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Sarah Lent

Chief Marketing Officer 

In this series, we examine how banks can anchor themselves to their value proposition—or ruthlessly carve out new ones to meet demand—to remain relevant in this ever-evolving financial sector. Brand is the most powerful tool financial institutions have to demonstrate their willingness to embrace the technologies reshaping the sector and to communicate their marketplace value.

With this positioning in mind, we’ve identified major trends in the financial industry that paint a picture of its future, and then used these insights to select three lenses for exploration and innovation of brand: ease, personalization, and care. Each lens explores how emerging technologies can be implemented and built upon to create an exciting, relevant brand identity.

[The Future of Money](https://s3.amazonaws.com/vsapartners.com-assets/The_Future_of_Money_-_All_Chapters_0f6b1aae5b.pdf)

The Future of Money

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VSA Partner's CMO Sarah Lent was recently published on Chief Executive. Her article "NFTs: The Great Diving Board" explores how brands can take advantage of NFTs as a rapidly emerging technology to both leap frog into the next iteration of the web, as well as build brand loyalty with the next generation of consumers. 

To read the article, [check it out here.](https://chiefexecutive.net/nfts-and-the-great-diving-board/) 

This piece is a continuation of Sarah's piece "NFTs: Welcome to the Next Fontier," [which is available here.](https://vsapartners.com/news-ideas/nf-ts-welcome-to-the-next-frontier)




Sarah Lent Published on Chief Executive

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VSA Partners is proud to announce a partnership with Rare Air Media and Ripple’s Creator Fund to create and sell an exclusive series of Michael Jordan digital assets from Rare Air’s catalog. 

Rare Air Media—producer of Michael Jordan’s visual autobiography *For the Love of the Game*—is working with VSA Partners to design, develop, and market a range of NFTs on the XRP Ledger blockchain, including a one-of-a-kind selection of digital assets covering former-NBA player Michael Jordan’s life and storied career.
 
Mark Vancil, founder and CEO of Rare Air Media (who was prominently featured in *The Last Dance*, the renowned docuseries on the life and career of Mr. Jordan) is enthusiastic about the effort:
 
“Original, high-quality NFTs are a natural fit for a company that has worked with icons across sport and music for the past 29 years. VSA’s reputation for excellence, innovation, and creative expertise is the perfect partner to make it all happen. I see the digital asset space becoming a valuable revenue stream for our team in the years to come.”
 
Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are creating tremendous opportunities for creators and collectors of art, memorabilia, and other digital assets, as well as strengthening and establishing brand-consumer connections. Embracing NFTs as a marketing opportunity for clients is a natural extension of VSA Partners’ award-winning work. The firm is a premier partner of [Ripple’s Creator Fund](https://ripple.com/ripple-press/ripple-announces-250-million-creator-fund-to-evolve-nft-utility/) by San Francisco-based blockchain technology firm, Ripple. The $250 million fund provides creators with the financial, creative, and technical support needed to explore and craft premium NFTs and other tokenization projects on the XRP Ledger.      
 
“We recognized early on the importance of NFTs as a secure means of growing the brand-building experiences through the continuous innovation of digital assets,” said VSA Partners Chief Marketing Officer, Sarah Lent. “Our partnership with Rare Air is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
 
NFTs utilize a digital ledger. As with cryptocurrencies, the ledger proves identity and ownership of digital assets. The unique security and identification attributes have opened up extraordinary opportunities for creators of digital content to not only assign value to their work, but to profit from it. Blockchain ledgers have been swiftly adopted by collectors, too. That means both sides of digital asset commerce can be confident in the assets they purchase and create. 

“For companies like Rare Air Media, blockchain technology like the XRP Ledger provides a whole new market for their work,” Ms. Lent said. “And they’re not alone. We’ve seen a significant increase from content-based operations asking how NFTs and Ripple’s Creator Fund can help expand their businesses. It’s a fast-growing sector that will change the marketing landscape as we know it today.”
 
Rare Air Media’s first batch of NFTs is expected to hit the market in Q2 2022 and will include a selection of original intimate images of Mr. Jordan, accompanied by his personal thoughts and observations leading up to the photo.  

Said Mr. Vancil about the collection, “It’s virtually impossible to overstate Michael’s impact on global culture. He is as much a fashion icon and business mogul as he is a remarkable athlete. The NFTs provide an intimate glimpse into Michael’s view of his exploits and enduring legacy. My hope is that these works provide true fans with a new angle into what drives Michael’s unusual sense of excellence.” 


VSA Partners is a hybrid brand strategy and design agency. We combine strategic consulting with design-driven experiences to solve business problems and realize the future of a brand. With offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, VSA offers a full range of fully integrated capabilities—branding, advertising, data science and technology—all under one roof. For more than 30 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike, IBM, Molson, and PepsiCo. 

[Rare Air Media](https://rareairmedia.com/) is a publishing and communications company. Rare Air has produced more than two dozen award-winning titles including five New York Times bestsellers with a variety of high -profile individuals, professional organizations, and corporations such as Michael Jordan, Mario Andretti, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Bears, Johnny Cash, Nike, MasterCard International, Hard Rock Cafes International, McDonald’s, and PepsiCo. 


Ripple is a crypto solutions company that transforms how the world moves, manages and tokenizes value to inspire new business models and create more economic opportunity. Our long-term vision is to enable the Internet of Value, where the world moves value like information moves today. Through RippleX, we contribute to accelerating the Internet of Value by inspiring and enabling developers to build solutions that use the XRP Ledger, its native digital asset XRP, and related technologies. For more information on Ripple’s Creator Fund, visit [www.ripple.com/creatorfund.](www.ripple.com/creatorfund. )

**Media Inquiries:**

Valerie Silverman Kerr

VSK Public Relations, LLC

valerie@vsk-publicrelations.com 

(914) 806-6647



VSA Partners Helps Rare Air Media Launch an Intimate Collection of Michael Jordan NFTs

ElizabethHancock

Elizabeth Hancock

Strategy Director 

Strategist Elizabeth Hancock was recently published in AdWeek for her article "Brands Must Rise to the Challenge of Our Latest Industrial Revolution: All Aboard Industry 4.0." This piece explores the latest Industrial Revolution, known as Industry 4.0, and how brands can use purpose-driven branding to drive long-term value and corporate responsibility. 

Check out the piece on [AdWeek](https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/brands-must-rise-to-the-challenge-of-our-latest-industrial-revolution/?ntfData=login) here, or the pdf version below. 

[All Aboard Industry 4.0_ Navigating New Branding Demands](https://s3.amazonaws.com/vsapartners.com-assets/All_Aboard_Industry_4.0__Navigating_New_Branding_Demands_6f359f7aad.pdf)

Elizabeth Hancock Published in Adweek

At VSA, we see NFTs as the next iteration of technology that will shape  brand-consumer relationships. NFTs are the newest frontier where brands can build meaningful experiences and connections with their customers and communities; the first step of the digitization of physical assets that can be monetized, sold, and tracked in the digital world; and a testing ground for the ecosystems and programs that will define the next iteration of the digital age.

In order to help brands leapfrog into this new era, we’re partnering with Ripple, the leading provider of enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions for cross-border payments. Ripple utilizes the open-source, public XRP Ledger, which is fast, low cost, and, most importantly, carbon neutral—using negligible amounts of energy to validate transactions when compared to other blockchains.

Brands looking to jump into a new world of revenue streams, explore different business models, and deepen relationships with their communities can consider taking the first step into this tokenized future through NFTs. 

Want to explore this new world of tokenization and NFTs with us? [Read the full report.](https://s3.amazonaws.com/vsapartners.com-assets/NFTs_WelcometotheNextFrontier_54539c0b67.pdf) 


NFTs: Welcome to the Next Frontier

[Ripple](https://ripple.com/), the leading provider of enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions that are faster, more transparent and more cost-effective, today announced a $250 million fund to provide creators with the financial, creative and technical support needed to explore and craft premium non-fungible token (NFT) and other tokenization projects on the [XRP Ledger](https://xrpl.org/). 

The heightened interest and boom in NFTs globally has introduced new revenue streams and business models while deepening the mainstream’s relationships with the communities, people and things they care about. However, when it comes to creating state-of-the-art NFTs, many creators face barriers to entry–including the fear their NFTs won’t sell and a lack of understanding when it comes to navigating NFT concepts. Developers, meanwhile, are often burdened with high transaction fees and clunky user experiences on marketplaces or platforms. 

While digital art and collectibles have quickly captured public interest and popularity, the utility of NFTs goes far beyond these use cases. By providing creative and technical support to a diverse array of marketplaces, creators, artists and brands, Ripple’s Creator Fund seeks to enable longtail use cases for tokenization—for example, interactive experiences and fractional ownership.

Ripple is teaming up with innovative NFT marketplaces and creative agencies who recognize the potential of these unique tokenized assets and, as part of the launch, will have first access to the fund. Together, Ripple’s Creator Fund and its partners are accelerating the evolution of NFTs while eliminating the pain points associated with crafting compelling projects:

- [Mintable](https://mintable.app/) - “Everything we do at Mintable centers around accessibility, and it’s time that we look at that holistically — creators of all disciplines and backgrounds need to have access to equal opportunities in the space,” said Zach Burks, CEO of Mintable. “There are so many untapped opportunities within the constantly evolving NFT ecosystem, and we’re excited to be deepening our partnership with Ripple to support their Creator Fund in order to encourage greater growth in the industry.” 

- [VSA Partners](https://vsapartners.com/) - “NFTs have been a source of huge excitement for creators, enabling new ways to build communities and meaningful brand equity,” said Sarah Lent, CMO of VSA Partners. “It’s clear that when creators and brands are deliberate with their NFT campaigns, it will have a long-lasting impact on their customers, partners, and the larger community. As a premier partner of the creator fund, VSA can help brands and artists think through the entire ecosystem of brand-building experiences, the community of fans to engage and deploy the strategic guidance and storytelling needed around NFTs to generate brand value.” 

- [mintNFT](https://mintnft.com/) - “mintNFT is honored to be selected as a key partner to build the next-generation NFT 2.0 experience leveraging the XRP Ledger to connect fans with premium brands, content owners, and talent around the world,” said James Sun, founder and CEO of mintNFT. 

“While NFTs have opened the door for a tokenized future, actually navigating these concepts is a different ball game for many,” said Monica Long, GM of RippleX at Ripple. “By starting with marketplaces and creators, our fund seeks to take the guesswork out of NFT projects to unlock unexplored tokenization use cases on the XRP Ledger.”

Minting NFTs on the XRP Ledger will enrich the experience for creators seeking new ways of monetizing their works. For developers, the XRP Ledger’s innate performance advantages—speed, low cost and built-in [royalties](https://xrpl.org/transfer-fees.html#transfer-fees)—make it ideally suited to drive NFT utility at scale, and without the need for Layer-2 protocols. Library support is also available to simplify NFT integrations and bypass direct XRPL development. The XRP Ledger is a [decentralized](https://xrpl.org/decentralized-exchange.html), open-source blockchain. Its built-in [decentralized exchange (DEX)](https://xrpl.org/decentralized-exchange.html) provides fast settlement for tokenized assets of all types–including NFTs—while its Federated Consensus mechanism eliminates gas fees and is 120,000x [more efficient](https://xrpl.org/impact.html) than blockchains that rely on proof-of-work validation. 

For more information on Ripple’s Creator Fund, visit [www.ripple.com/creatorfund](www.ripple.com/creatorfund.)

