Figure 3a.
2
OLYMPIC-SIZED CAMPAIGN
“The Olympic bid was the largest media play the city has ever done,” Collins states flatly, then pauses. (Collins
has a wholly absorptive pause, a breather amid the bursts of Ms. Piggy voices and drama and slicingly intelligent
commentary.) “Every taxi, every bus, phone kiosks, posters in bodega windows, scarves, hats. Eighteen massive
digital screens in Times Square, when the IOC [International Olympic Committee] came to town last February.”
The city-wide dialogue of images brought three enormous audiences together: native New Yorkers, tourists from
around the world, and the IOC, who made one official visit but unofficially hop the world’s capitals constantly.
“What’s great here are the parallel values,” Collins notes, handing me posters that read “There will be friends and
friends of friends to guide you,” and “Records will break.”
Figure 3b.
“New York is all about hope, ambition, and internationalism. People come here from around the world with
their hopes in their pockets to succeed. The Olympics are the same thing,” he says. The split icon logo, marrying
the Statue of Liberty with a triumphant Olympian, brings these ideas into energetic friction.
It’s a tough, if fascinating, slog, but the BIG difference slowly starts to gel. A brand problem without even a
product at its center, just a collective energy that emerges out of real culture, absorbs, and reflects it again? This
would not be the usual branding challenge.
3
BEYOND COMPARE
BIG designer Leigh Okies joins us to discuss Dove’s “Beyond Compare” campaign. Okies has an old-fashioned Olive Oyl-meets-tomboy air, with curling short dark hair and a wry expression. Previously a costume designer, in
many ways she exemplifies Collins’ typical team member: as he puts it, “gifted, talented misfits, people who have not been through the [brand identity] sausage factory.” Launched in Canada and now traveling through Europe
on its way to the U.S. this fall, “Beyond Compare” consists of a traveling photography exhibit and accompanying book, highlighting the beauty of ordinary women. The show features donated photographs by Annie Leibowitz
down to emerging photographers and bypasses galleries for more democratic spaces like shopping malls and
parks. Thumbing through the exhibit book, I see a woman struggling out of a burka, strongly backlit in a nimbus
of dust; elderly, former burlesque star Dixie Evans on a late-afternoon beach; twin girls gazing heavy-lidded at
the viewer, enigmatically titled “Friends and Enemies (Anne and Bayley)”.
Figure 3c. Dove Canada's “Beyond Compare” campaign staked out unconventional locations like shopping malls for its traveling photography exhibit of all stripes of beautiful women.
“It just has so much integrity,” Okies remarks. “It’s simple, not design-y. Dove took a different idea of beauty as a base point.” She smiles at the idea of designing for crassly commercial zones like malls. “I love that it’s commercial
art,” she offers. “A museum is a dead space, a graveyard, but a billboard is a living thing. It’s a sampling of our visual language today.” You can easily imagine how this brand experiment hooks into workaday life, how it could furnish stories over the supper table:
You’ll never guess what we saw at the mall today.
“As some brands become pan-generational, that’s when they take on a religious quality,” Collins notes. “They become part of rituals. Rituals have evaporated in our culture to the point that the rituals we have left are heavily loaded. My sister Maureen is getting married. I go to Barnes & Noble and there are, like, 50 wedding magazines.” His fingers fly in 10 directions at once, pantomiming overload. “Modern Bride, Getting Married, Your Wedding. [That’s also] why we’re so fascinated by the law, and court TV shows: Judge Judy, Judge Jimmy. Going to court calls on a clear set of behaviors, visuals, processes that we all understand. We like rituals, we need them, because they elevate you into a different, somewhat sacred space,” he notes. “Some brands do that really well, like Nike.
I was at a women’s basketball clinic recently, and when that Nike swoosh went up on the wall, it’s no longer just about basketball, it’s about the quest for achievement. Nike, the goddess, has been called upon. The activity is the same, but the experience is totally elevated.”
FIGURES 3a & b: The NYC2012 campaign blanketed New York City for its visit by the international Olympic Committee in February 2005. The campaign plays on the common themes of hope and internationalism that characterize both New York's and the Olympic Spirit. CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Brian Collins, Charles Hall; DESIGNERS: Rob Giampietro, Kevin Smith, Jennifer Kinon, Bill Darling.
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