We have a vast arsenal of storytelling tools and mediums at our fingertips, and digital technologies are making them cheaper than ever to produce. We have strong ties to a creative network of freelancers with unbelievable talent at creating stories using digital mediums.

So what so often stops these campaigns in their tracks before they even get started? A simple lack of understanding of a very simple methodology that is applicable to every business we can help.

So when we meet with a client, one of the first questions we ask a client is this:

What is your core message?

If a client is in the beginning stages of branding, it may be confusing. However, we can provide guidance and help guide it along quickly enough that we have a sense of what you probably want to go for. (Even if the first idea is not always the best idea, your ideas are the best place to start!) Your core message will, eventually, lead to all the stories we create. And they must all lead back to that single core idea.

But then we ask another question, and it baffles clients almost every time.

What do you want this campaign to do?

“What do you mean what do we want it to do? Isn’t it enough to have a website?”

You see, your company does not need websites. It does not need advertisements. It does not need billboards. It does not even need products. That is, until you understand three very simple things:

1. Core Philosophy: Profit is a means, not a motive.
2. Value Offering: Your product (or service) serves an unmet, or poorly met, need.
3. Brand Narrative: Every interaction a customer has with you becomes a part of your brand narrative.

Websites, advertisements, websisodes (aka videos), all of these things are tools that we build so as to bring #3 into alignment with #2. And we use #1 as the fuel to make that happen. It may be hard for businesses to put this idea to work without assistance, but the sooner it happens, the more likely long-term sustainability and growth will be. And it was an intentional ignorance to these fundamentals that very well may have been behind the financial instability that has marked U.S. society since 2007.

As Peter Drucker famously said, “Profit is not a motive, it is a means.” And “to make money” is never the singular reason to run an ad campaign or to release a product.

One more time so it is absolutely clear:

Products are created to solve needs, and advertising is a part of the process that brings together that need, and the product.

In coming months, we will be providing a series of stories about our past work on our blog in the category “stories that sell”, because that is really what we do, and it makes sense to share these stories with you rather than show you  websites and the like without explicating the narrative efforts behind it. This is the reason why you will not see a “portfolio” section on our site like you might on many of our competitors. We just don’t think it matches very well with what Odd Duck Media, LLC really does. For one client we may re-design a website and rework the site copy and manage a Twitter account, for another we may use gamification techniques to run a transmedia narrative that drives attention to a brand story for years to come. There is no one path to success, no one-size-fits-all approach. Every client is unique, and we help turn that into your best asset.

We will consult you on what best matches your goals and budget, and decide from there if you are equipped to run that strategy yourself, or hire us to help you run that campaign from there.

At the end of the day, Odd Duck Media, LLC does one thing: we create stories.

Of course, there are more than could possible be covered in a post. But in my past 12+ years of experience, I have noticed some tell-tale do’s and dont’s, and would like to share some of them with you.

9 DO’s OF SUCCESS:

1. Focus on your core message and value offering before building anything
2. Build your narrative like you would build a screenplay: architecturally. Start with structure first.
3. Strategize and maximize the distribution and motivation points based on the strengths of those mediums, not just what is trendy today.
4. Build user profiles. Do not be afraid to alienate people that aren’t in your user profiles. You can not and will not build a narrative that speaks to everyone.
5. To clarify: speak to your niche.
6. Look at opposition, “complaints,” etc. as opportunities for growth, not as reasons to give up or worse yet, “fight back.”
7. Allow your creative team to be creative, and work with them.
8. Expect that creativity involves risk. Maximize successes over time, minimize failures, but not before you’ve learned from them.
9. Help us foster an environment of team-work and cooperation.

7 DONT’S OF FAILURE

1. Change your core strategy or message a month after launch because you haven’t received the colossal reaction you were hoping for.
2. Begin a massive campaign with only the funding for the first month and a half, with the expectation that profits will be able to carry you through a campaign. Unless you are one in a million, they will not.
3. Give up on or ignore one useful channel for another. Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket. At the same time, don’t dismiss a channel just because it isn’t as likely to provide an immediate ROI as another.
4. When you get analytics or results back, especially early in a campaign, do not assume you know what those numbers are telling you right away. Look at that as an opportunity to get into the minds of your users. Adapt, improve, but do not abandon until you know why a methodology is being abandoned.
5. Do not expect to become a millionaire overnight, or expect a 3 month indie-scale campaign to make you a household name.
6. Cut corners just because you think you can without knowing what you’re losing in the process. Successful campaigns are about developing an integration of big picture (macro-) and all the details (micro-).
7. Manage through fear.