Ripple is doing for value what the internet did for information: enabling its instant and seamless flow around the world. We call this the Internet of Value (IoV). Using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, Ripple is dedicated to creating powerful gains in financial efficiency, equity and inclusion. In addition, Ripple is developing and enabling the future use cases that will catalyze the new digital economy for governments, businesses and consumers.

Ripple has offices in San Francisco (HQ), New York, London, Mumbai, Singapore, São Paulo, Reykjavík, Washington D.C. and Dubai.


Mintable is a next-generation non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace built on the blockchain. Launched in 2018, Mintable has pushed the NFT industry forward by being the first to design gasless minting, batch minting and royalties, empowering artists and creators to monetize their work via NFTs. Mintable’s gas-free minting option allows the everyday person to get involved with NFTs without any prior knowledge in coding or upfront cost of minting an asset — a great way for everyone to get into crypto. In 2021, Mintable announced the backing of a list of high-caliber investors including renowned venture capitalist and television personality, Mark Cuban, Sound Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, and TIME Ventures, the investment fund for Marc Benioff. To date, Mintable has sold and auctioned works by Grammy Award-winning artists, 20th-century avant garde artists, and various high-profile artists and celebrities.

mintNFT is a premium member-based marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFT) focused on bridging fan experiences with licensed content, brands, and talent. mintNFT integrates social, gamification, and a new patent-pending authentication process for NFTs. mintNFT makes collecting NFTs a fun and engaging experience and converts casual fans into collectors, creators and partners. mintNFT provides an unprecedented social experience for users with unique features such as exclusive digital events, NFT live auctions, and fan-generated campaigns all within a dynamic, interactive, and gamified platform. It also includes an integrated secondary marketplace allowing users to buy, sell, and trade NFTs.

VSA Partners is a hybrid brand strategy and design agency with a 40-year history of solving complex business problems. We deliver design-driven experiences that perform in market, realizing the future of a brand for some of the world’s most respected and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike, IBM, Robinhood and Affirm. Our approach hinges upon deep collaboration with our clients to identify, prioritize and convert individual interactions into a positive impact on long-term value in a highly transactional and noisy world. Global by trade, but unapologetically midwestern at heart, an intrinsic desire to help fuels our pursuit of solutions of substance. Amplifying brands — not to add to the noise — but to find a voice that rises above it. VSA Partners. Where brands breakthrough. 


**For inquiries:**

Sarah Lent
 
slent@vsapartners.com

VSA Joins Ripple on $250M Creator Fund

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For VSA employees as well as those they recruit, the agency is adopting a long-term hybrid model that allows people to define their location and way of working. This means that VSA employees can work from anywhere in the United States—home, office or any place in between. Working from anywhere gives staff the option to find time to work alone, join others for office-based collaboration, or meet up as needed for small-group moments and client meetings. The Agency is also hiring with geographic “neutrality”—pursuing the best talent wherever it may live. 

Aaron Heltsmith, VP of Talent Experience, states,"We think having a workplace option matters most these days: Employees benefit from human interaction and the need for a change in scenery from time to time. And VSA benefits from a diversity of experiences and perspectives that come from seeing and participating in the larger world."

In this hybrid strategy, VSA offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco are transitioning to a flexible, accessible network of workspace hubs for employees to use as needed for work and interaction with colleagues. For more information, visit the [VSA Careers page](https://vsapartners.com/careers). 


VSA Partners Announce Recruit From Everywhere & Work From Anywhere

VSA Partners, the hybrid brand strategy and design agency, has led the brand transformation of AMRI, a leading contract drug manufacturing organization, emphasizing its ability to take drug development ‘from curiosity to cure.’ That’s the core positioning and tagline VSA developed as it’s transformed the company to Curia. The new rebranding effort rolled out last month. AMRI, which began as Albany Molecular Research, Inc. (AMRI) in 1991, tapped VSA Partners to handle the assignment, which the agency turned around in a little over six months. Its brief involved simultaneous strategy and design processes that addressed
naming, messaging, brand identity, a website overhaul, environmental branding, sales enablement, social media and advertising. “Given the importance and emerging challenges of scaling drug discovery and manufacturing today, this was an exciting project for everyone at VSA,” said Joe Nio, head of strategy and analytics for VSA. “We tapped our Promise to Performance™ methodology to discover unmet needs where the industry wasn’t serving customers fully and helped identify unique segments within Curia’s target audience. The results, we believe, position Curia well for today’s fast-changing and demanding pharmaceutical landscape.” For development of the new name, Curia, VSA relied on its proprietary naming process, said Mike Walsh, VSA’s Client Engagement lead. The origin was an early Roman word that means ‘a gathering of minds.’ “It has a lyrical quality that also alludes to the promise of medicine,” Walsh noted. The new logo utilizes a stylized molecular icon to form the dot in the lower case ‘i’ in Curia, which links the mark to the previous AMRI brand identity. “In a category where playing it safe has led to a sea of sameness among competitors, we created a bold expression system that balances scientific expertise with respect, and compassion for the human lives we impact,” said VSA Partners Thom Wolfe, Executive Creative Director. “What impressed us about VSA from the start was their ability to quickly get smart on a complex business,” said Kerry Hutchings, Head of Global Marketing at Curia. “The combination of strategic thinking and creative execution has helped set Curia up for success.”


**CREDITS:**

Agency: VSA Partners, Chicago, New York, San Francisco
Joe Nio, Associate Partner, Strategy Director
Chandni Shah, Strategy Director, Media
Ryan Monroe, Strategy Director, Data Analytics
Linda Vo, Strategist, Media &amp; Analytics
Thom Wolfe, Associate Partner, Creative Director
Sarah Trent, Associate Creative Director
Cameron Leberecht, Associate Creative Director
Andy Blankenburg, Partner, Writing
Tarek El-Mofty, Associate Partner, Creative Services Director
Bryan Haney, Associate Director, Motion Producer
Thomas Horne, Motion Editor, Director
Melanie Trombley, Art Producer
Nick Lo Bue, Associate Partner, Digital
Jehan Cowan, Creative Director, Digital
Alberto Cristancho, Director, Development
Bill Maday, Creative Director, Writing
Mike Walsh, Associate Partner, Client Engagement
Susan Pfiefer, Associate Partner, Project Management
Sarah Kuhl, Senior Project Manager
Kate Barr, Project Manager

Curia, formerly AMRI, is a leading contract research, development and manufacturing organization providing products and services from R&D through commercial manufacturing to pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical customers. Curia’s 3,100 employees at 21 locations across the U.S., Europe and Asia help its customers advance from curiosity to cure. Learn more at [CuriaGlobal.com](CuriaGlobal.com.)


[VSA Partners](vsapartners.com) is a hybrid brand strategy and design agency. We combine strategic consulting with design-driven experiences to solve business problems and realize the future of a brand. With offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, VSA offers a full range of fully integrated capabilities — branding, advertising, data science and technology — all under one roof. For more than 30 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike, IBM, Molson, and PepsiCo.

VSA Partners leads AMRI brand transformation to Curia

Curia_VSA_Brand_Snapshot

A new integrated global campaign for Mānuka Health New Zealand serves to raise awareness for the many natural benefits of its rare Mānuka honey line.
 
Launching this month, this first global campaign by VSA Partners for the brand looks to educate consumers on the complex differences and natural potency of Mānuka honey, and position Mānuka Health NZ as a supportive partner of those on the lookout for ways to improve their health and wellbeing. 
 
The campaign, featuring bold typography and an optimistic palette of highly saturated warms and cools, will deploy in cross-device display ads, leveraging custom data segments, mobile interstitials, social media, online video and digital out-of-home to communicate how Mānuka Heath NZ’s natural Mānuka honey line offers more than just a way to sweeten tea and toast. 
 
Inspirational copy lines such as “A Spoonful of Seize the Day”, “Nature Up, Game On”, “A Honey As Potent as Your Potential” “Stack Your Wellness Bench with New Zealand’s finest”  and “A Daily Dose of Get It Done” and “Meet Your New Wellness Wingman” convey motivating, confident yet relatable messaging on how the brand’s natural Mānuka honey can help consumers as part of their daily health and wellness regimen.
 
“This isn’t just any honey, so we wanted the creative to have a look and tone that reflects how great this product makes you feel,” said Evan Thompson, Creative Director, Writer, VSA Partners, based in Chicago.  “The bright colors, layering and bold type all help to give Mānuka Health NZ an ownable point of view in the crowded health and wellness space.”
 
“The power of Mānuka Health NZ honey is in its natural potency, and this campaign is about giving people the confidence to embrace their true nature and live to their full potential,” said Anya Saikkonen, Global Marketing Manager, Mānuka Health NZ.  “We are delighted to work with VSA Partners to help educate consumers on the benefits of our special natural product in a vibrant and approachable way.”
 
The special honey is made from the nectar of the native Mānuka plant, and highly valued for its distinctive natural properties.  It’s also rare, originating only from New Zealand and produced just a few weeks a year — weather permitting — when the Mānuka plant is in flower.
 
Mānuka honey is a delicate resource that requires careful handling and processing to ensure its special natural properties are retained during the extraction and packing process. Unlike most suppliers, Mānuka Health NZ owns the full process from the hive to jar, from its 20,000 beehives to its own extraction and processing facility and in-house quality testing laboratory.
 
The campaign is the first global work for the brand by VSA Partners since the agency won the account in January.  Additional strategic design and communications initiatives are in the works for roll out later this year.

**CREDITS:**
 
Agency: VSA Partners, Chicago, New York, San Francisco
John Sheehan, Partner, Client Engagement
Kim George, Senior Project Manager
Joe Nio, Associate Partner, Strategy Director
Marisa Rondinelli, Associate Strategy Director
Chandni Shah, Strategy Director, Media
Linda Vo, Strategist, Media & Analytics
Josh Witherspoon, Associate Partner, Creative Director
Chrystine Witherspoon, Associate Partner, Creative Director
Evan Thompson, Creative Director, Writer
Gustavo Delgado, Designer
Tarek El-Mofty, Associate Partner, Creative Services Director
Thomas Horne, Motion Editor, Director
Melanie Trombley, Art Producer
 
Production: The Voorhes, Motion Photographers, Austin
Adam Voorhes, director, photographer
Robin Finlay, Stylist


[Mānuka Health’s](https://www.manukahealth.co.nz/en-us) purpose is to ‘re-nature people’, for the betterment of health, communities and the planet. Inspired by the knowledge that New Zealand bee products hold special and unique health properties, we are driven by a desire to use science to understand and harness these unique natural products, share their potential and help re-nature our world.  Today Mānuka Health is made up of a growing team of dedicated specialists (about 1.5 billion bees and 140 humans), who carefully craft and nurture our Mānuka honey, Propolis, Royal Jelly and New Zealand Gourmet honey to capture the living energy of New Zealand nature.


[VSA Partners](https://vsapartners.com) is a hybrid brand strategy and design agency. We combine strategic consulting with design-driven experiences to solve business problems and realize the future of a brand. With offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, VSA offers a full range of fully integrated capabilities — branding, advertising, data science and technology — all under one roof. For more than 30 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike, IBM, Molson, and PepsiCo.


VSA launches new integrated global campaign for Mānuka Health New Zealand

ManukaHealth_CaseStudy_Lifestyle

michael_girts.jpg

Michael Girts

Strategy Director

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) released a report that’s a little frightening for agency people like me: it says 57% of global companies have brought creative in-house.

The report also finds that three-fourths of internal studios were created within the past five years, which means the in-housing trend is accelerating.

