of the panel has an expiration date of July 1st, and I reserve the right to retract all idiotic statements.

If I haven’t talked you out of attending, check out the details here. It’s a great opportunity to pelt me with rotten fruit.

Is it my logo or theirs?

One of my favorite industry debates is “Who owns a brand?” Is it the company providing the service or product, is it the agency that guides it and shapes it, or is it the consumer. Early on (before 1950’s ?) it was the company itself, then it became the agencies as mass market advertising/marketing started to happen, but in the last 10 years (especially with the advent of social media) it has become the consumer.

Brand experiences have become very personal truly live in the mind of the individual.

I just discovered the logo for Dopplr.com. They embrace the fact that consumers own the brand and have created a logo supporting it. By itself the logo is recognizable as 6 color filled squares lined up horizontally. Simple. Clean. Memorable, Brilliant. But wait there is more. The logo colors changes for each member of dopplr.com, depending on your travels. Learn more here. So, my dopplr logo looks different than yours, but both are clearly recognizable as the dopplr logo. If you look at my dopplr logo, you immediately know something about me and my interactions with the dopplr brand. Too cool.

Yeah, but what are you really good at?

In kindergarten I drew 1,392 pictures of Evil Knievel launching his motorcycle over a pool of blood thirsty sharks. Some of the sharks had machine guns, but that’s not the point. The point is that for my entire existence on this planet, my fundamental understanding of my identity has been that of a graphic designer. As my career progressed and my title changed to Creative Director or User Experience Director in my mind I defined myself as a Designer doing creative director stuff. Your perception of yourself can go beyond your professional life. In my mind, I am a designer that does dad stuff.

What’s hard for me to understand is that others perception of me is not of a designer. To my coworkers I am simply a creative director and to the woman in the lunch café I am simply the egg salad sandwich with extra bacon guy. This realization bothers me. I want every one to know I am a designer. I am passionate and proud of that.

In school I never liked write, spelling is my nemesis. Just as Porky Pig works around words that trigger his stutter, I will write 10 words to mean the same as one word I can’t spell. Well, come to find in the last few years, I am a good writer. Coincidently, have also come the realization that I am a good designer, but not a great designer. I have hit my ceiling, Saul Bass has nothing to fear.

Now it gets worse, I quite possibly, most likely, am almost sure of it. I am a better writer than a designer. This is crushing. How can it be? What will people think of me? The thing about me that was most fundamentally core to my being is not what I understood it to be. It’s like fish finding out he’s actually a monkey midway through his life. Should he start eating bananas and masturbating in public or should he ignore all that and just continue swimming upstream?

Today, right here, right now I shall embrace my inner writer and maybe slightly adjust my understanding of myself. My inner designer now has a big fat roommate lounging about in his underwear leaving ass dents in the couch cushions.