[Music] [Rion Harmon] Welcome to From Brand Strategy to Social Content. Today, I'm going to walk through how to think about branding from a high level positioning perspective, how copy informs that, how to think about it strategically. And then I'll walk through a round one presentation of a brand that we created here at my studio, Day Job. And then I'll talk about content and how brands leads to that with a lot of high level thoughts around-- I don't know, just my opinions on how to do it right. But before I get started, I wanted to say what's up, and hello, and thank you to Adobe Express who is sponsoring this and allowing me to be here today to chat with you. Love Adobe. Obviously, I've been using it since I was a child. Their products just get better and better. I really love Adobe Express. Truthfully, it just makes things easier. There's a lot of tools for scaling your brand, for creating brand kits really being able to do things quickly. Highly recommend this product, and it really comes, I think, with every Adobe Suite thing you can subscribe to. Highly recommend diving in and seeing how it can help you out. I'll back up a little bit and talk a little bit about myself. I guess here, I've been just setting the foundation, but I think knowing a bit about me and where I come from and what I do is probably important. I run a studio called Day Job. I founded it about seven years ago with one of my best friends. We're now a 12-person shop. We create brands from the ground up. That's our main thing. However, we also do rebrands. We make a lot of content. We make a lot of videos. We in some ways are an all-in-one shop.
We've done a lot of really cool brands. I'll walk you through some of them today. But, of course, wanted to make sure that you took us seriously. These are some of the brands we've worked on. Social proof, always good to start here, so you know we're legit.
The first part of my presentation is about branding.
I'm going to walk through a number of brands we did, and talk just quickly breaking them apart, deconstructing them a little bit. And branding is really the first thing that needs to happen before you can make things. The second part of this will be about making things. But the first thing you got to do is make your brand exist. There's a lot of thought that goes into that from what's the market it's going into, what's happening on a macro level what's the product, how do you differentiate it, is there a white space in that market, and also to what are the sensibilities of the founders, right, the people who wake up every day and work on these brands. And so each of our brands has its own perspective. It has its own lane, and it feels like its own little universe that we like to invite people into.
And so I want to start off with thinking about strategy and particularly through the lens of copy. I think copy is this underutilized thing in branding, but really implanting an idea in people's minds about how to think about the product, how it's positioned, is really where strategy comes to life. It's maybe the most articulate way of showing it is through action. And so in each of our brands, they all have their own tones, they all have their own approaches because they're all completely different, they're in different categories, they're very unique from each other as products. And so when we think about copy, it's really thinking like, what can we say that our competition couldn't say or wouldn't say? And it's always really important to look in those places because you can often find ideas that are super helpful for framing up a brand to get started. The first brand I'm going to talk about today is a brand called David. This just launched. So when they came to us, we went through naming first. That was where the copy began. That's often the case when we're launching these brands from the ground up. We pitched a bunch of names, and David was the final one that we showed, a wild card. It seems like a crazy name for a protein bar. The idea behind the name really though was about hitting this idea of Michelangelo's David, this very perfect sculpture maybe the actual icon of beauty perfection, and just the dedication to craft. And it feels large. It's a huge idea. And it really goes into leaning into the idea of what they were thinking about for this product and all the development they put into it, really finding the best ingredients they could to hit what they were trying to accomplish. And David really just opened up our heads to really thinking about this from that perspective and started to give us an angle in on how do you not just have a generic gym bro protein bar? How do you make it feel like something that's elevated and thoughtful, which is exactly what the product is? And so David was the first piece of copy that really we wrote for this, right? And, obviously, with a bunch of other lines and names throughout that we didn't end up using, but landing here was the North Star that we were looking for. So naturally, with a name like David, the final protein bar is one of the first lines we wrote for this. It really does feel like the achievement of excellence, what they accomplished, and let-- Okay, let's just say that out loud. We're pushing the boundary of what's possible with protein. We're really making a product is a step up above what anyone else is doing in that space in terms of macros. So let's just own it, right, as a brand. Let's just make sure that we're saying what we are and where we stand. It's the tone for this is very hyperbolic, but the product really is innovative. I love lines like this like humans aren't perfect, but David is. It's just like both referencing the sculpture and the product. It's this funny thing where we're all striving for perfection. We're all trying to be better. And Michelangelo went ahead and made the perfect form. Using that to allude to product and set the tone is just a fun way of thinking about copy for this brand. And then, obviously, finish your masterpiece, right? Really thinking through what is the end goal of this. The end goal is that humans, we're always trying to be better each day, right? And we have goals that we're working for, and that masterpiece is going to be different for each person. But at the end of the day, this brand's about creating tools to help you accomplish goals that you have in your life. And so finish your masterpiece, it's again, it alludes to David. It feels funny and hyperbolic and such a crazy thing to say for a protein bar, but at the same time super fun.