What’s an agency to do?

Well, we can fight the wave—or we can ride it.

Truth is, VSA has been riding the wave for a while. That’s probably because we work with so many big tech companies. Google, Salesforce and LinkedIn each launched their own in-house agencies more than a decade ago.

Here are a few ways we plug in:

An in-house creative studio of 50 to 100 people is a lot of firepower—but some of these global tech companies have 200,000+ employees. Developing brand ideas is one thing; making sure the brand scales consistently across every global business unit is quite another.

We partner with our clients to design brand systems and develop guidelines that help practitioners of all skill levels, ensuring the brand shows up in a consistent and compelling way.

Google-Cloud-Symbol

Most of our big tech partners have absurd amounts of user data. When it comes time to deliver a product offering to a new audience, they need a fast way to understand an entirely different 
group of people.

VSA has an in-house analytics team dedicated to helping companies find their highest value target, deeply understand their needs and deliver products and messages that authentically fill those needs. Our team of data scientists and brand strategists work as a blended team, so our research outputs are actionable for creative development.

Linkedin-Logo

Ask any writer: sometimes, you just get stuck. For many of our clients, we function as a supplementary idea engine. When they’re having trouble cracking a problem, they know they can bring in VSA for a rapid collaborative, creative sprint. The fact that we’re not in-house means we’re better positioned to deliver outside-the-box thinking. In these instances, we like to say we’re a “fresh arm out of the bullpen.”


Salesforce-logo

One more stat from that WFA study that I keep thinking about: 40% of companies allow external agencies to pitch against their internal agency.

That means at least 40% of these companies are inviting agencies to fight the tidal wave of creative in-housing.

We don’t see any reason to pick a fight. Instead, we’ve designed an agency (and a west coast presence) custom-built to collaborate, iterate and solve problems together.

Why resist the wave when we can have more success—and fun—riding it?


1. **Listen hard.** Seek to understand the challenge. Ask a ton of questions.
2. **Align on the problem.** A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.
3. **Check egos at the door.**It’s about the work. Every idea is a shared idea.
4. **Know when to divide and conquer.** Solutions rarely happen in a crowded Zoom.
5. **Generate from abundance.** Bring lots of ideas. Edit later.
6. **Build before breaking down.** Find what’s right about it and add to it.
7. **Check in a lot.** Have tough conversations. Go on the journey together.
8. **Practice radical empathy.** Give the benefit of the doubt. Assume the best.
9. **Learn as you go.** Mistakes are helpful if you recognize them. Debriefs matter.
10. **Make time for fun.** Get personal. The best teams know and like each other.

Surf’s Up

surfing_1b-43 (1)

VSA Partners, the hybrid brand strategy and design and communications agency headquartered in Chicago, has appointed Sarah Lent as its Chief Marketing Officer. The announcement was made by VSA President Anne-Marie Rosser. 

Sarah is a veteran marketing executive with over 20 years’ experience in developing business solutions and unlocking growth opportunities for clients through brand, digital innovation, design, communications and media. Lent will spearhead VSA’s growth efforts, including business development, marketing, media relations, brand leadership and content creation.

A graduate of the University of Virginia, Lent has worked across 4 continents and brings to her position at VSA a deep passion for taking emerging technologies coupled with world-class creativity in order to contextualize them in the real world. She is fueled by looking for the leap-frog moments of change and taking clients on the journey—something she has quickly proven in her short tenure at VSA by the partnership she secured with Ripple as the premiere creative partner for their $250m NFT Creators Fund. 

Sarah has held a number of senior positions at agencies all over the world, including running growth across the US for Essence, the performance media agency that’s part of Group M, and for the EMEA region while at R/GA, a leading global digital innovation, design and communications agency. 

Prior to R/GA, Lent spent seven years with Interbrand, serving in client-facing and leadership roles in the UK, South Africa, and the US. Over the course of her career she has led teams working on a range of global brands across categories, including Disney, Airbnb, Westbrook, Adobe, LVMH, Ikea, Siemens, Diageo and more. 

Lent states, “We live in a noisy and highly transactional world. Every second, a different voice urges brands to pivot to a new type of content, dive headfirst into emerging forms of media, and monetize each trend while simultaneously creating the next one. Brands can no longer compete on convenience or ease of use—technology is the equalizer, not the differentiator. This is why I am so excited to be joining VSA. As a hybrid brand strategy, design and communications agency, VSA has the unique capability to help brands stand out from the clutter by creating better human experiences at key moments of impact, which in turn yield loyalty and social capital. VSA approaches each challenge with the rigor of a management consulting practice, coupled with world-class storytelling and design, ensuring everything that we deliver is applicable and contextualized in the real world, delivering substantial impact for the long-term. Brands don’t need help making more noise. They need a partner, like VSA, to help them rise above it. “ 

With a strong commitment to social causes and activism, Lent most recently served on the Board of Directors for Infinite Family for seven years, an organization built to connect teens across townships in South Africa with video mentors working to integrate confidence and self-reliance as they prepare for their lives as young adults and beyond. She resides in Marin County. 

VSA Partners is a hybrid brand strategy and design agency with a 40-year history of solving complex business problems. We deliver design-driven experiences that perform in market, realizing the future of a brand for some of the world’s most respected and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike, IBM, Robinhood and Affirm. Our approach hinges upon deep collaboration with our clients to identify, prioritize and convert individual interactions into a positive impact on long-term value in a highly transactional and noisy world. Global by trade, but unapologetically midwestern at heart, an intrinsic desire to help fuels our pursuit of solutions of substance. Amplifying brands — not to add to the noise — but to find a voice that rises above it. VSA Partners. *Where brands breakthrough.*


VSA Partners Appoints Sarah Lent as Chief Marketing Officer

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Jessica Sochol

When local brands are presented with the opportunity to go national, conflicting emotions can arise. On the one hand, there&rsquo;s enormous potential for growth. On the other, there&rsquo;s the very real fear of losing what has been for many companies most integral to their success—the feeling of soul and connection to their founding communities.  
 
Investing companies may also wonder if an acquired brand will uphold its potential in a broader market. What makes some companies falter, and others soar?  
 
When we distill all the attributes of companies that successfully navigate the path from local brand to international player, we see the same factor appear again and again: **a clear, validated brand promise.** Specifically, this means a succinct articulation of the unique value you provide, and intentional, well-designed delivery on this promise during each moment and interaction with your consumer base.

Whether you&rsquo;re launching a brand overhaul or performing routine brand maintenance as you prepare for your place on the national or international stage, the necessary insight you need to succeed has two timeframes: immediate, and future.  
 
First, you need to ensure that you&rsquo;re bringing in audiences across your strategic planning, whether white space mapping quantitative studies, audience needs analyses, or qualitative ethnographic accounts. Know who your customers are, what they want, and how they feel you&rsquo;re currently delivering.  
 
Second, consider how your current brand, category, and audience may shift in the coming months or years. Brands that succeed as they scale invoke both adaptability and relatability, which requires constant social listening, industry awareness, and internal reflection. 

It also bears mentioning that learning happens both ways: the acquirer must respect the new audience and get to know them, too (that&rsquo;s what you&rsquo;re buying, right?). It&rsquo;s not just the small brand scaling up, but also the big brand thinking local or small.  

Once you&rsquo;ve examined the current and future iterations of your strategy, don&rsquo;t be afraid to change what should. You have one chance to make the right first impression, and holding on to aspects of your business that no longer serve you is a death knell for innovation.  
 
When VSA Partners teamed up with Mack Trucks, they had been acquired by Volvo and were struggling to maintain relevance in the marketplace. We were tasked with modernizing this American icon without compromising its heritage.  
 
Through field research, VSA found that Mack&rsquo;s current focus on logistics was having a negative impact on its consumer perception—audiences found the brand impersonal. With this insight, VSA launched a campaign to build a more meaningful, direct relationship between customer and truck. We communicated the brand&rsquo;s sense of independence and elevated its audiences&rsquo; commitment to a greater purpose through a series of activations from dealer marketing to events to broader advertising. From consumer insight to implementation, our strategic positioning propelled Mack Trucks back into the relevancy by communicating its longstanding value and leaning on the emotion and humanity of the people behind the brand.

Mack-portrait-truck

As you scale, the one thing that shouldn&rsquo;t expand is your brand promise. A brand promise should come from an understanding of what&rsquo;s true about the brand as well the community. The tighter and more focused the brand promise is, the easier it is for your brand to be a filter for everything you do (keeping that spark you had from day one).  
 
It&rsquo;s tempting to say more as you reach more people, enter new markets, or launch new products. But the more you say, the less people retain, and the more you water down your message by trying to be everything to everyone. When we work with brands who feel they have lost their way, very often we find that brand over-communication is the culprit—their core promise has been lost in a sea of messaging. So once you have your core promise, stick with it and leverage it thoughtfully. As you activate the brand, consider the role of each touchpoint, communication, and asset, both on their own and in coordination together. Each piece should reflect and deliver the brand promise. 
 
Our work with Goose Island began after the company was acquired by AB InBev, and the brand was grappling with how to maintain its Chicago-founded identity as it prepared to launch nationally. Afterall, in the craft beer world the perception of a brand as &ldquo;big&rdquo; can damage its reputation. Through market research, we found that Goose Island consumers were loyal, but considered themselves &ldquo;tryers.&rdquo; Rather than fight this common sentiment among craft beer drinkers, we embraced it with the new tagline: &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t need to be the only beer you drink. We just want to be the best beer you drink.&rdquo; We also worked closely with Goose Island to infuse their urban heritage throughout their branding and packaging. Because the design felt intentional and true to its spirit, we were able to use national and local campaigns to introduce Goose Island and its brand to new consumers while keeping it grounded in its founding sensibility. Authentic urban heritage put Goose Island on the map, and helped the brand scale without losing its soul.  
 
While some brands undertake this connection with their roots from the beginning, others realize that they lost it somewhere along the way. When we worked with Converse, their brand was struggling to maintain relevance in the shoe industry. Competitors and consumers alike had become obsessed with technology and performance—two areas where Converse lagged. After they were acquired by Nike, the brand was looking for a relaunch to establish a relationship with the next generation, and to remind consumers of their place in the market. Rather than try and broaden the brand message and make Converse into something it was not, we helped Converse &ldquo;rediscover their Converse-ness&rdquo; by focusing the brand promise as the true voice of the optimistic rebels. These optimistic rebels are the non-comforming creators and change-makers who seek self expression and authenticity above all else. This simple idea was distributed across its entire portfolio, unified as a rally cry across product design, retail, and a global market. The impact was immediate: Converse became the fastest growing brand in the Nike portfolio, moving from $500M to $5B in six years.

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A brand promise is not just a slogan, it&rsquo;s an actionable, tangible way of operating that should be infused into every touchpoint and experience a consumer has with a brand. A website can and should feel like the brand as much as talking to a sales rep or reading a CSR report. And for Goose Island and Manuka Honey, across messaging to brand identity, it all came down to creating a sense of place. 

Our work with Manuka Health, a leading New Zealand natural health company specializing in bee products, evoked these strong identifiers through a refreshed branding campaign. Manuka Health was named from the single tree species bees forage upon, and competitors were using the &ldquo;manuka&rdquo; name to pull customers away. The company needed to establish itself as the authentic, real deal, and a leader in its category. We repositioned Manuka Health as the &ldquo;co-pilot&rdquo; on the customer&rsquo;s wellness journey, and brought the idea of re-naturing: the benefit of connecting with nature to bring out your best. This collaborative spirit was connected visually with a bright and energetic visual system that contrasted with the muted, sleepy tones of other brands in the category, and paired with a relatable, bold voice to increase approachability and capture attention. The visual system and sense of identity was so successful, we brought it to Manuka Health&rsquo;s biggest markets in the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany, communicating the message in each market to fit the culture without losing the common thread.