There are no 100% certainties in business. But you are assured that if you follow these rules of thumb you will build brand capital over the course of a campaign, and if you ignore them, you will very likely lose money in an effort to save it.

Direct link. Note: The fundraiser has been pushed back to June 1.

Odd Duck Media, LLC : A new social media and brand identity business based on honesty, transparency, and visibility.

“Amidst the social media and app bubble, we wanted to create something different,” says Odd Duck co-founder and Creative Director James Curcio, “I have seen many businesses in this sector promising anything just to get clients to close sales on the one hand, and a real disconnect between the tech and actual human beings on the other. I realized that I couldn’t just sit back and accept the status quo. How can we talk about social media, and at the same time essentially create systems of automated spam?  As Hunter Walk says, ‘Your BRAND is not your logo, name or tagline. It’s the promise you make to your community.’ Brands aren’t scalable widgets. They are unique identities. I wanted to create a business based around that realization.”

“I decided to broach the idea of launching a business with my wife, who has a background in information science, and we decided to create a company based on creativity and the human element. We make no pie-in-the-sky claims, and have no goal of a quick flip. Everything we create is done one client at a time, custom-tailored. We aim to educate our clients on the realities of risk and reward in the digital social sphere, and forge long-term relationships based on trust. Many companies toss around words like trust, honesty, and transparency, but it is just a PR front. It is not just a front for us, it is the core of our company. We realize we are a somewhat young and edgy company, and don’t try to cover up that edge. In fact, we own it as a cornerstone of our brand identity.”

Jazmin Idakaar presented comments on our philosophy and objective at Philadelphia’s Tech Week, speaking at the Women in Tech Summit. Watch the video here: http://youtu.be/HDn1AzWaY20http://youtu.be/HDn1AzWaY20

Clients

Though a young company, the founders have been working in digital media since the first dot com bubble, and have learned a great deal about startups in the process. “Keep your overhead low, and your brand and value offering on point,” James says to sum up this philosophy. “Though we are open to all clients that share our general philosophy, our ideal clients are startups themselves, which means they are flexible enough to run with the ball, and not bogged down in decades of brand and political baggage.” Social advocacy is also a major focus for Odd Duck Media, LLC, as can be seen in one of their present clients, Beacon Initiative, which focuses on software that raises awareness about bullying and hate speech. You can see a video they worked on with multi-media freelancer Daniel Warwick here. (Though note: the fundraiser has been pushed back until June 1.)

About the founders:

Jazmin Idakaar:

Social Media Director

Jazmin is an information professional with a passion for social media, event planning and community outreach, with nearly a decade of professional and library experience. She has founded two social groups, one for library professionals and the other for crafters seeking to donate their items to local charity organizations and hospitals. Her goals and work are informed by a commitment to community and social justice, and a drive to engage groups and local and small businesses in participating in those efforts.

James Curcio:

Creative Director

Since getting involved in media production as co-founder of Evolving Media in 2000—the first in many media/arts collectives he helped organize—James has built numerous cross-platform narratives, utilizing the media best suited to the task. This has led to work with emerging media and marketing trends, including podcasting, blogging, and social networking. Some of his books have been taught in college level classes on identity, myth, media, and literature.
For more, visit their website at http://www.oddduck.org

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Watch link.

Pattie Simone of WomenCentric.net interviewed attendees at the 1st Women In Tech Summit in Philadelphia. Pattie spoke with Rebecca Tversky, (a brand, business and content strategist) and Jazmin Idakaar (the co-founder of OddDuckMedia.org) to get their insights on the event and their overall feelings about what it means to be a woman in tech in today’s workforce.

Check back for Part 2 of this interview, coming soon!

What exactly does a brand consultant do?

Well, that’s a worthwhile question to ask, but, like this really smart (if somewhat) unpopular guy Socrates often did, let’s answer that question with another series of questions. Because it’s about time for a heart-to-heart about who you are and what you want. It is brand therapy time.