So the next brand I'm going to talk about is Recess. We launched this brand in 2018. At the time, there were not really any functional beverages. It was a new category we were creating. This package design felt really innovative at the time. It was almost unheard of in consumer packaged goods to really not put every single product benefit you could imagine on the front, like low sugar, or organic, or etcetera, gluten-free.
So we push to make sure that we strip the can back of anything superfluous, right? Really just at the bottom telling you what it's about, telling you the flavor, having a line on it that's calm, cool, collected. Really just leaning with vibes first.
And we were told a lot of time that this was a stupid idea. But at the time, again, like I said, everyone was doing as much as possible. And so sometimes it's good to take a look at like, all right, is there value, and is there a way in where we can do things the opposite? With this brand, we really even thought through the texture of it. Matte finish on a can at the time was not normal. Everything was shiny. So we figured it would stand out on shelf. And it also leaned into the value prop of this particular brand and product, right? We wanted it to feel soft in hand. We wanted to prime the user for the experience of drinking something that's calming. At the time, this was infused with CBD. We didn't want to be a CBD brand because you lock yourself into a product category. And with an ingredient, forward approach, it's not necessarily the smartest because you don't have room to move, right? We wanted this to feel like a calming brand. And so we didn't even use photography traditionally in this brand. It was very much like, let's create a 3D universe that felt surreal and dreamy and used poetic language to get that across. And so the first thing I'm going to show here in terms of copy was when we first launched it, we had this line, it was a we canned a feeling.
This line is particularly interesting because it doesn't tell you what the feeling is, but when you see it in the world, in the universe we created, when this was live as a site, that can was floating up and down softly, those clouds were blowing through that arc. And so we really, didn't need to say. It explained itself, and I love lines that do that. If you have a brand system that can say a lot, then you can say less, right? And it allows the words you use to actually hit harder. And then another big line we had for this was, this is a tentpole line for this brand, an antidote to modern times, right? This was 2018. Everyone was losing their minds. And it's pre-pandemic, so it got even worse. But this idea of calling a beverage an antidote to modern times, such a funny idea, super playful, super hyperbolic, and it just feels right especially when you go back and look at the can here, and it's there on the left hand side of each of these cans, where it feels, it's very big language, but it's used in this environment that doesn't feel like that. So you can change the shape of what the words mean when you change their context. So branding is all about the push and the pull of these ideas and how do they come together to form a cohesive whole that does something that's bigger than each of the individual components. So I'm going to start this next brand off with a different slide, not leaning with the product. But this slide was from our original round one deck where we came up with a bunch of ways in on this brand. And in our copy explorer, we hit on a number of ideas. And I'll talk about each of these quickly. But Fly By Jing here at the bottom right, that's the name of the brand. And we decided to deconstruct that name because what does it mean? So fly refers to the hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Chengdu that are so popular. They attract people like flies. Jing is the founder's name. At the time, she actually went by Jenny. And so we talk about the backstory of her relationship to her western name, and her eastern name, and how she was coming to terms with her heritage.