ManukaUS_EnglishJar

**Ready for launch**

While scaling up is the goal for many brands today, the risks of losing that original spark and authenticity are real and do erode reputation over time. Scaling while retaining the identity and relevance that made the brand successful to begin with is possible. It requires foresight and perseverance, a commitment to the principles and touchpoints that made the company successful, as well as a willingness to embrace new ways of being. The more you can stay committed and true to your promise, the more successful you&rsquo;ll be at maintaining that spark and protecting your core as you grow.

Scaling with soul

Spread of Goose Island Bourbon County bottles

goose-bourbon-bottles

VSA Partners is very excited to share a collection of short essays on culture and career from the incredible Asian-American and Pacific Islander community within VSA. Through their background and experiences, these members bring an irreplaceable perspective to the work and VSA community. These are their reflections on how their culture has impacted their careers and the way that they work, as well as a celebration of the heritage that has made them who they are today. 

“This is your Tita Bella and your Tito Rolly, we went to school together,” my mom told me, as I met the open smiles and warm embraces of complete strangers. “And this is their daughter, your cousin Rhonda.” 

In the span of a few breaths, I met a new uncle, aunt, and cousin...none of whom were related to me by blood. 

The Philippines, like many Asian cultures, has a longstanding nomenclature that weaves together a respect for elders and inclusivity. Labels like Tita or Tito (Aunt or Uncle), Kuya or Ate (big brother or sister), Manong or Manang (older male or female, two generations older), aren’t reserved for blood relatives. In a way, the blood relationship takes a second seat to a desire to show respect and promote a sense of belonging. 

For me, this approach crossed over language and racial barriers, too. Friends of my parents who weren’t Chinese or Filipino became my Uncle Richard, Aunt Judy, Grandma Sophie. When I was introduced to someone in this way, it was far more likely that we had no common ancestry—despite that, I was expected to treat this person like family.

The wide use of these terms has taught me that we are honored and bound by all of our relationships, both chosen and familial. The simple act of calling someone “Auntie” creates an atmosphere of familiarity, and an obligation to treat this person with courtesy and affection. It reminds us that there are direct and indirect connections to others that deserve acknowledgment. It cultivates community and broadens our perspective from “me” to “we.” It instills a belief that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.

This sense of relatedness has influenced my professional career tremendously, in various ways. For one, acknowledging someone’s background and shared connections builds trust and inclusivity, which aids in collaboration. Also, it naturally creates an “us versus the problem” dynamic instead of “me versus you,” which facilitates finding workable outcomes. And lastly, it fosters an underlying sense of optimism about others, whether we know them or not—that despite what lies on the surface, we have common ground.  

**—Carmelita (Cat) Tiu, Chinese-Filipino-American**

Senior Counsel 


Many are familiar with the basic greeting of "你好 (ni hao)" as a way to say "hello" in Chinese. However, the phrases "你吃饭了吗 (ni chi fan le ma)/吃了吗 (chi le ma)?" also serve as common greetings amongst friends. Literally translated, they mean "have you eaten?"—and, to some, this may seem like an oddly specific or nosy way to greet someone, but in fact it is a way to show care. Like many other cultures, Asian and beyond, food often plays a central role in how it connects people. The association of food with emotions, health, and general wellbeing are deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. So, when used, you aren't actually asking someone if they have eaten or not, instead, you are asking them "how are you?" and making sure they are doing well. 

This connection with food and care extends beyond a simple greeting. Growing up, whenever I had friends over for a meal, they would stare in awe at the "feast" my mom prepared. And, they would have no choice but to leave with food to take home—my mom would insist on it. This form of generosity has always been a part of my life, from having food continuously shoveled on my plate or in my bowl by my mother, to getting five-plus boxes of 60-count rice krispie treats sent to me by my dad from Costco over the span of the quarantine. And even if I’m not hungry, already full and not left for wanting, the food must be accepted wholly. I suspect I am not alone in experiencing these acts of love in excess as a child of Asian immigrants. Food is our unwritten love language.

I've often found myself carrying out the same behavior with others even in a professional environment. There are literal things like ordering food for everyone if we are working late or randomly treating coworkers to a coffee or sweets. But, this mentality has also extended to my own managerial and mentorial style. It has influenced how generous I am with my own time, my interest in how my teams are doing, beyond just completing "work tasks," and if they are metaphorically well-fed. And, if the last year has taught me anything, it's how important it is to ask each other and ourselves "have you eaten?"

**—YanYan Zhang, Chinese American**

Associate Partner, Executive Creative Director

Resourcefulness can be defined by how one finds a solution based on what’s in front of them—what they can create, what answer they can find, what discovery is buried under all this information.

Filipino mothers are resourceful beings at their core—nothing goes to waste, everything gets reimagined. Dad’s old white t-shirt went missing? Mom cut it into cleaning rags. Leftover rice from dinner? Turned into fried rice by morning. Clothes don’t fit? Pass it down to the younger cousins, who will eventually pass it down to even younger cousins.

Resourcefulness also goes hand-in-hand with being a go-getter and independent. To this day I tell myself, “Look with your eyes, not with your mouth.” I got this a lot as a kid: 

“Mom, have you seen my ballet slippers?” 
“Look in your room.” 
“I’m not seeing it anywhere.” 
“Look with your eyes, Megan, not with your mouth.” 

Be resourceful and figure it out. The answer is in there somewhere—whether it’s finding slippers or tracking down important assets and making sense of readouts, reports, and audits. The answer (or clues that get you asking the right questions to land that answer) are in there. I definitely learned from my grandmother and my mother and their immigrant stories that you can get pretty far on your own, especially when you have to. Push the limits and then see if you can go a little further, learn a little more, have that breakthrough. And, when you’ve done all in your power, then we can open it up for questions. 

**— Meg Rux, Filipino American**

Content Strategist


In the Filipino culture, young children are taught to greet their elders with a gesture called mano po. The literal translation for this is, “your hand, please.” This gesture entails taking the elder’s hand and placing it on his or her own forehead to express honor and respect for the elder. This is a gesture that I still practice today with aunts and uncles. When my Lolo (grandfather) lived with our family, I recall greeting him daily with mano. 

I also recall my brothers and I taking turns accompanying our Lolo for his walks around the block so that he got his daily exercise. We did this as our parents taught us it was part of our shared responsibility to care for our Lolo’s well-being. Filipinos are known for being wonderful caretakers of the elderly. This is because the idea of respecting and caring for the elderly is deeply rooted in Filipino values, as it is similarly with other Asian cultures. 

Being raised to respect and care for our elders has truly impacted the work that I do and the way that I work. As someone that works in customer and user experience, empathy plays a large role in our work. Respect and consideration of others’ needs was always something that felt very natural to me. These values have allowed me to anticipate and accommodate those needs through the experiences that I help envision and create as a designer. The mindset of humility has permitted me to meet users, clients, and colleagues where they are and effectively understand their pain points and learn from them. I owe a great deal of my success as a designer because of these values that have been firmly instilled in me.

**— Jehan Cowan, Filipino American**

Creative Director, Digital Design

A common experience for Asian Americans was, during potlucks or family gatherings, all the children would perform an informal recital of their latest songs on piano, violin, or another instrument for everyone’s enjoyment. As I was mediocre at best in piano, I would go first as the opening act to warm up the crowd and set the bar low for the other kids to surpass. My older sister, on the other hand, was the headliner who would go last and close the show to rousing applause and envy from other parents.

I quickly learned that this did not happen by accident. My sister would spend countless hours practicing and honing her skills. She continuously challenged herself and was rewarded with first chair in numerous orchestras as a result. Although music was not my forte, I observed you must put in the time, effort, and be willing to go the extra mile to truly excel at your goal.

This is especially true in the professional world. It does not matter what discipline or practice you are a part of—both VSA and our clients expect our finest on every project, task, or assignment. As such, I take pride in our work as I know we have gone the extra mile for our clients. The high expectations we set for ourselves will be the reason we are the headliners and not the opening act for our clients and the industry. 

**— Ming Young, Taiwanese American**

Revenue Accounting Manager


My Asian Culture and My Career

VSA_blog_illos_4d-43

VSA's latest work with Manuka Health is featured in The Drum. The article takes a look at Manuka Health's global campaign to help honey stand out in a crowded category as the appetite for immunity-building natural products sees a huge surge. Click [here](https://www.thedrum.com/news/2021/05/18/how-manuka-health-rewriting-its-honey-brand-s-playbook) to read the full article.

Integrated global campaign for Manuka Health featured in The Drum

Manuka-news-article leadspace

Should brands join the Clubhouse? Hear from VSA Strategy Director Jessica Sochol in the latest ANA Magazine article on brands participating in the new social platform. Jessica shares her point of view on riding the changing waves of social media and identifying which is right for your brand. Click [here](https://www.ana.net/magazines/show/id/ana-2021-05-should-brands-join-the-clubhouse) to read the full article.

Jessica works at the center of brand strategy and behavioral change, where she helps her clients to successfully navigate major inflection points — shape-shifting industries, emerging technology, new audiences, M&A. She’s led strategy for IBM Quantum, Consumer Reports, Bloomberg and more. Jess spends her time in New York City and Pittsburgh, PA. 

Jessica Sochol quoted in ANA Magazine

anne-marie-rosser-1524

Anne-Marie Rosser

President

We are entering a new age of brand importance. Companies today face endless channel opportunities and customer journey interactions—all at a lightning fast pace, and at a time when the traditional advertising model has been upended. Though this was already happening, the past year has amplified it tenfold, prompting companies to increase the velocity with which they implement digital strategies to meet the market’s needs. Companies are conflicted on where to focus their attention, and how to build a brand that is flexible enough to encompass all customer experiences without losing its sense of purpose. It’s a lot to take in, and requires a strategy adaptable and resilient enough to meet the challenges ahead.

In this environment, a hybrid approach to brand building can be a secret weapon. In our conversations with clients, we stress that velocity isn’t the issue—it’s whether the brand has embraced a hybrid approach in order to be more unified and effective.


All the technology, data, insights, channels and media in the world do not guarantee successful brands or effective marketing. In a commoditized world, brands are the vehicle to drive differentiation. But when agencies create brands, there tends to be a lot of focus on the delivery channels, so talk of “programmatic”, “performance”, “omni-channel” and other terms begin to dominate the conversation. A lot of this is the direct result of a permanent change to traditional advertising, and the rise of brand as the center point of the conversation. But you don’t see much on what it takes to create a resilient, engaging and effective brand. The realm of brand-building is too often seen as a logo exercise. But great brands are business assets, and as such, they need to be built from a business lens. 

Enter the Hybrid model.

The hybrid model focuses on solving a duality in every brand to ensure its success; *What is the business problem* and *what is the human problem?* When you solve for this duality, you can create brands that drive more valuable human experiences and catalyze growth. This is the next frontier of branding, and few are solving for it well.

We find that a lot of companies approach brand building from a singular audience or product perspective, or as mentioned earlier, from a channel view. Those that do so risk creating a brand that won’t have the relevance it needs to be successful. It may look beautiful, and the creative may be superlative—but if it doesn’t fundamentally help solve a business problem through a human lens, it’s not likely to resonate.