Who are you?

We don’t mean in some deep existential sense. We mean, what is the identity of your brand? Whether you are a local business or an international brand, you represent a unique identity. Almost without doubt you do not present a unique product or service. Even the talents of your workers, no matter how talented they may be, are not inherently unique.  But your brand – that is potentially the most unique thing about you. What is it? Take a long look in the mirror. The question is not who do you want to be, it is who are you? What do you think customers see when they look at you?

For some reason, many businesses are deeply afraid to allow their branding to speak to that uniqueness.

What does your brand stand for?

What are your beliefs, and how do they show through your actions? Many companies have “philosophy” and “mission” statements that have very little to do with their actual business practices, and it shows. And even more importantly, how do you treat your employees? Do you work to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses by tailoring a project management strategy based on their unique traits? Do you have a unique brand identity that is based on their unique approach? Forget mission statements and words – live the myth of your brand through your actions, and you will reap real-world, long term rewards for it.

What do you want customers to take away from the experience? What do they take away from it now?

The answer to these two questions is a culmination of what has come before.

This is a time and place to be honest, not to pretend, and not to throw out fake PR smokescreens. Nowhere are such things more likely to backfire than in the “social” space online, which is why that is one of the first places we seek to take your brand management once we have a grasp on who you really are.

It is only after this point that it comes time to begin looking at what that brand story is.

If you have been paying attention, it should be especially clear at this point why you want to hire an outside consultancy to help you strategize and manage your brand. Why? Because they aren’t tied into the internal politics of your company. They shouldn’t be made afraid to speak truth to power, and they will be able to have an outside perspective on what you are actually presenting to the world. When it comes to small, niche brands, we are the people for you to hire, whether to sculpt an overall brand remodeling or to create a viral adjunct to a new product release. But we will be the first to admit that it is not a part of our core brand identity to do this kind of work for international brands. There are plenty of other, larger consultancies that do that. We’ll even refer you to some of them, if you’re not the right match for us.

And that’s what branding is all about: discovering who you are, owning it, and being the best at that. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. You don’t need to.

So what do we mean when we say that stories are what sell your brand?

The only way I can answer this is by telling another story, which itself says something.

Here is a little story about stories — a meta-story — about branding, and about pate. Okay, it’s mostly about pate. But a little about branding.

So, when I was a senior or so in college, there was a restaurant that I really enjoyed nearby. And there was a waiter there who I am fairly sure was gay, and he was a little sweet on me. I only mention this because I think it explains how chatty he was with me. And I can enjoy the attention even if I’m not gay myself.

I was going down the menu and I saw something I hadn’t seen before. Pate. Now, if I’d asked many waiters what it was, they might say “It’s duck liver.” Or “it’s really good.” Or something else that tells what it is. After all, that was my question, right? “What is Pate?”

But instead, this waiter gave me a story. He said “imagine you are at war, in the trenches or something, and you want something really hearty, full of vitamins and fat. Something rich and dense and, you know. Pate is something you eat to go to war.”

As you can probably imagine, if for no other reason than curiosity and the way he made it seem exciting, I ordered the pate. And I have come to enjoy it. If the waiter had said “it’s liver,” I doubt I would have ever bought it, and if I did, I doubt I would have liked it. But I was given a story, and that story has ever since colored my experience of what pate is. Do you see? My very experience of it, my enjoyment of it, was in part structured by the story I was given about it. And certainly I could change that story, or I could be given conflicting stories and wind up identifying more with that one. But this is how this works. You cannot successfully market brands before you understand the psychology of identification, and the psychology of myth.

This, this is what we need to figure out together for your brand. Don’t tell your customers what it is. Don’t even just tell them how they can benefit from it. No. Create a story that involves your product, a story far greater than just your product. Your product is not the main course of your brand story. It is a detail within it.

Of course, I cannot explain the entirety of transmedia branding and advertising with this one story/analogy. But it’s quite a start. For more on transmedia, see these posts.

Many of those in media and advertising still think of a model where a message is formulated and then broadcast at an audience. This is generally ineffective and outmoded, especially for those that aren’t already essentially “converts” of your core message. Nevertheless, it is the basis of most web advertising, it is the basis of many magazine ads.

If it is so outmoded, why is it still the standard?

