Strategy doesn’t photograph well

Open Campaign this morning. Then Creative Review. Then Design Week. And count the stories about work made for B2B organisations. 

You will not need both hands.

There will be a beer and a burger campaign, a football club or fashion rebrand, and something clever involving a supermarket and the national mood. And there’ll be a side hustle addressing the latest social hot-button issue.

Most of it is good, some of it is excellent, and I enjoy reading all of it.

But almost none of the stories come from the half of our industry where the largest budgets sit, and some of the hardest briefs are written.

The tyranny of pictures

Trade titles are trend-sensitive visual media, whatever else they are.

A homepage needs an image that stops a scroll. A poster stops a swipe. A title sequence stops a click.

But a message platform that lets a founder say the same thing to a Senate hearing, a Korean shipyard and a graduate engineer stops nothing, because nobody has worked out how to photograph an argument.

So coverage tilts towards consumer work you can see, and away from the reason it looks that way.

That is not an argument against beautiful work, because good work combines compelling ideas with distinctive expression. The trouble is that only one half of that combination fits on a homepage, and we have all quietly agreed to treat it as the whole.

Our work for CORE POWER, a successful British business pioneering ship-based nuclear energy, is a good example.

CORE POWER are leading the world in the development of floating power plants moored at ports and, in time, nuclear-powered cargo ships. The market is estimated at about $2.6trn, and their partners include giants like BWXT, Southern Company and HD Hyundai.

So we built the brand around a promise, Energy That Moves, which is small enough for a hard hat and big enough to frame an industry, and launched it in June at CORE POWER's European summit in London to more than 400 global energy leaders, regulators and engineers.

Yet it did not trouble the design press. And I have thought long and hard about why that is.

The work was not short of a beautiful design that breaks sector conventions. The logo was even mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article. The eye candy was there. But I think the story wasn’t seen as relevant because the category was unfamiliar and much of the value was in the thinking.

Do we want to be strategic partners, or decorators?

Our industry has complained for forty years that clients treat us as decorators, called in only after the adults have decided the strategy.

We beg to be judged as a business discipline in the boardroom, but chase novelty and visuals in the press and in the awards.

So if our own trade media treat the artwork as the story and the problem as a caption, we can hardly act wounded when a chief executive files our entire profession under ‘ads’ and ‘look and feel’.

Why the current approach is worth fixing

Giving more prominence to the thinking and B2B work in general would change what ‘good’ looks like.

Because a press that explains the thinking behind the work, not simply its creative solution, is a press that presents this industry as we long to be seen: strategic partners, not decorators.