Spafax Stories

Brand managers (or guardians – that’s a much grander sounding word, no?) are busier than ever. And sometimes they’re confused. They should be. Brand guardians are having a tough time seeing themselves as publishers, as content managers. The world is changing rapidly and sometimes it’s tough to get your bearings. That they never “owned” their own brands has long been established but even today some brand guardians seem to think they do. Worse, there have never been more brand touchpoints – consumers can literally access a brand whenever or wherever they want to. And if they can’t, that’s also a potential problem. Some basic basic truths in 2012:

1)   No one cares about your brand. Absolutely no one. Consumers only care about your brand as it pertains to them. Does your brand make them happy? Does it improve their lives? Is your brand and the values it espouses in line with how a consumer sees him/herself? Everything about a brand has to be seen in relation to the consumer. Without the consumer you have no brand. A brand isn’t just PR. It’s an outreach program and it needs recipients. Without a recipient and a brand is just floating in space, lifeless and meaningless. Without form.

2)   Without brand consistency you have nothing. How many touchpoints does your brand have? I remember once walking into a secret lair, an office hidden behind a staircase in a non-descript building. Inside, a giant windowless office that was a client’s rebranding nerve centre. I was shown a very simple Excel document, printed out and pinned up on the wall. And on it were the almost 200 consumer brand touchpoints that had been identified to that point. All this to say, your brand is more than just some words. It’s more than just a story. It’s a voice. It’s your company’s voice. Its humanity. And if you have different voices for different media, you’re just confusing the customer. And that’s bad branding.

3)   Don’t confuse a mission statement with a brand’s meaning. You should be able to describe your brand in one word. The mission statement (say “Generic Corp’s brand embodies the values of honesty and simplicity in improving the lives of its customers”) is just that – a statement and something for the staff. It’s internal. The word? That’s the nugget that goes out to the world.

4)   Your brand is the source of all media. Or it should be. A brand may start as a nugget but it sets a lot of stuff in motion. In this sense, perhaps nugget isn’t the right word. Pearl is. Your brand is like a pearl. Get it right, execute properly, and your brand shines. And since your brand is the source of all media, and your company is a publisher of content, you need to get that right. Everything is content. Brochures. Video. Your website. Any print materials. Custom publications. Newsletters. E-zines. Signage. Stationary. Posters. Ads. All of it is content. Because every company in the world is a media centre.

5)   Just because your brand was successful yesterday means nothing tomorrow. Brand maintenance is hard work. We all know that. And the worst thing a brand guardian can do is rest on his/her laurels. A brand review should be regular. Even when things are going well. Especially when things are going well. And a brand review should include all stakeholders. Both internal and external. Sometimes external agencies have a better idea about a company’s brand than its internal guardians.

6)   Don’t take your brand somewhere just because the competition is there as well. If the answer to anything is “Because everyone’s doing it” your brand is in a bad spot. Yes, the consumer demands and expects a lot more than they did just a few years ago. That’s why you need a solid strategy. Too many brands have rushed into various platforms and spaces without understanding what they were doing. The resulting brand black eye is both predictable and unfortunate. Does thinking things through make you slower? So what? If the brand is strong, it will survive the wait. And it will probably thrive.

As a content marketing agency, Spafax has seen some brands get it really really right and then others, well, not so much. We often tell potential clients that we want to “get under the skin” of their brands so that our work makes sense in a larger context. So that the message we create fits seamlessly into the existing brand universe. If we do our job well, we can even lead a brand to a new space by enhancing it in ways the client hadn’t ever considered. Content marketing is, in essence, another way of pushing brand values out to the consumer in a way that is relevant to them. Difficult? Yes. But definitely not impossible to do properly.

The word “brand” has gone through a huge shift (and will probably continue to do so) but the essence, the pearl of it, has remained constant. A brand embodies the soul of a company, how it wants to be perceived by consumers in a world of almost limitless choice. It is an amazingly powerful thing. And needs to be treated with respect. And intelligence.

As the provider of content for British Airways (BA), scheduling, promotion, brand and packaging for their in-flight entertainment services, Spafax is responsible for updating and rolling-out new content as they need changing or refreshing. This is especially important when it comes to branding, and after eight years on-board the current set of idents (those pieces of video you see in between programming) were looking out of date, as was their on-board wellbeing video (to promote healthy flying). While we were working on these, we were approached by BA’s Marketing team to create Olympic versions of these items, to both carry Olympic sponsorship, and promote British Olympic Athletes for 2012.