Then we get into a line like you will find yourself putting this on everything. This line's super important, I think, especially at the time for Sichuan Chili Crisp. In the North American market, it was certainly not ubiquitous as it is now. And so we really wanted to tell people how to use it. Put it on vanilla ice cream, put it on eggs, put it on vegetables, put it on meat. It makes everything taste better. It has a great umami flavor. But let's just tell people how to use it, right? And then we get into a line like not authentic but personal next to this chart then breaks apart how it tastes different from actual typical Sichuan Chili Crisp from China. It is Jing's recipe, right? It's from ingredients that she sourced specifically. It has a different texture, different taste, and a different quality, chef quality. And then it tastes different to American people because generally speaking Americans haven't really been introduced to this product until Fly By Jing came to market. And so we really wanted to break apart how this fits into the world, how it fits into how people cook, how the name has a story behind it. We even talk here about how we use the most prized version of each ingredient from the oil to the pepper, and even lines like it costs more because it costs us more.
That's such an interesting line because at the time, Chinese food was equated with cheap, and these are using the highest quality, best ingredients. And so just getting out ahead of that conversation and being like, "Okay, Chinese food can be upmarket. We can make incredible products that are worthy of being more expensive." And so we took all of this idea and we synthesized it into the jar. This is a super dense design system, but there was so much richness in this copy that we really wanted to make sure that we showcased all of it. This was from the original round one deck. It looks almost identical right now to this with some minor tweaks and some different copy changes. But I really wanted to see how sometimes if there's a lot of interesting ideas there, how do you look for density in a system, and how do you bring it to life in that capacity? So now that you're seeing some of the brands that we've created, where they ended up, I think it's now interesting to see the journey of getting there.
How do these ideas come to life? How do you tease them out? How do you just think laterally here, and look at what are all the alternate realities that a brand could be? I think that's such an important part of the branding process is being able to explore different avenues and ideas and ways in and really paint a picture of what's possible. Such an important thing to think about here. So I'm going to run through this sake brand we launched earlier this year. It's called SummerFall Sake. We named this brand. We ideated it. Its backstory is that, Takuma, the founder, is from Japan. He moved to France. He launched a bar and a sake brand in France when he was living there, and it became the number one sake brand in France. And he came to us being like, "Well, I want to launch in America. How do I do it?" And so we took a step back. And so how do you think about sake, right? So I'll walk through the strategy and our thinking here, and then I'll walk through all of the directions of how that comes to life and how we tease out different ideas. Sake is both ubiquitous, and it's uncommon. Most people know of it. Most people have tried it. Most people even like it, but most people don't consider it, right? So it's not a thing that you're thinking about on like a Friday night, when you're leaving work on the way to the bodega or the corner store, the liquor store. So sake is this thing that people are served but they rarely buy. It's relegated to menus, it's relegated to wait staff, to restaurants. It's almost always consumed indoors. And the idea here was that we want that sake to be able to break free of those settings. So how do you tie it to new context, new associations, new feelings? How does it see the world outside of the restaurant? So backyards, beaches, beer gardens, patios, porches, picnics, pools, parties, you get it. It must be seen as casual, but informal, premium, but every day, and it's not just about special occasions. It needs to be about Wednesdays, not Saturdays. Potato chips, not caviar.
It's a sake for everyone. So it's got everything you love about wine. It's got different cultures, wine cultures, complexity, terroir, and it has the informality of beer, and it tastes better outside. And so then we did a copy explorer with that idea in mind, and I'll go through just a couple of these. But sake is fermented in California.
It's with wine culture. Tastes like where it grows. I love this idea of positioning it like wine, and the regions in which it's grown. Notes of California, again, leaning into that idea. The rice is grown in California, obviously.