As a hybrid brand consultancy, we spend a lot of time partnering with our clients to ensure we’ve defined the business problem accurately, and really interrogated it. Is the business issue market share, is it product parity, is it lack of awareness, or a fragmented set of audiences? Honing in on the metrics that will actually drive the business helps us to understand how to best leverage the brand as a true business asset. We can then evolve or calibrate the brand to better deliver on that business goal. Sometimes we have a general idea, and we really use research to fundamentally dive in and test our hypothesis around the business problem itself. Other times, it’s not entirely clear why the brand isn’t delivering on the business intent. In those instances we work to understand what the perception gap is in the brand’s core promise vs. its market performance. 

And that’s where solving for the human problem comes into play—the second part of the hybrid approach. Once you’ve identified the business problem to solve, you start to look at your target audience through that lens, and it may change what levers you need to use to engage them. We all know that marketing can’t deliver differentiated experiences if you don’t understand your audience, their mindset, and the most important moments of impact for them. Consumers are less loyal, have higher expectations of personalization, and need brands to meet them on their terms. Once you have the business problem identified, you can go back and really understand the audience as it relates to that business issue. We seek to understand audiences holistically, as people, at the human level, which then helps us to identify all of the areas where the brand needs to show up, but more importantly, also the areas that are of highest value. Not all brand experiences are equal. 

When we solve for both the business problem and the human problem we design brand experiences to ensure that each interaction can stand on its own, but also fit into a broader ecosystem of interactions aligned to a brand’s core promise. Integration makes the brand story complete, preferences enduring, and business outcomes stronger.


It’s not just a hybrid model that helps to craft more effective brands. There’s an ongoing effort to break down silos in agencies and enable talent to really bring a fuller skillset to the table. It plays out at both the business and the cultural level. In our industry today you see ongoing agency consolidation, you see big consulting firms, traditionally focused on business transformation scooping up brand and marketing firms because they want to tap into the hybrid brand model. All of this in the quest for the right hybrid talent. 

At VSA, we’ve always had a hybrid sensibility. We like generalists and specialists alike, because ultimately we care the most about getting to the right idea. When you’re working in a hybrid model, your designers think like strategists, your writers think like designers, and so on. People tap into more of themselves, and it better fulfills their curiosity. They can major and minor at the same time, if you will. Experience has taught me that you’re able to really get the best talent out of your people by letting them bring their fullest selves to work. Egos get checked at the door, and good ideas can come from everywhere. I think this is not just where the future of brands is headed, but the future of work as well. It’s a cultural shift, and it’s one that is going to accelerate this new era of branding.


Getting more mileage out of your brand with a hybrid approach

hybridimagery

Can an AI own a patent? A new legal drama will soon decide. As AI continues to think for itself, VSA Creative Director Jeff Schulz looks at the arguments around whether it is capable of creating patentable inventions independent of humans, and what this means for brand consultants and creatives. Check out his latest piece in [The Drum](https://bit.ly/3g9gogv).

Jeff has a wide range of writing and creative experience at brand, digital and creative agencies. His clients have included Capital One, CVS, Fidelity, Google, IBM, Mastercard, Nike, SAP, Subaru, Verizon, Walmart and others. Jeff’s writing has appeared in AdAge, Recode, The Drum and VentureBeat and he was an early contributor to Wired magazine.

Jeff Schulz—piece featured on The Drum

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Jeff Schulz

Creative Director

fay-scott

Fay Scott

The relationship between humans and machines has always been one fraught with tension, starting with a knee-jerk reaction of primal fear, reaching a plateau of efficiency and healthy dose of skepticism as it reaches mass adoption, and then a disillusionment of its benefits as it becomes pervasive and we in turn become either jaded by or complacent with the impact it has on our lives and our businesses.

As the relationship evolves over the adoption lifecycle of a new and emerging technology, so must the brand strategy….

- In the innovators/early adopters phase, a B2B technology brand needs to adopt an **EDUCATE, EMBOLDEN,** and **EMPOWER **strategy.
- In the majority phases, a brand needs to adopt a strategy of **RADICAL DIFFERENTIATION** through positioning that captures a true white space opportunity supported by category-defying **VERBAL **and **VISUAL** language.
- In the late/laggards phases, a brand needs to adopt a **CHALLENGER** mindset.

bell_curve1

**The problem to solve: **You’re not just selling your product, you’re selling the industry

**The challenge:** Combatting fear of trying something new

**The VSA approach: **The 3 Es: Educate, Embolden, Empower with your brand’s Value Stack Assessment™ 

When a technology is in its nascent stage, a brand needs to do a lot of work in supporting the directionality of the market. It’s not just about selling your product, platform or service, you’re actually selling the entirety of the industry. 

1.  **EDUCATE not just your customers, but your whole industry by explaining what the technology is, does, and why it’s needed.** — Enterprise leaders may not yet be convinced of the need for change, and change in highly regulated industries can be a risk that some conservative leaders are not willing to take on. Using the Value Stack Assessment™, you can start educating with the top of your pyramid, and selling the transformational benefits of your technology.
2. **Have confidence that can EMBOLDEN a prospect **through an understanding that you’re dealing with the emotional headspace of fear. Therefore, you need to over-index on powerful, emotional brand moments. — Using a Value Stack Assessment™, layer your brand messaging on the emotional components of the brand. Assess every brand touchpoint against “how will this make them feel?” and ensure you’re meeting their fear with an equally powerful emotion. For example, if you show them that this technology will make them the leader in their own industry and provide them with a competitive advantage against their top players, you can turn the fear or potential negative consequences into the Fear of Missing Out. 
3. **EMPOWER your salesforce with audience insights by using a deep understanding of nuanced buyer needs to segment messaging and pitches in a smart way. **—  You not only need to empower your salesforce with the right materials for clients and customers, you also need to ensure their immediate clients are equipped with the right messaging to then sell-in their unconvinced leadership. This tactic involves a clear understanding of each potential prospects’ immediate pain points, and targeting the final layer of your Value Stack Assessment™ with specific groupings of functional benefits that can immediately solve the pain points for each, making a long-term investment a short-term no brainer.


bell_curve2

**The problem to solve:** Changing existing behaviors and perceptions

**The challenge:** A sea of sameness

**The VSA approach: **Radical differentiation through Promise2Performance™ white space opportunity identification

In the majority phases, a brand needs to adopt a strategy of **RADICAL DIFFERENTIATION** through positioning that captures a true white space opportunity supported by category-defying **VERBAL** and **VISUAL** language.

In a saturated market, it can be difficult to compete without getting into a ground game of advertising/marketing dollars that go head-to-head. Winning business often means stealing from your competition, but at this stage in the technology lifecycle, the category often appears to customers like a sea of sameness. There can be a tendency to try to flex the more, more, more muscle — more speed, more features, more power, more you-name-it. If you have all the money in the world to spend, perhaps you can win. But for those in a position trying to take on the leader in the category, you’ll need to adopt a strategy of radical differentiation.

1. **Uncover true white space opportunity** through a positioning exercise that creates meaningful differentiations from your competitors (5 Ps: Product, Platform, Process, People, Purpose). You can  do this through our Promise2Performance™ methodology that not only identifies the new category tablestakes, but also finds a white space opportunity by connecting unique customer needs with promises that are credible, differentiating, and ownable compared to your competitors.
2. **Be different in what you say and how you look by** using words that are not just unique, but true to your positioning. Find ways to precisely describe your value at every level. Stay away from category jargon and strive to use language to further prospects' understanding of why you’re different than the others.

bell_curve3

**The problem to solve:** Breaking through

**The challenge:** Building credibility as a newcomer

**The VSA approach:** Challenge the marketplace through as a disruptor brand, focused on delivering Moments of Impact℠ in unexpected places 

In the late/laggards phases, a brand needs to adopt a **CHALLENGER** mindset.

If you’re entering a category that is past the point of saturation, the chances are you see things differently than the incumbent leaders. You have a mission to change the way the category provides value to customers, and, in essence, you’re looking to redefine the category as we know it today. We call this a challenger brand mindset, one in which your ambitions are larger than the traditional means, and with a mission to disrupt a market in the favor of customers.

1. **Start a conversation** by challenging the category truths, and take on historical category truths head-on with a tone of honesty and candor. — By contradicting the existing perceptions of their category, you’re able to create immediate resonance with the jaded mindset of your audience. While incumbents are spending money trying to be everything to everyone, a challenger focuses all efforts on a single message that can capture a broad mindset.
2.  **Focus your offerings on underserved mindsets** by being relentlessly focused on customers. Designing for unmet needs and talking like humans, you can capture and retain your audience’s attention. — As a challenger, you can’t just be better than your competitors, you need to be developing products in a way that is truly customer-centric and fulfilling an unmet need to be able to compete against legacy providers. While incumbents are spitting out their product benefits at rapid fire pace, a challenger is answering the question “what does it do for me?”
3.  **Show up in unexpected places. **You don’t win by going head-to-head—you find ways to garner attention by showing up in ways that others don’t.
At VSA, we use a Meaningful Experience Model™ study to determine where to invest in designing an exceptional brand-led moment across your customers' journey. The study measures each moment against a potential to deliver best on a target audience’s needs, but also where is the biggest opportunity to exceed expectations in a way that builds long and short term brand value (a Moment of Impact℠, or MOI). We define brand value as the ability to create social capital, command a premium, and drive differentiation. 

For B2B Technology brand strategy, market context is (almost) everything.

bell_curve_mtn2

Nick-FINAL

Nick Lo Bue

Executive Creative Director, Digital Practice Lead

Back when I still had spots, I was at a small agency designing coffee table books for clients in the Sports and Entertainment industries. One of our clients, the NBA, would publish a book each year to celebrate the league champions about a week after the conclusion of the series. That’s right—one week after the championship team was getting champagne in their eyes, a commemorative 112-page, full color, hardcover book with over 150 photographs was hitting the shelves at Barnes & Noble (the quicker the release, the better the sales). Copy, design, photo retouching, proofing, client approvals, file prep, printing, binding, shipping… in a week. 

Now, in all fairness, we would get somewhat of a head start on the writing and design before the winning team was crowned. As the championship series progressed, we’d shift our energy and attention to the book design — we had one going for each team — that mapped to the team that had the momentum. Lakers? Yeah, definitely the Lakers. Wait, no… Pacers? No, Lakers. Hold up... Pacers? LAKERS WIN!!! 

The 72 hours after the series ended would be frantic — a small team of about six people would work around the clock in order to release the final file to the printer. The name of that file would be something like “2000_NBA_Finals_Book_Lakers_**FINAL**.qxp.”

And then it was “2000_NBA_Finals_book_Lakers_**FINAL_v2**.qxp”

Then “...**v3.qxp**”

“...**v4.qxp**”

“...**v5.qxp**”

…

…

“2000_NBA_Finals_book_Lakers_**FINAL_v27**.qxp”

Yep. 27 times we thought we were releasing the “final” file — only to find a typo, or a missing page number, or a photo of a player wearing a hat in which the brand of that hat wasn’t “an official sponsor of the NBA.”

And so began my hate-filled war with the word “final.”

From that day on, I stubbornly refused to name any files with the word “final” in it. Partly because of superstition, but mostly because of the existential realization that nothing is ever final. My suspicions were all-the-more confirmed as I transitioned from print design to digital design. It didn’t take me long to realize that in digital, the notion of “final” was even more misguided than it was in print design. At least in print, somewhere down the line, paper gets bound, shrink-wrapped, loaded onto pallets, and shipped. That’s pretty “final.” By contrast, in digital, what’s “published” can be changed in a moment’s notice, and changed over and over and over again — not to mention the publishing flexibility that’s afforded by automation and AI. 