British Airways’ In-Flight Entertainment Branding idents

When confronted with the task of re-designing the in-flight entertainment (IFE) packaging for BA, we started with some brand-work, looking at the role of in-flight entertainment for BA in particular, and how that differs from other airlines; acting as a branded entertainment environment that BA wanted to associate with the hospitality experience – from lounges, to food and drink, to free newspapers – rather than with BA’s corporate identity or the transport function of the airline. The creative approach that stemmed from that was to take the hosted lounge experience, which BA is already bringing into the aircraft cabin, and bringing that onto the IFE screen, creating stronger associations with the overall experience of being “looked after” by the airline.

To do this, we filmed various colours, textures and objects that are featured across all of BA’s UK lounges, focusing on the newest iterations in Heathrow’s T5, and created a palette of icons, patterns, colours and images, in-camera, which we then heavily treated in post production to create simple graphic backgrounds for the Highlife Entertainment brand – which we also re-designed.

Each logo/Ident is short, providing a breath-pause or punctuation mark in the programming flow, opening and closing each sequence of content items selected on the IFE’s Video-on-demand by the viewer. There are 12 idents in all, covering a wide variety of moods and shades, each with an individually animated logotype animation and subtly individual music score.

We were very conscious that channel identity is highly repetitive, especially in the IFE cabin environment, so we wanted a wide range of executions that wouldn’t become an irritant on an eight hour plus flight, but would still provide a strong brand identity.

For Your Wellbeing

In approaching the production of BA’s new wellbeing film our main goal was to provide a tranquil piece of high-quality creative that inspired the idea of holistic wellbeing as well as demonstrating practical exercises that would help make the flight as comfortable as possible for passengers. As BA are a British brand in an International context, we chose to take the action outdoors into Britain’s beautiful English heritage countryside, where we literally placed a BA Traveler-plus seat into a natural setting, outside, amongst the trees and follies of Stowe School grounds.

We deliberately looked to cast someone who was a genuine yoga and Pilates practitioner into the seat, and settled with a young woman who’s looks could place her from pretty much anywhere in the world, including the UK, to reflect Britain’s modern diverse culture and BA’s role in connecting nations together.

Eight exercises were developed by the Body Control Pilates group, which were then meticulously filmed in high definition on high speed cameras, extracting as much detail and beauty as we could from the stunning natural settings. Original music was scored to underline the mood and environment.

An Olympian Effort

Having created the generic wellbeing video, our brief was to create a version including some of Britain’s Olympic hopefuls, to support BA’s status As a tier one 2012 Olympic & Paralympics Games sponsor. We cast three of Britain’s most well known athletes, Heptathlete Jessica Ennis, Paralympian Shelly Woods and Gymnast Louis Smith. We filmed them in action at Basildon Sporting Village in Essex on track and in the gymnasium, demonstrating their sports, as well as seated in our mobile World Traveler seat in the sports hall. Actions scenes were intercut with the wellbeing exercises, with heavy post production to provide a high quality finish and introduce brand colours and graphics, again with specially scored music to support the visuals.

BA’s Olympic IFE Idents

To wrap around BA’s specially commissioned Olympic content we were briefed to create Olympic idents, carrying sponsorship credits.

For the creative execution, we decided to celebrate athletics and sporting prowess in-detail, by shooting sportsmen and women in-action at very high speed in against a black background, then zooming in on the detail of the action while playing the moves back in slow motion, with ramped-speed effects to highlight the explosive nature of some of the moves.

Brand colours were introduced through lighting, lens flare and particle effects, mostly generated in post-production, where we also worked hard to comply to LOCOG brand compliance.

We created 13 idents in all, each focusing on one sporting action from striking a football to leaving the starting blocks, striking a tennis ball to doing flares on a pommel horse.

All four projects were delivered on time, on budget, and exactly as specified in our original pitch work, and we are as pleased as our client with the end results. Keith Rogerson acted as Director and Christine Youngblood was the Art Director, working to Ed Oppe as Exec Producer and Anthony van Someren as Creative Director.