And then just starting to talk about it in terms of how you position it. It's like to taste better in backyards and on rooftops. It tastes better on Wednesdays. Drink this if you are outside, just saying the thing.
Local rice plus wine cultures plus time talking about the fermentation process, talking about where the rice is grown, talking about how it's made and processed, feels elevating. And then getting done with it. So pair me with a cheeseburger.
I love stuff like this. It makes you take a step back, like you never would normally think about sake with a cheeseburger, but I love the idea of having that thought. It feels like a novel thought. It makes people think about it. It makes people put themselves in the shoes of what would that be like. Super fun. Again, I taste good with potato chips and just being like how to drink sake, however you want, how to pair it, who cares, it's not that serious. Drink sake whenever. And then this final line, easy and odd, which gets explored in some of the directions here.
Again, just showing a breadth of ideas about how we could turn this brand into something real.
I'll start first with one. It's again, leading back to the strategy, outdoors, casual, talking about the rice form. Here's the mark. It's a custom word mark. Feels playful and fun.
Feels almost 8-bit in its way as well. It has a digital feel to it.
And then we assembled that from rice, so that's actually where it came from.
And then we took the idea of, okay, let's do an off white rice color, and then let's do this premium earthy toned elevated palette with some illustrations that are, again, taking from that rice form that unpolished rice. How do we extrude that out into a cohesive system in terms of illustration? And this is where we landed on direction one. Here's that illustration system as the flavor cue here. You see the rice outline around yuzu, drawing the eye in. We have couple of variations on packaging. We always like to explore a number of ways in just to show how the system can flex and move and do different things. Here's one, based on the one I just showed you where we have a color cue for the flavors. What if we inverted that and added a color blocking scenario? What if we remove that, see how that feels? Here is where we start to see it with art direction. Obviously, it's redacted. But you can tell that maybe that there are people back there having fun.
Then we tried some different art direction with this one too. This is perspective shifting stuff that felt like it's both out in nature, but feels a little bit surreal, adds to what we were trying to do with the design system, pulls it in a new direction. Here's how the system, again, expands outward to boxes, to coasters, a website. Here you see the mouse is also built of rice, basically, and the same thing with the cart at the top right and the shop all. You see how we use that as a way of highlighting things. And then around that picture that is redacted, you can see that we use the rice as a border form, as well as the add to cart. So having that theme run through everything. The third one is the idea behind this was, what if we made this the drink of the summer? How does this compete with the White Claws of the world? And so we did a modified typeface word mark here. We did like a monospace type at the bottom here. It feels very digital. The color palette is taking from Super Nintendo hardware, this light gray, this bright red. We did this muted yellow that feels very nice as well. And then we tried a bunch of options. So here's one where we took that digital typeface, and we made the brackets into selectors for the ingredients, a fun way of doing it. Let's look at like an inversion of color while we're here. Let's see what that looks like as a taller, thinner can. This is actually almost one-to-one with what they actually ended up with. I'll show you that at the end of this particular direction. And let's try some options that are a little bit more product forward. So let's just really nail you with the flavor. Here, let's have the brand take a little bit of a back seat in the packaging explorer. Again, color inversion. Some redacted art direction, but we did some really cool stuff with some textures and patterns that is probably hard to see here, but you can probably see on their Instagram. And some merge, blah-blah. And then this is where they ended up. This is the final direction. This is actually a screenshot from their website that we designed and developed for them. And it just-- As you can see, it's the same system, but it's a maximal interpretation of what we were doing with this. So we took the basis of it, and then we pushed it a little harder. We made it have a bit more energy than what we were doing in the presentation. It's always interesting to see how you can do that even within the same system, right? So you can see how we could sometimes tone things down and sometimes ramp them up, and you can see a wide perspective there.
And that's SummerFall. So these are all the different options that we did for that, and you obviously saw where they landed. Part two, social.