I think it is partially a case of old habits die hard. I have many theories about why many advertisers still try to overload an already media-saturated audience, but since I don’t have the research on-hand, let’s let it pass. Instead, I’d like to point out the alternative, which has been used for over a decade now in the methodology of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and in the cross-media approach that has been named “transmedia.” All of these methods have been popularized by the top-tier Japanese ad firm Dentsu in their book “The Dentsu Way,” but don’t let them fool you. They are far from the first to use it.

Don’t bombard your audience. Engage them to walk a number of different paths leading to different desired destinations.

Transmedia advertising is a little like choose your own adventure. Create stories and action paths that intersect one another. Some people will be pulled in one direction, others in another. Create paths that lead throughout the intersecting “stories” of your products.

That said, it is still a worthwhile read for anyone working in this field, and it highlights the methods that we are eager to utilize for our clients. The offerings of a creative firm are only as strong as the adventerousness of their clients. We want to build auxiliary transmedia narratives that kick your traditional marketing campaigns into high gear. We want to build stories that stick with the audience, leveraging the archetypical forms our creative director has discovered through over a decade of mythic research.

The underlying point is the same. Tell a story. Invest the budget and time to create a narrative that can pull in audiences from many different angles and let them make their own choices about where that narrative can take them. You will be surprised at the results!

Economies of scale and general industrialization processes – whether we’re talking about the assembly-line processes that we erroneously attribute to Ford with the Model T, or the mass-farming approaches that drive industrialized agriculture – are not always as effective long-term as a spreadsheet might indicate. For instance, in Fresh, a movie/documentary about farming for the future, the point is made that the industrialized methods of food production actually create many of the problems that must be “solved” with more pesticides, and increased methods which lead to health risks that can only be mitigated through the incursion of more technological solutions.

Strange as it may sound, this got me thinking about our business model for Odd Duck. In many ways, our primary commodity is creativity and innovation, along with having some specialized knowledge about web advertising and marketing, social media, etc. This business model flies in the face of the industrialized process. There is no real way to streamline creativity. In fact, creativity works best when it is cultivated through techniques of restricted play, as John Cleese so well explains in this video. (It’s 30 minutes, but I really suggest you watch it.)

He lays out a simple dichotomy between an “open” and “closed” mode. The ongoing challenge in this business exists in getting those who are so stuck in the “closed mode” to allow an “open mode” perspective to drive their brand strategy. There is a certain anxiety that arises in letting a creative team build a narrative with your brand, and in investing your money in carrying that narrative to an audience that will help you amplify it for other potential customers. If you fall pray to that anxiety, a sort of conservative mindset can take hold that says: take no risks, stick to what you know.

Similarly, this mindset wants to take an industrialize perspective too soon – before the narrative is even a seed in the ground. When a story starts to flower, then you can look at how to improve it, and look to minimize threats to its growth. But the right ingredients must be present for it to ever grow at all, and that is really what we aim to do.

Those ingredients are:

• Ingenuity / creativity (which can’t be quantified)
• A realistic strategy that makes use of available opportunities
• A budget that can give the story an opportunity to grow in enough minds to create that highly sought-after “viral effect.”

Of course, so long as someone takes no risks and stick to only what they know, they will have no place in the marketplace of the future.

How do you look at the role of storytelling and narrative in your brand?

Unfortunately, storytelling has become a lost art in many businesses. This is especially detrimental to start-ups, because failed attempts to effectively pitch and present information to potential investors, customers, and partners can quickly result in the end of the business. Instead of taking the time to craft captivating stories, most entrepreneurs create dreary Powerpoint presentations filled with facts, jargon, buzzwords, and graphs. Powerpoint (and laziness) has killed our ability to tell good stories, but this is a habit we need to ditch. (ref.)

A good start. The next step is to recognize that Social media and transmedia are brand tools.

It’s about content.

More than just a logo and company colors, brand identity is established through the collective narrative customers develop about your company through every interaction they have with you.

It is a story nurtured through a variety of mediums.

Brand narrative is transmedia storytelling.

More:

• The Story of a Transmedia Revolution (Part 1 / Part 2)
• Questions Toward A Philosophy of Gaming
• New Questions Toward A Philosophy of Gaming
• A Mythic Primer of Transmedia