Rather than a curse, this ability to avoid finality in favor of adaptability is a brand’s greatest asset. It’s also one of the most overlooked and neglected attributes of digital activation. Regularly, we see brands spend a ton of focus and energy getting to launch, and lose sight of what's possible, and even required, post-launch. “Launch” needs to be regarded as the starting line, not the finish line. 

With that spirit in mind, I offer some (ever-adapting) best practices regarding the launch of a site or app: 

**Do commit to evolution, not perfection.** Release, learn, and improve. Brands have the responsibility to collect and leverage ongoing data and insights to inform the evolution of features and content. In the words of Voltaire: “Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.” 

**Do define post-launch workflows and governance.** Knowing what to publish is difficult, but knowing what not to publish is even more difficult. Establishing frameworks in advance that provide guidance and a governance model is essential for consistency and time management. Brands should be building out processes that will turn the insights they glean into actionable tasks, and managing those tasks in a backlog prioritized by user needs. 

**Don’t underestimate the need for cross-disciplinary talent.** While brands often appreciate the need for content creators, they almost always underestimate the ongoing nurturing that only skilled data analysts, UX and digital designers, product managers, content strategists, and developers can bring. Investing in these roles is a commitment to the evolution and optimization of content, features, functionality, and brand assets.

**Do invest in good tools.** Spend the time to investigate and test drive tools to collect data from users (Crazy Egg, Google Analytics and Tag Manager, SurveyMonkey, etc), and tools to help manage the backlog (Jira, Trello, DoneDone, etc).

**Don’t neglect your CMS.** The most important of the tools, the CMS, should get (almost) as much UX love and consideration as the customer-facing site. An effective CMS can be highly configured and customized so that the terminology and permissions aligns with existing business nomenclature and workflows. Content managers should inform the buildout of the CMS, and a training program should be implemented to support onboarding. 

**Do get into the right mindset.** Arguably the most important consideration is recognizing that the investment to nurture your digital property after launch is less expensive and has a better ROI than undertaking a major redesign every three-to-four years. Just the search, RFP, selection, and procurement of an agency can cost seven figures and take months. Brands should find a partner that won't “drop the mic” and is committed to their client’s long-term success.

The end. 

*Or is it?...*


The Fallacy of Final 

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Chrystine Witherspoon

Associate Partner, Executive Creative Director

Among all strategic corporate decisions, there may be no bigger high-risk, high-reward moment than rebranding. It’s an arduous task for any organization—and for their brand agency partner. Everyone involved, from front-line employees to the board of directors, knows that a new brand means more than a visual makeover, and isn’t something that can be rethought with next year’s budget. It’s a clear signal of change and a carefully considered expression—and investment—meant to endure the test of time.
So, how do rebrands ensure that they’re speaking strategically, meaningfully, and personally all at the same time? How do they capture the imaginations of every stakeholder audience and communicate a lasting vision for the brand?
We’ve seen a number of high-visibility rebranding efforts this month among some of the best-known businesses in the world. Each appears to have its own motivation for signaling “something’s different about us,” and each has led to a different kind of design decision. So which recent new logo appears to be successful in changing the story of the brand it represents? Here’s my take as a design observer on three of them…


As a business and brand, Pfizer has arrived at an inflection point. The past few years have seen a significant shift in their agenda—away from traditional pharma (think pills) and toward a “smaller, science-based company.” And being the company that has developed the first Covid vaccine, Pfizer has proof of that purpose. This was the right time to reintroduce themselves with a more expansive message and a reimagined identity. 
 
I never loved the original logo with the wordmark cramped inside a pill shape. So, deleting the pill shape in favor of a double-helix-inspired icon was a natural move and clearly signals a strong shift towards more science-driven therapies. 
 
But, the best part of this redesign is that they hung on to the beauty of their wordmark, even while adding the helical elements and enabling it to perform in more digital experiences. I have always loved the elegant ligature within the wordmark, and their tweaks to letterforms and color modernize the look without making it feel wholly new. 
 
With typography this strong, it leaves me wondering if the brand needs an accompanying icon. Or, could a more robust and expressive (read: less corporate) design system do more work to communicate “the next generation of breakthrough treatments”?

First off, I am a sucker for wanting to dig into the heritage of a brand. Even if your intent is to strongly signal change, heritage isn’t always something to distance yourself from—especially in consumer contexts when you can reconnect with impressions formed in audiences’ younger lives. Recapturing this familiarity adds a degree of trust you need to lead customers into the next era of your company or product.
 
With Burger King, the previous “futuristic” blue swish of their identity always felt artificial and unnecessary—one of many attempts at the time to add “energy” to a logo through implied motion. Now, at a moment when food can be a great comfort, conveying the warmth of earlier, easier times may be a way to remind BK customers of what they savor the most about the brand.
 
In this case, the design team dug deep into the Burger King archives to assess when Burger King felt the most authentic. According to the brand team, this was a generation served between 1964 and 1999. 
 
I loudly applaud the design team for embracing hand-crafted illustration to express the deliciousness and fun of food. I love that the illustration can create a sense of graphic, playful texture with endless opportunity for interpretation and application. That, coupled with hyper-closeup photography direction, certainly does the job of communicating deliciousness.
 
This is a system that feels expressive and appropriately playful, and brings people back to the best of Burger King history while still mixing in modern flair.


The new General Motors identity states that it is solely a rebrand of the corporate identity. And as a holding-company brand, GM has always had a different task to tackle through its meaning—asserting corporate direction while allowing its individual “badge” brands to live on their own, go to market independently, and appeal to car buyers with their own identities.
 
Calibrating the role of the parent brand to GM’s sub-brands certainly must have weighed on the teams working on the rebrand—what story and what value should a GM logo contribute as a parent, and what is that investment worth? That said, there is just too much branding going on with the new GM identity system. 
 
On one hand, I love that GM is doubling down and elevating thought leadership and real technological innovation in the alternative fuel space. But there are ways to do this that don’t require a new, “futuristic” logo to tell the story or an Easter egg of an electrical plug hidden within the letterforms to make their point. I also question the more diminutive lowercase letters to communicate “Big Company with Big Ideas.” But for me, the big question is why are we asking the logo to do the work of changing stakeholder perceptions of the company? Audiences these days are savvy. To me, this was a moment to change the conversation, not the logo (at least not this drastically) and let the accompanying “Everybody In” campaign be the vehicle for their new point of view.
 
New logos are easy targets, especially when they’re part of our cultural landscape. At a time when everyone has an opinion and a social media outlet to express it, undertaking a brand makeover can be a scary one, and the return on that investment likely won’t be known for years. Audiences are more connected, skeptical, and willing to scream about change, for better or for worse. Still, it’s nice to see that some brands are willing to take the leap from the familiar—to challenge expectations and embrace what’s different, provocative, and sometimes even controversial.



(Re) Making Their Marks

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VSA Partners is pleased to announce that Gus Granger has joined the VSA team as Client Engagement Partner. A VSA alumnus, Gus will lead development of new business opportunities and help drive growth for VSA as we extend our reach and capabilities with new clients. Based in Dallas, he will lead engagements across the full suite of VSA services, seeking growth opportunities in the region while serving clientele nationwide.

“We are delighted to welcome Gus back to the VSA team. In addition to a career steeped in noteworthy accomplishments, his countless hours of volunteer service in the creative community exemplify VSA’s core values,” said Dana Arnett, CEO.

“VSA has a long history of serving great clients throughout Texas—from USAA in San Antonio, to IBM in Austin, to AT&T in Dallas. We’re excited to have an expanded leadership presence in the region. Gus will accelerate our momentum and growth in the state and beyond,” said Chief Client Officer Jeff Walker. 

Over the last two decades, Gus founded his own agency, 70kft, which was later acquired by global data center and cybersecurity company, Cyxtera. He went on to serve as their Chief Creative Officer, building graphic design, UX design, web and application development, digital marketing, product marketing, and marketing operations teams—based in both Dallas, Texas and Bogotá, Colombia. 

Gus has been honored by many groups in the design industry including Adobe, American Advertising Federation, AIGA, Brand New, Communication Arts, Dallas Society of Visual Communications, Graphis, and Print Magazine. For over a decade, he maintained an active presence in the human rights and social justice arena as the agency for the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. After serving as chapter president of the Dallas Fort Worth chapter of the AIGA, the professional design association, he was selected to be the Chair of their national Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion task force. That team’s mission is to eliminate barriers for marginalized designers in the profession and empower them for success. 

Additionally, in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attack in Charleston, North Carolina and subsequent debate of the role of Confederate symbols in the United States, Gus’ team was tapped by a National Public Radio program, Studio360, to envision a new symbol for the modern South. The project became a national sensation, sparking international attention, and provoking important discussions of history, meaning, honor, respect, and belonging.

VSA Partners is thrilled to welcome Gus Granger back to the team in his new role. His leadership will be an invaluable asset to VSA’s growing workforce and portfolio of world class clients. 



VSA Partners grows leadership team with the addition of Gus Granger 

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Andy Blankenburg

Partner, Content Practice Lead

History will ultimately judge whether McDonald’s newly [announced](https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/en-us/our-stories/article/ourstories.menu-items.html) McPlant burger is any good, but for now, branding professionals are enjoying a good roast of the name.
 
The Mc-mockery is predictable—maybe inevitable—for a brand name that’s come to be associated with the speed, uniformity and mass production (see: “McMansion”) of processed food. One observer immediately eschewed the plant-based burger’s name, saying  “When I hear ‘McPlant,’ what comes up in my head is eating a tree or grass.” Others who aren’t lovin’ it noted that a McPlant sounds more like a manufacturing facility than a vegan treat.
 
But all the burger-flamers may be missing the point. McDonald’s is approaching the McPlant name as a “platform” rather than a product name. Meaning that it’s an umbrella term that the company hopes to grow into a franchise of products beyond the burger, as it has over the past 10 years with [McCafé](https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/mcdonalds-adding-menu-items-breakfast). It’s also a conscious attempt to not market the platform as vegetarian or vegan. (McDonald’s has sold a McVeggie in Australia, with some [fine print](https://mcdonalds.com.au/menu/mcveggie%E2%84%A2), since the beginning of 2020.) Instead, the McPlant is about going to market as a meat-substitute burger rather than as another veggie burger, a fine distinction in mindset that’s propelled the growth of [Beyond Meat](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/09/beyond-meat-shares-rise-on-news-that-it-collaborated-with-mcdonalds-on-the-mcplant-options/) and the Impossible Burger brands: It’s about the taste, not just what’s in it.
 
That said, is McPlant a good name? Will anyone want to eat a platform? Well, “McPlant” checks [certain functional boxes](https://www.businessinsider.com/mcplants-name-reveals-mcdonalds-takes-plant-based-meat-seriously-2020-11), and it helps that it comes with a perfunctory sort of visual identity that makes it look less like manufactured food than it sounds. Unfortunately, McPlant bears all the hallmarks of a name a committee settled for at the end of a long week, rather than a name that plants a meaningful flag, so to speak. Or, as comedian Rob Gill tweeted, it’s just “the laziest name for a McDonald’s plant-based product.”

