Launch of Double Art - part one

on Nov 03 in News, Projects, Strategy tagged by Peter Blackman

In the last few days, this web address has changed from being the website for my business Blackman AMD, and reverted to being a simple blog. The reason for this is that along with some other creative individuals I’ve launched a new venture called Double Art. Our new website isn’t quite ready yet, so I thought that for those people (Mother) who couldn’t wait to hear more about the new agency, that I’d do a little post here on what it’s all about…..

 

First of all -  we got the government to pay for everything. After all, they’re prepared to give those feckless banks billions of pounds of taxpayer money, so why shouldn’t they open up HM Treasury to some highly ambitious yet slightly disorganised creative people? Train 2 Gain came through with some funding, we found a couple of fantastic business development and brand strategy gurus, and set to work.

We brainstormed. Thought cascaded. Ranted. Raved. Took personality tests - the results of which were, yes you do have them, but stay away from sharp objects.

The disgorged output of these sessions was captured for our future reference, and your current amusement…

All of which led to us hammering our way through a ‘brand wheel’ for the new agency. Which I publish here again so that you might understand a little more about us…

 

In looking back and reviewing this now, it reminds me first of all how useful it was to use Lucinda of Marketing Clout as an independent moderator in these sessions. For even though this is just the kind of strategic advice and direction we would hope to offer our own clients, you just can’t be objective when it’s your own business you’re discussing and creating.

Secondly, and again thanks to Lucinda, I don’t think that left to conduct this process alone, that we would have had the guts to acknowledge and put at the heart of our values and personality the word ‘irreverent’. Furthermore, as it says on the attached slide:  we’re not the slickest operation in town - we’ll always be a little bit ‘rough around the edges’. Perhaps we also take our very English self depreciation too far sometimes - and this in a sector where there is always a talentless egomaniac ready to not only blow his own trumpet, but to buy in an orchestral brass section to accompany him as he tries to steal your clients away. We also can’t go ten, sorry, five minutes without making a gag. We’ve done tests. It’s impossible. No matter how important things are - they’re never serious. 

All of which may well mean that we are out of business in six months because we don’t take things seriously enough. That we play down how good we are. That we can be too, well, direct in how we express ourselves. But at least it’ll be us being us. Plus of course the fact that this irreverence is hopefully offset by our other attributes - which hopefully capture the passion and desire we have for producing great creative work, and are what any client would want from their agency. Or so we hope.

All of which leads to the name. Double Art.

Needless to say we came up with all sorts of ideas for the name. But we kept coming back to a quote that I was once told by a former colleague at WCRS - Jonathan ‘Hilly’ Hill. We were very creative with nicknames back then. Jonathan once related to me a piece of advice that he had been given by advertising industry legend Paul Bainsfair. ‘Bainsy’ told a young ‘Hilly’ - “always remember that a large part of a clients work is boring drudgery. It’s dealing with finance. Or distribution. Pricing. Warehouse management. Pick any example you like. So dealing with their creative agency - that should be the fun part. They should look forward to it. If the rest of their job is double maths on a rainy Monday morning, working with the agency should be like double art on a friday afternoon”

We love this sentiment. It not only sums up how we want our client relationships to work, but also how we all want to work together. We all have wonderful memories of art and design, critical and creative writing at school and college. We want to recreate the purity of thought and ambition that we had then, in everything we do now.

Our mission - which we have chosen to accept - is to ‘create great marketing ideas that capture people’s imagination’

Let’s see if we can.

Coming up next - drum roll, the website goes live….