We in the content industry tend to go to a lot of conferences. And there are a lot of conferences about content. With the vast changes in technology, everyone in the field wants to know the ins and outs of content and content strategy to better service their client needs. That’s perfectly understandable. But it also leads to something we’re starting to call The Conference Bubble: if you stay inside of it for too long, you tend to stop experiencing the outside world. The real world. And that disconnect is not good for content providers and it’s especially not good for their clients. It’s disastrous. In the end, the conference was really about a big idea and that was: quality over quantity. It’s something we preach at Spafax and it’s nice to know that after a few years of everyone trying to parcel out content in the shiniest baubles

At the recent International Content Summit, held in London, we were lucky enough to hear some compelling stories from the trenches (there’s more on the “big idea” from the conference here, at Sparksheet).

People Still Like Print

This is perhaps self-evident but you wouldn’t know it from The Conference Bubble. At least conferences that are about “content” or “content marketing.” The irony, of course, is that many of the speakers at these conferences are published authors pushing their books. Irony, another inconvenient truth.

Richard Cope, Global Head of Insight at Mintel, called print a status symbol. He said research has shown that “we still need to carry badges and emblems of taste” and that print fulfils that function. (This thinking went into the relaunch of Air Canada’s enRoute – we wanted to make it “printier” and also speaks to the sumptuous feel of our print media for Bombardier Business Aircraft, among others). An iPad may say something about us but a magazine says something specific. And then he put numbers to something we all understand intuitively: 42% of people consume print for “long journeys” (this is a UK study so take that to mean train trips) and 71% would rather read print than online. This stat was one of the most retweeted from the conference. For obvious reasons. Reading is a luxury, or should be qualified as such, because time is the new luxury, and it is relatively accessible, just like reading. Print might be on the way to niche status but it is an aspirational niche, and anything aspirational is also marketable.

These insights jibe closely to what we at Spafax have been saying for a while now: print is still important and a key component of a multi-channel communication strategy. Speaking of multi-channels….

What Hath the Touchscreen Wrought?

Nothing. It’s great. The Telegraph’s Mark Challinor even showed off the “nightmode” button on their app – a smart idea, brought on by user analytics (that is, a good number of their subscribers read the newspaper on their iPad in bed).  In good news for people who like to make money, the Telegraph’s studies have also found that readers like ads because it gives the newspaper app “a premium feel.” This goes back to the great thing about ads in print: readers have long found that ads are “content” as opposed to something they can skip over, a fact that has long explained the mammoth sizes (and success) of the fall fashion books. And Richard Cope asked a question that lingered long after he had asked it: Is the touch screen dulling our sense of touch or reawakening it? I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time.

One Brand, One Voice

Ruth Spencer, Head of Loyalty, for Boots (the largest drugstore chain in the UK and the home of one of the world’s great integrated content programs) affirmed that her company is “absolutely a content company.” And with a wide-ranging content strategy that embraces almost every form of media she insisted that her content must: be consistent, get integration right and play to each channels’ strengths. Meaning, quite often, one photo shoot for print, digital, in-store, you name it. What this says, really, is no silos, something I’ve touched on earlier. By employing a brand strategy without silos, Boots wins. And they do. Their program is something to behold.

Customer Loyalty

Myf Ryan, GM Marketing for Westfield UK, a large shopping mall developer, spoke of launching an enormous new mall in a relatively depressed section of East End London during the current economic climate. Westfield did this through the power of storytelling. That is, they gave a shopping mall that didn’t exist a backstory and then sold that story (as opposed to selling a mall) with stunning success. But more importantly, Ryan realized that any audience is “not channel loyal, they are content loyal” – so her story was consistent over multiple channels. More importantly, she said “Don’t tell a story about the brand, tell compelling stories that embody your brand” – something any good content marketer tries to get their clients to understand every day. The best brand stories are the ones the audience wants to be a part of, after all. No one really cares about a brand. Just what it can do for them. Brands that understand that are successful.

All great examples of good content done well. But more than that, all great examples of smart strategy in the service of great content working toward the same goal. It is really what all content marketing should strive for.