You can imagine what else might have been on the table for the McPlant name, and the brainstorming that went with it:

McHarvest: “Too romantic. What says *grazing*?”&nbsp;  

McGarden: “Yeah, right. Let me check the tomatoes growing by the drive-thru.”&nbsp;  

McGreen: “Ew. Sounds like mold.”&nbsp;  

McStraordinary: “Evocative, but can you bring it back to earth?”&nbsp;  

McEarthy: “Too preachy. And too gritty.”&nbsp;  

McHerb: “Hungry segment, but too nichey.”&nbsp;  

McRoots: “Too Alex Haley.”&nbsp;  

McBeans: “We already sold Chipotle.”&nbsp;  

McField: “I see ‘Mrs Fields.’ It’s not a cookie. But hold that thought…”&nbsp;  

McNaturals: “Let me call the lawyers and see if we can own ‘natural.’”&nbsp;  

McAg: “’Gag’? No.”&nbsp;  

McGrown: “Do you even *know* what a homonym is?”&nbsp;  

McCrop: “One letter away from disaster.”&nbsp;  

McFarm: “Like *all the animals*? E-I-E-I-O? Gross.”&nbsp;  

McBlossom: “Hated that show.”&nbsp;  

McSeed: “Step away from the thesaurus, please.”&nbsp;  

McReap: “Please leave the room.”&nbsp;  

In the final analysis, “McPlant” may be descriptive, inert and endlessly lampoonable. But what it lacks in flavor, it makes up for in pure…functionality. And McDonald’s is clearly betting big that McPlant tastes like victory.

Bland naming: Why ‘McPlant’ wasn’t meant to sizzle

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Curt Schreiber

Chief Creative Officer

In most organizations, the number of marketers and communicators far outpace the size and resources of their colleagues on the brand team. At the same time, those businesses recognize that brand is essential to the direction and alignment of their organization, and that everyone plays a role in contributing to the success of the brand. And beyond the walls of an enterprise, agencies and business partners also “touch” the brand and influence how it’s experienced. Internal brand leaders and their functions—the “keepers of the flame”—increasingly face a decentralized, distributed and often disjointed world that they need to manage. A systems approach to brand management has become the answer to the need for guidance and consistency while serving the realities of scale, adaptability and distributed brand decision-making.

Brand guidelines haven’t changed much over the past 50 years. Typically, they consist of assets and standards—a comprehensive set of do’s and don’ts that govern the use of the company's proprietary visual and verbal assets. Certainly, many brand guides have made the leap to digital brand centers, asset management systems or even public websites, but it’s rare when they actually account for how people learn and work today.

It’s time for a change in how we approach branding systems — one that centers branding as an intuitive, adaptable framework rather than a static set of rules. The following three target areas optimize the relationship between the brand management system and the people who use it, ultimately creating a modernized brand management approach ready for a fast-paced market. 

An effective brand system takes more than providing access to a robust set of guidelines. Your entire organization needs to develop and reinforce better brand practitioner skills—and the critical thinking needed to interpret rules and adapt assets.

How much effort should go into upskilling employees? The biggest factor is the desired level of expertise and fluency. Malcolm Gladwell famously said it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, which translates to about nine years (around four hours a day, five days a week). No business needs an entire organization of brand experts, but all employees need to learn the skills to perform well enough for their own purposes—think 10 to 20 hours of training each year. This is the right commitment to brand training for acquiring the needed amount of brand fluency.

In a large organization, brand practitioners and marketers can number in the hundreds. Brand users and “brand dependents” can number in the thousands, with connections and needs shared between them often going unseen. This makes consistency an enormous challenge. For disciplined brand governance, businesses should be investing in tools, not just guidelines and assets.

An automated, systems-based tool provides constraints. Think of these tools as a means of “rigid flexibility.” With preprogrammed choices like color, typography, format and hierarchy, virtually anyone can build the right asset and do so efficiently. This ensures fewer mistakes and is less expensive than human intervention.

Most of our own work in this area resides in building digital design systems. These are fundamentally code and pattern libraries that greatly reduce the amount of effort to build and deploy, and that increase the consistency and efficiency of teams. 

Two notable examples worth learning from:

[TimesTalks](https://www.basedesign.com/work/the-new-york-times-know-whats-now-know-whats-next) – A quote about the system from Mirek Nisenbaum: “A bespoke digital tool allows The New York Times’ design team to easily implement an established graphic language, explore the entire range of color and type and maintain consistency from event to event. This beats a static graphic guideline.” 

[Walker Expanded](https://walkerart.org/magazine/walker-expanded) – This was a brilliant “hack” by the museum back in the day, and a great example of automation. The typeface has all the right choices of words, patterns and colors embedded. It’s hard to mess it up. And still rewarding to use. 

The primary implication of automation and systemization of brand expression is less “guideline” training and more “tool” training. For groups like a social media team, who work at accelerated speed and responsiveness, an automated tool embedded in the creative process is a powerful enabler of disciplined brand management.


Big, distributed and automated brand systems still have to account for the human factor. Like all the major digital and societal shifts underway in how people consume, navigate and share information, brand guidance needs to fit new expectations and habits among users to be effective.

A few tips that help to ensure users see themselves as part of the brand system:
- Make it two-way: systems need to support conversation—expert to user, user to expert, and user to user  
- Open it up: systems need to be easy to access, easy to change and easy to support a complete range of users—known and unknown
- Leverage tutorials: video is the ideal medium for engagement, knowledge transfer and modeling skills
- Appeal to all: the user interface and range of content needs to appeal to the expert and novice—“insiders” and generalists can each find information relevant to their needs and interests

However a brand system is designed, distributed and managed, it's crucial to treat it as a living organism. The more rigid a brand is for its users, the more static and "expected" the experience becomes for its broader stakeholder audiences. Build it with logic and structure, certainly. But also envision how it will evolve and be interpreted over time and through different media and moments. With skilled practitioners, digital access and automation, and human-centered guidance, you can build a system that is truly future-proofed.


Managing brand in a decentralized, democratized world

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Aaron K. Heltsmith

Director, Talent Experience

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been unlike anything most of us have ever experienced professionally or personally. In early March as we were all told to vacate the familiarity of our offices, the fear and uncertainty were palpable. But creative agencies don’t just sit with fear and uncertainty. Our clients pay us to design solutions. So, true to form, that’s exactly what VSA did for this year’s Summer Internship program.

In the first half of any year, VSA’s Talent Management team is hard at work planning and interviewing candidates for our Summer Internship program. Our standard framework is designed to provide burgeoning talent the opportunity to become acquainted with working at a creative agency, leaving with real-life experience that prepares them for the job market after graduation. It’s a celebrated and cherished program — all of VSA gets excited to interview and welcome a fresh cohort of interns every summer. 

With so much uncertainty at the end of February and early March of this year, my team and I questioned what would become of VSA’s beloved summer program. The prospect of not having a summer internship and leaving so much eager talent idle was unfavorable to say the least. After extensive discussion and logistical planning alongside the Executive Leadership Team, we decided to take the program online, and the 2020 Virtual Summer AtHometernship was born.

This year’s program was a 12-week, part-time virtual experience, focused on eLearning and Mentorship. In the absence of confirmation that any of us would be back in the office this year, the AtHometernship was designed to be geographically agnostic and allowed our participants to stay safely at home. Our practices welcomed amazing students from across the country who partnered with multiple mentors to understand career progression, their current roles and all things VSA. We prioritized billable work for our full-time employees so AtHometernship participants were able to shadow and learn from some of the best creative minds in the marketing world and gain real agency experience. Additionally, our AtHometerns designed and delivered a COVID-19 related project together, giving them a topical and unique addition to their portfolio as well as mirroring the cross-functional collaboration that is part of every project at VSA.

We are pleased to say that each of our AtHometern finalist candidates pivoted with us as the structure of the program changed. Our top choices chose us as well, knowing this year’s program would be like none other. Thank you to this year’s participants for sticking with us; we are excited to see how each of you continues to develop and grow.

While VSA’s At-Hometerns may not have been able to enjoy our snack bins, they instead received the best version of an internship experience the creative world can offer in the midst of a global pandemic, resulting in job preparedness, powerful exposure to agency life, AP-level Zoom skills and a deeply meaningful experience to prepare them for the future. 

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VSA Partners' Virtual Internship Program

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Kim Mickenberg

This past July 4th weekend, we were very proud to launch “Until Justice Just Is,” a platform idea and rallying cry for long-overdue change, which we developed in collaboration with our longtime clients and friends at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. The fully integrated campaign had a :90 video; OOH, digital, print, and paid social advertising; a fully built-out, written, and designed microsite; and a social strategy (complete with designed assets) for launch. **It helped our clients meet their fundraising goals six months ahead of schedule—and kick off an all-new Racial Justice League committed to dismantling systemic racism in companies throughout the country.**

Oh, and we did it in *three weeks.* 

Like every member of our team, I am deeply proud of the work and personally invested in the success of the larger movement. But five minutes after the campaign launched—and four minutes into actually sitting still and breathing for a bit—I was stunned by how quickly we’d pulled it all together. And how we’d done it all seamlessly, while cobbling together workspaces out of our living rooms, children’s rooms, and backyards. 

After a few days of reflection (and sleep), I realized there were a few core elements that made the turnaround possible. I’m sharing them not to suggest that *all* teams and projects should work this fast, but instead to shed light on what pieces you need in place if you *need* to work fast—especially in the midst of a pandemic. 

YWCA is a unique organization that’s spent the last century in pursuit of one very big, consequential goal: eliminating racism and empowering women. They work toward it in many ways—from providing direct services in their communities around the country to advocating for policy changes on Capitol Hill—but their mission is clear. That clarity makes it a lot easier to come up with a creative platform that speaks to the totality of what they do for the world. And it makes it easier for them, as an organization, to recognize the “right” idea when they see it. 

The platform idea we developed with the YWCA—Until Justice Just Is—works for a few main reasons. One, it’s true to who YWCA is and always has been: an intersectional feminist organization dedicated to addressing the effects of systemic racism and eliminating it. The line would have been clever for a wide variety of organizations and initiatives, but it would have felt hollow for any that couldn’t authentically own it the way YWCA can.  

Two, it’s a call to action with a clear and differentiating purpose: to ask people to commit to *act* to advance racial justice not just today, and not just tomorrow, but until justice and fairness are something we can all take for granted. 

And third, the idea is big enough to encompass who YWCA is today and who they could be tomorrow. Plus, it’s a *narrow enough idea* to have clear meaning and a built-in point of view. That narrowness and point of view are the reason creative teams can bring it to life in a meaningful way, execution after execution. And it’s what allows us, the creative directors, to review work and immediately know what’s working, what’s not, and why. The result? A more focused, unified, and purposeful campaign that gets its message across in every medium.

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VSA has a wide range of capabilities in-house, from creative concepting, design, and writing to digital strategy and UX to production. Having all of these teams used to working seamlessly together makes it quicker and easier for us to spin up new projects or build on existing ones. 

For example, once we got the go-ahead from YWCA on the campaign concept, we had to immediately start writing, designing and developing a website so we could have it programmed and launched by Day 1 of the campaign. Without wasting any time, we looped in our director of UX so we could brief her on the project, share the client’s wish list for the site and talk through different approaches. Within two days we had approval on wireframes, at which point we were able to start design and copy.


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I don’t care where you’ve worked before or what big names are on your highlight reel; to me, the most important thing any teammate can bring is passion for the work and intellectual curiosity about the subject matter. And fortunately, our team had that in spades, finding a million tiny ways to bring thoughtful, considered elements into the project that made the work stronger and more meaningful. 