So you saw I talked a lot about brands. I know that was probably long. I don't know how long it was, and how to make a brand exist, how to think about it strategically. And then now we're on to making things with it. So that is the second phase of this presentation. So a couple of things upfront. It's not a design tutorial. There's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of brilliant people who do design tutorials who can show you how to use Adobe Express and all of the other great tools that are out there. That's not what this is.
It's not about community management. I'm not a community manager. I don't really know how to do that.
There are people that are very good at that. But it's a slideshow of opinions that I formed about social and content by just doing and observing over the years, along with some examples. And hopefully, some of them are going to be helpful to be determined.
So the first thing I want to talk about in this section is the Sisyphean nature of making things every day. Shout out to everyone making content. That is brutal. The amount of things you need to do and try, I don't know how people do it. It's truly honestly, you guys are legends. And I think that marketing departments need to take note of that. It is not easy to be creative every single day. It is extremely difficult. It is taxing. It is, honestly, I think, an undervalued thing these days, especially in the attention economy.
So yeah, shout out. So I want to talk about speaking of Sisyphean, how the single product problem is I guess what I call it. I don't know, I'm just making that up. But a lot of companies are basically a single product. And how do you talk about that product every single day and make it interesting? I think this is something that when we did Recess, the brand that I showed you earlier, that seltzer brand for about two and half years, and this was a problem we contended with. How do you talk about this thing, the same thing every day? It's not like a platform brand where you're launching new products all the time. It's not a retailer where you have all kinds of things you can promote. You're talking about one thing, and you're talking about it every day. And so the creative process led us somewhere in that. And so we started exploring, okay, let's start stretching it, like, let's introducing Recess LONG for the long days, and this alludes back to the strategy. It talks about the product in an interesting way. It definitely hits all the notes that you would want for a post. It's also extremely dumb. And then we got comments on there. Everyone was laughing, and then some people were like, "What? I don't get it?" And then it's like, "All right, let's introduce Recess THICK, for those confused by Recess LONG." Why not? So you start to see how we start playing with the product, right? Okay, how-- Let's start actually using it as a narrative device.
Start playing with perspective and size of it.
Don't talk to me or my son ever again.
Start actually changing it completely. We did this thing reality spray because why not? You want to change your reality. And then it just gets weird. And then you're like pomegranate, hibiscus, ham, lunch meat. Don't know how we got away with this, but we did. This is on the grid. And then you start trying different things like, "Okay, how does Recess wear its pants?" Good question. And then if you ask yourself, is this a dream? And don't know the answer immediately, you're in the dream.
So what this shows here is where we started to one of the things we did when we started working on Recess was we did 3D renders of the can at every single angle you could imagine, so that we could then Photoshop it into anything we wanted, any image, in any situation, and make that work. So this is where you got to work harder smarter, not harder. And so what we did was, really just create a system for us to actually do that. Look off in the distance who is she? And then tan lines. I don't know what the caption is on this, I forget, but it's pretty self-explanatory.
But where this led is like when you see something like this, you start humanizing it. You start to anthropomorphize it, and then your products eventually develop personalities. And that's exactly what happened with Recess. It started off with small tweaks and dumb ideas, and then it's like, "Oh, well, maybe these things keep entering different circumstances." And so that's what happened. And so we actually ended up codifying that. So peach ginger, she's a gemini. She's influencer with less than 500 followers.
Her favorite movie is Clueless, and she identifies as the fun one. And so we started doing this for all of them. They each have their own personality. But again, you can see how when we had those renders, we could really start to bring them out and put them in situations and use them. At the time, this was novel. I think especially when in 2018, when we were doing this because it was very much like-- When we launched Recess, everyone was doing the same thing on social for consumer packaged goods. It was like someone on the beach holding a can smiling, or a picture of a salad and it's the drink's next to the salad, like, okay, not very good content. And so as you start to-- We started to build this world it became denser and richer and weirder and just like this journey.
