Volume 41: New Citrix, imagination, blanding & ad-tech is at it again.

1. We interrupt our usual programming for some shameless self promotion.

tl;dr: Let me tell you about Citrix, which just went live.

In a true quirk of fate, I got to write last week about an Intel rebrand I don’t think will do the job they need it to do and this week I get to contrast it with a Citrix rebrand that I think absolutely will. Since I and the good folks over at Athletics worked with Citrix on this, I understand that I’m horribly biased, but please bear with me.

Let’s start by explaining why these two rebrands are so different. After all, they’re both middle-aged technology companies in an industry that fetishizes youth.

Put simply, the Intel story is the new logo without much evidence of an underlying there there. With Citrix, the new logo isn’t the story. Instead, it’s a signal of change that symbolizes the story, which is all about the business, what it’s doing, and where it’s going. Let me explain.

When we started working with Citrix, three things quickly became apparent. First, this was a company populated by fundamentally decent people with a humanity that simply wasn’t being reflected in the brand. Second, this was a company in the midst of a significant business transformation that was being hidden by historical associations. Finally, this was a company with the ambition to lead an emergent workspace category dominated by functional narratives and an unhealthy obsession with productivity.

Our job, then, became three things: 1/ Better reflect the company's humanity; 2/ Treat the brand as transformationally as they are treating the business to escape the constraints of history; and 3/ Deliberately differentiate from the functional, productivity-obsessed category norms.

I can’t possibly get into all of the work that we, the client team and their other partners have done, but I do want to focus on a few important observations:

First, the key strategic driver is that personal progress and potential matter far more than productivity. Productivity as written is an anachronistic metric in the 21st century. More output from the same time brings images of Taylorist time and motion studies. Instead, we can leapfrog this old-fashioned mentality by realizing that rather than a goal, increased productivity is a side-effect of using technology to enable people’s progress and unlock their potential. As a result, workplace technologies aren’t simply about squeezing more out; instead, they need to put more empathy in, giving people the space to augment their ability to create, innovate, and be successful.

Second, in this spirit of creativity and innovation, Citrix worked with us to embrace an array of creative partners way outside the norm for your average enterprise technology company, including some things I can’t talk about yet.

And finally, on the subject of open-mindedness, I want to talk about the client team who’ve been nothing but supportive, open and ambitious throughout. One of the great failings of our business is to judge clients based on what you see before the pitch. One of the reasons so many conservative seeming companies end up with such conservative rebrands is that their agency partners pre-judge their ambitions before they’ve had a chance to demonstrate otherwise. But I learned a long time ago when selling televisions to fishermen that you should never let first impressions give you the wrong impression. We owe it to any prospective client to be ambitious on their behalf and use their responses to gauge the appetite. With this mentality in mind, Athletics and I partnered to pitch for Citrix’s business and beat much larger and far more storied agencies, even though we were just a scrappy combo. That’s a decision that’s not easy for a client to make. I hope we’ve repaid them with work they can be proud of.

2. Strategy, ambiguity and the power of your imagination.

tl;dr: From ambiguity to linearity to what a business can become

I stumbled upon an interesting little conversation on Twitter this week focused on the difference between selling advice and delivering it as a consulting service. Specifically, in any strategy sell, the correct answer to a question is almost always “it depends” and “we’ll need to figure that out,” which, if acknowledged, would make for a very short conversation.

I found it particularly interesting how fast responses moved from selling strategy to selling processes and tools, which someone quite rightly compared to selling a drill's tech specs when the client wants a hole.

If I were to chase this metaphor down a rabbit hole, while clients don’t want to buy drills, they often aren’t just looking for a hole. Instead, the ask looks more like: “I know I need a hole. I just don’t know how big it should be, how deep it should be, the best way to drill it, and where I should put it so I don’t accidentally wreck my house. And maybe it shouldn’t be a hole. Can you help?” In other words, strategy problems are almost always messy, ambiguous and non-linear problems that are highly vexing to clients.

Having once consulted to a consulting firm (how meta), I had a fascinating conversation with their managing partner on this very topic. His view was that the key to selling strategy lies in taking a messy non-linear knot of ambiguity and turning it into something linear instead, because people are much more comfortable and confident in managing linear problems than non-linear ones.

Thinking about it, this is something the best strategic minds do intuitively: break down messy problems, prioritize the things that matter the most, and connect the dots to make the problem appear understandable, manageable, and, yes, linear.

But I don’t think this alone is enough. In addition to being able to break down the problem, you also need the imagination to envision what’s possible. In the same way that the best contractors don’t just come in and drill you a hole, they help you imagine what your house could be, the best strategy consultants help you understand what’s possible from your business and brand.

It’s the thread of imagination and ambition for the possible that truly connects how you sell strategic advice to how you deliver it. It is this belief in what the client can become that you’re really selling.

3. The blah, blah, blanding of the world.

tl;dr: A thoughtful blueprint on exactly what not to do.

The first time I heard the term “bland” related to branding was in a somewhat, how should I put it…cantankerous meeting with the former chairman of Wolff Olins, Brian Boylan, who amid a review of work to be presented to a client, pointedly exclaimed that “We’re in the branding business, not the f’ing blanding business.” This was probably around 2002 or so, and like many of the things Brian says, it’s a statement that sticks with you because he’s right. Wolff Olins most certainly wasn’t in the blanding business and nor should we.

Fast forward to 2020 and the term blanding has become something of a catch-all category definition for venture funded DTC. (And I must admit that I find it somewhat amusing that folks think they’ve invented a term that was being screamed at me almost 20 years ago.)

Anyway, I found this incredibly thoughtful and well researched piece on the scale of the blanding problem to be both readable and insightful. It goes into way more depth than I have the patience for myself, so I certainly appreciate that someone else did.

The best way to think about this is that it represents an excellent blueprint for exactly what not to do. It highlights how formulaic and boring and fundamentally uninteresting blanding is. And as far as I can tell it’s a strategy that only works (kind of) if you have a war chest of venture funding you’re willing to incinerate in the process.

Maybe we can get back to the branding now instead?

4. Twice the price for half the results. Yes please, say marketers.

tl;dr: Dr. Fou speaks truth to power. Again.

I’m a huge fan of Dr. Augustine Fou. He consistently presents a cogent understanding of what’s really going on in the world of digital advertising, particularly the value-destroying perils of digital ad fraud and the extractive qualities of the advertising tech stack.

In his latest article for Forbes, he focuses on how poorly most ad-tech targeting is and how much they charge for it. To paraphrase, even when it comes to something as seemingly obvious as targeting by gender, ad-tech vendors get it wrong. Not just wrong, they perform worse than the natural gender split in the population. That’s right, if you don’t target by gender at all, roughly 50% of the population who see your ads will be the gender of your choice, whereas if you have an ad-tech vendor charging you to target by gender, it’ll be more like 42%. Add more targeting constraints and the accuracy drops precipitously from there.

But wait, it gets worse. Not only does the targeting underperform doing no targeting at all, but you get charged a significant premium for the privilege. Ad-tech vendors typically layer on as much as 100% of the cost of your CPMs as their cut for delivering a targeted audience, and they’re abjectly awful at accurately representing them.

So, what to do? Well, Dr. Fou makes some excellent points. Don’t bother with the targeting because it costs you a lot of money for worse results. Instead, do the smart thing that marketers always used to do: focus on the publisher's quality where you want to place your ads and the contextual likelihood that the people you want to see your ads will be visiting those sites. Seems like a smart move to me.