For example, let’s take deep dive into the Until Justice Just Is typeface. The typeface is actually from Vocal Type, a type foundry created by Tre Seals. After starting his career as a graphic designer, Tre decided to create typefaces in order to bring more diversity into the industry. The font we purchased from him, Bayard, was actually inspired by a hand-painted sign outside the HQ for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—which was led by Bayard Rustin, a prominent gay and civil rights leader. 

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That same integrity and specificity was also applied to the imagery in the video. Many of the images we used are from Black photographers who have been at the BLM protests, capturing the energy, enthusiasm, and empowerment of activists, organizers, and participants. Their POV was essential to providing a truly balanced and honest look at the world right now. And as an added bonus, we loved getting to know new-to-us talent and supporting their careers. 

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We chose Sarofsky, a female-owned editing studio, to bring the video to life. Not only does founder Erin Sarofsky feel passionate about Black Lives Matter, but she’s also a longtime supporter of the YWCA whose personal values are deeply in sync with their feminist mission. Plus, her team is as committed and creative as she is. After we shared our script and vision for the video (shown below), the Sarofsky team went out and developed beautiful, evocative visual storytelling, with the perfect vocal talent to bring it to life: a Baptist preacher from Los Angeles. 


The more organizational layers you have to go through to approve any campaign asset, the longer it’s going to take to put things out in the world. Period. The YWCA has a very streamlined internal approval process, which enabled us to meet extremely aggressive deadlines. 

I have a love-hate relationship with Zoom. After a full day of videoconferencing, I’m completely wiped out from the energy it takes to focus on-camera.

But that said, it really does help simulate the office setting while working from home. Spending all day, every day, on video conferences with colleagues in different time zones—many of whom I’d never worked with before in person—really did bring us close together as a team. Two days after the campaign launched, I found myself missing our morning stand-ups and the chance to catch up with everyone. 

Lately, though, we’ve been getting the band back together. The campaign performed so well to date in Chicago, YWCA is going to launch it nationally in the next few weeks. And we couldn’t be more excited about it. 


YWCA: Until Justice Just Is

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Mike Walsh

Associate Partner, Client Engagement 

“Let’s not use the word craft.” 

So began our pitch to VSA’s first prospective beer client. A craft beer client. 

In 2011, Goose Island Beer Co. had turned the craft beer world upside down by selling to Anheuser-Busch. As one of the “Class of ‘88” breweries—the breweries including Deschutes, Great Lakes, and Rogue that opened in 1988—Goose was an O.G. in craft beer. Their perceived defection to “big beer” was met with howls of outrage, including from within its own ranks. 

As Goose searched for an agency partner to tell the brewery’s story, one thing was clear: They cared as much as ever about their craft and the quality of their beer, and that needed to come through. 

And there we were telling them that that word—“craft”—had outlived its usefulness. 

Consumers still cared about quality, yes. But in the time since Goose Island opened in 1988, the beer landscape had changed. A newly legal-aged-drinker’s first beer is as likely to be a flavorful IPA or a rich amber ale as it is a watered-down light lager. For these drinkers, it wasn’t “craft beer.” It was just “beer.” 

The industry itself was also changing, fast. New breweries were opening every day. “Local” replaced “craft” as the signifier of quality (even if it was hit or miss). And big brewers were coming around to the need to broaden their portfolios.

At VSA, we were lucky to have a front-row seat for what unfolded next. 

We won the Goose Island work. We repositioned the brewery’s brand, redesigned its identity and packaging, and created its first national campaign. Then AB bought Blue Point Brewing in New York. And Breckenridge Brewery in Colorado. And Elysian. Golden Road. Four Peaks. Karbach. Virtue Cider. 

With each acquisition, VSA had the opportunity to do what we’d done with Goose Island. And over the next several years we learned a number of things about the beer business.


The influx of choice in the beer category has given drinkers permission to sleep around (metaphorically, mostly). Breweries have long cultivated deep relationships with serious fans—and even those lovers aren’t entirely loyal. Drinkers don’t have a steady go-to anymore. They have a handful of brands on their list at any given time. Breweries need to get into that selection set; a deep bench of “likers” is worth more than a bunch of somewhat committed lovers. 

It’s rare in packaged goods categories that the spiritual home of the brand is also its actual home. No one visits a diaper factory, or thinks much about who made their soap. And while breweries strive to build brands, those brands are inextricable from the place and the culture where they’re born. The “brewed and bottled by” statement on a can of beer is more than a legal requirement. It’s a badge, and part of the brand’s (that is, the brewery’s) essence. 

Working with founder-led businesses is different. It’s a gift to have their thumbprint to use as a roadmap to brand character. A brewery takes its cues from the tone they set. The culture flows from there, along with the choices about beers and brand. Does the founder exude sunny optimism and love pop art? Are they counterculture rebels? Are they khakis-and-a-button-down kinda guys? Embracing the founders’ ethos keeps the brand true and helps deepen its ability to connect.

Someone once once quipped that breweries are like pizza shops: there’s no such thing as too many. And it’s true—there’s never been a better time to be a beer lover (or a pizza lover, for that matter) in terms of quality and choice. But it’s downright daunting for the consumer at the shelf. Even with the power of strong distribution, breweries need to work hard to break through. A Super Bowl ad may not be the answer, but investing in creating mental availability is a must. Counting on a New Year’s Eve post to become a meme won’t cut it. 

In the end, craft still matters. Consumers are over bad craft beer. They’ve been burned too many times by the local brew pub or an out-of-code can of IPA. So they look for familiarity, and for cues that the brewery cares about what’s in the package. Those cues come from what’s on the package, and what comes from the brand. Craftsmanship of communication is every bit as important as the beer itself.  

A few things we have learned over a few beers

Variety of beer brands that VSA has helped elevate.

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Josh Berta

*This article is part of an on-going research initiative at VSA to help companies understand the evolving needs of their employees in the remote workplace. To learn more about our findings (and to discover your own work personality), check out [“Understanding the Needs of Your Remote Workers”](/understanding-the-needs-of-your-remote-workers) and download our study.*

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The other day as I finished a Zoom call with a designer, my daughter looked over with eyebrows raised. “That was a short meeting,” she said. I had to explain that the call wasn’t a meeting, at least not in the pre-COVID sense. In the world of working from my living room, that call was my replacement for being able to swivel my chair around to face my co-worker, and quickly suggest we make X, Y, and Z changes.

As managers, we have lost the ability to practice one of the most simultaneously valuable and fraught exercises: The Hover. The Hover is universal. We’ve all done it, and we’ve certainly all been subjected to it. But like any habit, some of us are more dependent on that type of working than others, and anxiety ensues when it’s suddenly pulled away.

How can we hover? How, while we’re all working remotely, can I stand behind a designer, gesturing at their screen and asking them to try this and that? In these past few weeks, managers have been trying to adapt The Hover, having their teams share screens and push pixels on command. If you’re prone to hovering, this tactic might be the best proxy. Even so, it’s no stand-in for the real thing, and could have an unwelcome side effect of piling on the Zoom Gloom. It’s also already facing a phase-out. As we all return to the office after a prolonged period of increased autonomy and independence, I can only imagine that The Hover might be less welcome after months of working without it.

There is value in this kind of collaborative, in-real-time editing. It’s one of the reasons we all love The Hover: it gets things done, exactly how we want it. But because it works, it’s often overused, leading to inefficiency and needless repetition. We’ve been given a chance to hit the reset button, and my hope is that we can find a better way to work—one that is built on trust, learning, and letting go (just a little).

**Let’s start with trust.** Managers, if you’ve had trouble trusting your team before now, it would be a good time to start developing some faith. If you have notes, share them. Send an email, have a quick Zoom call, do what you need to do to get the message across. And then let your team work. Make it clear you’re giving them the space to try things, even occasionally fail, but that you are looking forward to seeing a product closer to the finish line than it was before you gave the notes.

Teams, you aren’t off the hook—you need to step it up too. If you have been given autonomy and ownership of the work, show your stuff! And be prepared to defend your choices. If you’re not entirely sure what to do, try it all, and then try some more. Reward the trust you’ve been given and take advantage of this new terrain. Understand this: it’s going to make you better at your job.

**Get learning!** Teams should also be using this time to learn, and their leaders should become more patient in their teaching (which means they might have some stuff to learn as well). For team members, your new-found autonomy might be a crash course in solving problems on your own, or using new tools. If you’re confused, ask questions. Confer with your fellow teammates. Rely on each other’s expertise and experience. Ask the internet. Do what it takes to get up and running.

For managers, it is crucial that you invite those questions, be open to conferring, and share your experiences. In other words, teach. If your usual way of hovering is simply a shortcut to finishing the work and not using it as a teaching moment, learn to be more open with your thinking and your process. Teams who understand why you want it to be blue instead of red are more likely to meet your expectations when you give them all that trust we talked about.

**I know it’s hard, but you might have to let go, just a little.** It’s time we acknowledge why we hover: we want to control the output to make it the way we want it. And yes, we all want the work to be as perfect as possible. But perfection is subjective. Your perfect is another person’s meh. Part of trusting your team is seeing the value in the choices they make. They’re not the choices you would make? Get over it (or engage in some of that learning/teaching I’m endorsing).

This brings me to my most important point: sometimes hovering can get in the way of understanding what your company or clients value and prioritize. If you like to hover because you’re obsessed with kerning, but your client doesn’t know Comic Sans from Neue Haas Grotesk, set aside your obsession—at least for a little while. Prioritize your team’s efforts for the forest, not the trees. I’m not advocating we entirely abandon the hallmarks of our crafts. I’m simply saying, as belts are tightened globally, efficiency in objective becomes paramount. And as we all struggle to make the best of a bad situation in work as well as life—let’s not make “the perfect” the enemy of “the good.” Afterall, we could all use some good right about now.

Direction at a distance

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I’ll admit I said it.

I said it out loud, before all the shutdowns, and before we knew how long this would last.

And for a while, it wasn’t so bad. I liked sleeping in an extra hour. I enjoyed making my own lunch in my own kitchen. And it was a treat to spend more quality time with my significant other.

Today? I miss going to the office. Working from home has been a little tough on me because I’m a **Connector.** That’s my work personality.

**Connectors** feel a deep need to share their truest, honest selves with their teammates and their bosses. We want to connect as people—not just co-workers. We think it’s important to go through the ups and downs together. We believe those experiences tend to facilitate collaboration, which leads to better work.

There are lots of employees out there just like me, but importantly, there are even more employees out there who are not like me. And we have the data to prove it.

You see, different employees care about different things. Yes, all of us value functional, tangible benefits like perks, paychecks and job security. But when it comes to emotional needs—the intangible stuff that rarely appears in a job description—that’s where we start to segment into different work personalities.

We conducted a quantitative survey of 1,100 employees who are working primarily from home. We asked them to identify what they most want—functionally and emotionally—from their employer. We also interrogated them about their attitudes on working from home, and we sought to understand their WFH conditions. (Do they have kids? Do they have roommates? How big is their living space? Are they in the city or the country or the suburbs?)

This study is helping us and our clients better understand how we can motivate, retain and reward our people in this new remote working environment.

The quantitative study revealed five distinct needs-based segments. Because their needs differ, their employers must add value in different ways.

Understanding the Needs of Your Remote Workers Five Needs-Based Segments

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Understanding the Needs of Your Remote Workers: The Climber

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Climbers are frustrated by the lack of consistency, clarity and structure in their WFH routine. It’s harder for them to feel acknowledged or rewarded for the work they’re doing, and they are less likely to see a path forward with their company.

The latest from inside VSA.

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