And even things like, again, tying back to the product, but pomegranate hibiscus, which is one of the flavors. She started in adaptogen garden, and now everything she cooks is stress relieving. Just really having fun with the product creatively. How do you integrate ingredients into that in playful ways and benefits of it? Eventually, you start adding mouse to them and you look at a crowd of cans at the background, and it's just becomes this weird thing. And then you just have fun with other things. This may look cozy and adorable, but it's actually cannibalism, and we have Recess cans floating in it. And you'll notice it, this is pretty primitive. It's just hastily done, and it's really about the ideas, which I'll get to. And so looking at Recess now and the social that we did for them, it feels like everyone does that now. But at the time, it was weird. I can't stress that enough.
Even though now it doesn't seem that way. If you go back six years, it's a different universe almost. And so what we learned from that was, whatever everyone else is doing do the opposite and look there. And this is the same with branding too. It's like, let's look at the areas where no one's really touching and sometimes inverting things and putting them on their head, can unlock ideas and ways in to actually be making things.
I want to say that make something bad and then optimize. I think this is such an important component of this. It's like there's-- We're beholden to marketing calendars, and we're beholden to having, "Okay, what are we doing?" And what's our plan? And truthfully when you're making stuff it's not really a plan. It's just you make things, you see what people react to them, and then it's like you keep trying new things. And when you start to hit on ideas that work, you double down on them. I think overplanning these things sucks the creativity out of them and doesn't allow for actual creative thinking. You're not protecting the creative space. You're being like, you have to think within these confined buckets, and that can be brutal, honestly. And so medium strategy, this doesn't mean not large or small. It doesn't mean medium in the size sense. But thinking about each medium as their own thing, they're all different, and it's not one-size-fits-all. What's works on TikTok doesn't work on Instagram necessarily, and that stuff definitely doesn't work on Twitter and X, and so it's always thinking medium first in a way. It's like who are we talking to on that platform and thinking of it in that terms? And I think, there's always, I think in marketing departments, this idea of, "Oh, we have to have a big platform idea, and then all the content needs to be the same for each one, but that's not really true." I think, if you think of brands like Wendy's, for instance, they're you don't think of them as an unhinged psycho brand, but you go to their Twitter account and it's absolutely unhinged, right? But that doesn't change the way that you think about the brand. They're just playing in that medium, right? And so not over controlling what you're trying to do, and really allowing what needs to be happening organically within each of these systems and is actually the thing you need to be thinking about here. And that's a segue into this one. Don't over script both from a strategic perspective, from a calendar perspective. Sure, it's good to, yeah, make sure you have your Valentine's Day post. But really, it's just about making sure you have opportunities to make dumb accidents that work. And I think this is true for almost anything creative, really. I mean, certainly at a certain point, if you're about to, spend a million dollars producing a commercial, you definitely need it to be scripted.