Last week, I spoke to the Custom Content Council at their pre-Pearl Awards gathering in New York. (For the record, Spafax won 5 Pearl Awards for our work for Air Canada’s enRoute, enRoute online, Air Canada’s OnAir and Mercedes Benz Canada.) Speaking about in-flight magazines and our long-standing partnership with Air Canada, I then conducted a Q&A with Air Canada’s Senior Director, Product Design Louise McKenven. We spoke about our long-standing partnership, how enRoute media enahnces Air Canada’s brand, how enRoute allows Air Canada a different level of communication with their customers, about earned media, and about the compelling brand story we (Spafax) can offer advertisers on Air Canada’s behalf.

The audience was fascinated. One, because the perception of in-flight media in the US is so different than it is in Canada (and in many other parts of the world). Two, because the story itself, of a brand leveraging the talents of its content agency to tell quality stories to a highly mobile audience – and then commercializing that conversation – is an amazing story in and of itself. Three, the audience (composed of other custom content providers) tried to figure out how to apply the in-flight model to their own customers.

At Spafax, we have taken the knowledge and experience we’ve built up with the airline and travel industry, and come to some basic truths. The people who travel, an amazing mobile and global audience, is, in fact, the customer base that all brands crave. The audiences our clients reach on the in-flight/IFE side of things and the custom media side are, basically, one and the same. And so it makes sense for Spafax to include the likes of Turismo Chile, Bombardier Business Aircraft, and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts in a client base that also includes the likes of British Airways, Emirates and Singapore Airlines, to name a few.

We have long been about content, curating brand stories for a mobile – and highly coveted – audience. What the gathering in New York learned is that the richness of the experience we have created with Air Canada is applicable to “terrestrial” brands as well. Because telling brand stories, and telling them well, is universal.

You’re on a quick flight. An hour to decompress before the start of the day. So you decide to relax with some new music. But you don’t want to start thinking about what to listen to. That’s what DJs are for, right?

Curation may be a buzzword in content circles but it’s basically what DJs have been doing since the invention of radio. And it’s what Spafax does across multiple media channels like audio, video and print. As an audio programmer for Spafax, programming audio for 20 airline clients, I’ve been in the curation business for longer than I’d care to admit.

But like any service, picking music for the world’s airlines is one, way harder than you might imagine and, two, needs to change.

A modern approach to music curation, much like the cocktail revival and slow food, relies on what many may consider a “throwback” method: begin with the finest ingredients, and assemble them with precision, passion and expertise. (Yes, I like to cook.)

Inflight entertainment is in a unique position as it lives in a place where aviation, the travel industry and 21^st century technology meet.  With this in mind, Spafax introduced an additional option to audio-on-demand (AOD) systems, song libraries and seat channel offerings for our airline clients.  Dubbed “Custom Playlists” (or CP), this new short-form audio program is a versatile, bespoke music compilation.  CP’s have been a hit with passengers, who regularly inquire about playlists and ‘something I heard while flying from x to y’.

What makes a CP special? It can perform the following functions:

• The Quantitative.  Focus on composers, instruments, themes, festivals.
• The Qualitative.  Focus less on lyrics and verbal description and more on moods, sounds, vibes and inherent musicality: Blue Moods, Unique Voices, Scat Styles, Sunny Feelings. Music based on mood as opposed to “category.”
• Depth.  Focus on areas not otherwise covered by other offerings: Goethe in Music; Classical Shakespeare; Original Blues Songs Covered by Rock Greats.
• The Tie-In.  Focus on destinations, promotions, anniversaries, editorial coverage.

With CP we also wanted to offer a new take on typical inflight audio. When we offer this model to a client, we do so in addition (or as an alternative) to our traditional AOD model. Some airlines do not offer many CDs through their AOD system. Let’s face it, sometimes, entire CDs are not very good. A few good songs are surrounded by a lot of filler. With our help, or because of our “curation,” the airline helps the passenger narrow the choice in an otherwise vast and daunting sea of song. This way, we hope, a passenger on a short(ish) flight is guaranteed music they want to hear and that fits into the time of their flight.

As more and more of our clients take us up on CP, we’re hoping to revolutionize the way airline passengers enjoy music. And as music lovers, we hope this is a way for passengers to discover new music and musicians in a cool format.

Slow food, craft cocktails and Spafax Custom Playlists have one thing in common: attention to detail.  The Spafax audio team strives to provide “real” music programming that goes beyond a mere iTunes playlist or Amazon recommendation. Curation – like DJing – implies a personal choice. We believe no automated result or algorithm-generated product comes close!