While visiting I.D.E.A, presenter and partner Jonathan said their company wants to “move people, products and culture” and ideally wants to help people different about the brand they are working on.
Different roles/sections of his business include: Brand Partners, Brand Managers, Brand Strategy, Brand Purpose, Public Relations, Creative, Design Traditional/Digital, Social Media, and web. They are part of a bigger team called Taan Worldwide which is a global network that hosts many ad and communications agencies. They work together to help on projects when it comes to being politically correct or need help reaching an audience in a market. By having a contact person in those different countries they can run presentations in person and have a face to face interaction with a variety of clients.
Most recently they have become a certified B Corporation which is achieved by being a company that “does god in the world” Etsy, Warby Parker, King Arthur Flour & Ben+Jerrys are a few in this category. To do so they had to eliminate a certain percentage of paper use, eliminated ALL plastics from their office, encouraged alternate forms of transportation (hence bikes in the office), and donate a certain percentage of money/time to charities.
When presenting an option to a client they show three: easy or safe, a relatively standard/normal version, and a daring version, “we always hope they choose the daring one.” They get to do about two daring projects a year. They strive to reach out to new audiences while keeping the current. He then went into examples of the Harrah’s Resort “Adult Swim Saturdays” which transformed a typically older crowd into an off the wall raging pool party with a lazy river and swim up bar. Girls in bikinis passed out free passes at the local beach. They had airplane banners and planted graphics on the local busses. He kept emphasizing the need to attract “hard bodied” guests.
He also covered the Del Mar Fair Horse Races and how they also tried to attract an untapped audience: the younger crowd. “Once the current crowd dies off, literally, there will be no one to go to these races.” So they hosted a type of “social media/fashion” event where they had drinks and a burlesque dancer. The whole point was to have fellow Instagram users attend, take pictures of themselves, and share their experiences. They tried to contact celebrities to attend the horse races, also. The emphasis was on this wild/fun party and “oh, there happens to be horses”-which would eventually lead to younger crowd getting into betting.
John quotes “All the ideas in the world don’t mean shit if you can’t make it sell a product for your client”
He also emphasized to not lose your integrity. We asked him about taking on projects that were less desirable and he said “we aren’t assholes, we are just particular" about who they choose to do business with.