But when we're talking about content in day-to-day stuff, it's really about the fluidity of it, right? So setting it up so that success can happen and that you can make moves on the fly, right? So how do you make things quickly, the things that we do with Recess, where it's just like we have every angle of the can, we can do whatever we want with it really thinking in those ways. When we make video, we often don't script. We do it in almost curb your enthusiasm style way where it's like we have a prompt. We maybe have a few things that we want to hit there, but let's let the talent do what they need to do. So we can capture those special moments that actually make it seem like it's not just someone reading off a teleprompter, right? Unless you're hiring one of the best actors, that's usually not going to be that good. People are going to be able to tell. But if you can like get someone and bring out their personality and create an environment for them to do something, that's actually where interesting things happen. Become your target audience. So one thing we learned when we did Recess was, we wanted to basically go after creatives, right? We wanted to talk to creatives. We wanted to, that was our early adopter, right? So people who made things, people who were designers, or creatives at companies, and makers, etcetera. And the base level thinking on that is always like, "Well, okay. Cool. Let's partner with some influencers, and we'll do some content series with them and all of that." And so what we decided to do actually was not that because everyone was doing that. Everyone wants an influencer vibe and attention to rub off on them. And that certainly is good, and that's not something that you should necessarily completely avoid. That's definitely helpful. But I'm talking about when you're making content, right? And so not having all your content be just like that curatorial content. And so what we did with Recess was we actually were like, "Okay, well, let's take that idea and what if Recess itself was just a creative brand?" And that's why we started making all of those weird things. It was like, how do we just be creative? And that's going to attract what we want. And that's going to be able to speak to that. People are going to find that interesting. They're going to respect it as a brand who's actually doing something that's novel. And so sometimes thinking about how do you actually just be and act like who you want to target and not just thinking about, "Oh, we want to target them," and then you're talking at them instead of to them, right? And so I think that's such an important distinction to be made, and it's nuanced, but I think it can be helpful. Do the dumbest thing possible. Time and time again in my life, in my career, I've been rewarded, maybe not my life, but definitely in my career. Do the dumbest thing possible. And it's crazy because it's about taking leaps, right? I think one thing we always tell clients when they're selecting a brand direction or an idea, it's like, does one of these make you feel uncomfortable? Because if it does, that's something that you should be thinking about because that means we're pushing into new territory. That means we're trying something that isn't just been done by everybody else. And so feeling a little bit of something in the pit of your stomach is, I think an important thing. And doing the dumbest thing possible is, it's a great idea.
And I'll talk about a few things. One time, I was a VP of marketing creative director at this company called MakeSpace, and we were giving away some credit, MakeSpace. And so price-is-righting a guy to win $50 of credit. And instead of just giving him $50, I was like, "Let's just send him an entire crate full of Skittles." And then this guy was insane. Very funny Twitter account. I don't know if it still exists, but it went viral multiple times. So this is actually, I couldn't find the original, but this was the retweet years later of what he did. And I almost got fired for this. Actually, our CFO was extremely pissed that I spent about $800 on Skittles, but I ended up not getting fired.
So whatever.
This is that brand SummerFall that I actually just walked through. This goes to doing the dumbest thing possible and also just trying things, right? So she has gone insanely viral. She's been running that account since early in the year when they launched, and she just kept making different things. And then one day, she made a water of the day, and it's so dumb in the best way possible because it's not water. It's a bunch of alcohol, and people just lose their mind over it. You see 5.6 million here, 1.7 there, 1.9 million. I mean, they hit the gold mine in terms of content on TikTok for a brand. And there's product placement in it because she quietly is, SummerFall Sake and pours them in. But it's subtle, and people don't even really necessarily realize that they're being advertised to, which is also funny. And honestly, just kudos to Lala who ideated that, and we've been helping her with some new stuff as well. But again, it's so dumb, just like a bunch of alcohol. Don't bankrupt yourself. This really goes to the same thing I was talking about with Recess where we made cans at every angle. And how do you think smart? Doing a photoshoot every week is a very expensive ordeal. You don't want to be doing that unless you set up a photo studio yourself and can crank things out. But how do you scale things? Because it's all about volume. It's all about trying things, and it's not always about being, you don't want to be precious with it. You want to figure out ways to actually, set up templates, that work for you and Adobe Express and find ways to value engineer what you're doing.
Here's an example. So when we were doing Recess again, here's the breakdown. You see the cans at all of these different angles. But then there's components here that make it basically a Recess post, and it's simple. You cut out the background, you apply a gradient in our color scheme, and then we have these again we created a 3D universe for this. You can see it on all of our touchpoints and website. But those clouds are these 3D clouds, and then you have the cans, and it's really simple. It doesn't take much to make a Recess post in a way, right? So it's like, how do you create the templates and upon which to just continually make things and not have it be this overthought out thing? Because you really want to be moving quick here. Again, here's again, the gradient. You see the clouds? Simple. It's not much. There's only a couple components to make this work.
Again, here, I mean, happy New Years. Sometimes you just got to also just make something pretty.
I think beauty, humor, and education are the main things here. Sometimes you want to make something pretty. So Fly By Jing made these incredibly gorgeous, 3D render. I think they're just hero images. Some of the most stunning imagery probably I've seen for consumer packaged goods. And hire talented people and leave them alone.
People like Haruko who made those last images. I think, find talent to do something that you like and then set them free within the brief of, we're trying to talk about this product or this service. And sometimes letting people come back to you with ideas is actually the most important. Good ideas can die by notes just like noting them to death, and then, eventually, you're just back to the middle. And sometimes just listening to outside voices in that way, super important. Again, Haruko. Incredible imagery here. This is pretty obvious, but teach people something they want to know. I mean, if you can't be funny, at least be a good teacher.
If you can't be beautiful, at least teach someone something. And that goes for in the reverse of all those.
If you can't teach people something, well, make something pretty. If you can't make something pretty, be funny. If you can do all three, that's even better.
Inspiration can also come from weird places. I think it's even textbooks sometimes. So trying different things within the Recess system here. Again, you see the gradients. You see our illustration system here, and it fits into the brand, but it talks about the creative process in a fun, novel way, feels somewhat surprising. It's always good to talk about ego dispersal in your brand. I think that's important. Collaboration, obviously, love my team. And so just having fun with different context, trying different things, seeing how different things might fit into your brand, and really just playing with anything, nothing's off the table. Again, it's about just trying things and then doing bad stuff and then figuring out what works.
Become a meme. Don't post memes. I think there's a cynical draw for people who are running these social accounts and things like that to just take a meme and lift it and become a meme account because you can get tons of eyeballs, and that's great.
If that's what you're going for, that's cool. I just think that if you're trying to build a brand that is memorable, people aren't going to remember a meme. They're not going to remember who posted it.
They're going to view that as a meme account, not a business. There are exceptions to this. But I think, generally, you want to be thinking about how do you make a brand that can be a meme in and of itself, right? How do you have an idea that's big enough that can capture the imagination of culture generally, right? And how do you make content like that too? And so that's option what we're looking for when we're making brands. Timelies, this is a big one because I think every brand does it. Some cultural phenomenon happens, and then queue within the next 48 hours. Every brand has done a post on it and it's so boring. But that said, it can work, and I'm okay with it, if it ties it in to the product. So Recess obviously, 2020 was happening, pandemic, terrible time to be a human being.
And so Recess Extra Strength, it's a joke, and it's a timely it's about what's going on, it's relevant, and it ties to the product. There are times where this stuff is good, but I think timely is generally I don't know. It just feels like, you can come up with other ideas. You don't have to piggyback on it. Although it is nice to get that dopamine hit when you're posting stuff that gets just tons of traffic.
So I'm not mad. Design is less important than an idea.
It's just true. Ideas are everything. You don't have to be precious about it. It doesn't have to be perfect. You do want it to adhere to your design system, to your brand system. There's tools for that, obviously, even Adobe Express as good as setting up everything so that you can keep hitting that. But it's really just about what are you saying? What is the thing we're doing? Does it capture the imagination? Things like this. This is an ugly image, but sneak preview of our upcoming collab with big pharma. Let's go.
Dry things to visualize during dry January, just using a font, and then we're putting just a cutout saltine cracker, Stock image, and then a desert, and then raisins, and then dandruff, all things that are dry in dry January. And that leads me to my last point is that this all writers' room. So get ideas on the table, make spreadsheets with tons of different copy ideas, and let copy lead the way. It's much easier to have an idea and then make something for it than sometimes to retrofit copy onto an image. And so respect to the writers.
Truly, everything is a writers' room. So hit me up. I'm Rion, spelled R-I-O-N. My email address is r@dayjob.work Feel free to drop me a question if you feel so inclined, and thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it. Thanks y'all. [Music]