Mind Over Matter Monday, March 05, 2007 It has quietly become one of this industry’s most powerful forces, a global design leader spanning the entire live spectrum. It is a dominant driver in the growth of the experiential realm, crafting some of the most progressive environments and engagements for some of the largest brands on the planet. And the work—integrated, next-generation, living architecture—is literally sending a shockwave through the industry. The Era of Imagination has officially arrived, and this business may never be the same. It’s long been nearly impossible to label Imagination—and that’s the point. Some peg the London-based company as an event agency, others as an exhibit house or design studio. There are those who consider brand communications the forte, and some who label digital media as the defacto offering. Exactly. The fact that Imagination is miscast as any number of types of companies is a testament to a business vision that mandates the organization not take on the form of a design house or marketing agency. Rather, it is positioned as a “global consultancy,” balancing one of the strongest design competencies found anywhere with insights-based research and content. “Being a consultancy reinforces us to be, first and foremost, a thought-leading enterprise. It’s a deliberate use of language,” says Eduardo Braniff, the ceo and creative director of Imagination USA. “We solve problems, craft solutions, and understand situations. We use design and technology to achieve clarity. ‘Consultancy’ is more all-encompassing than ‘agency’ or ‘studio’. In the end, we want to be the McKinsey & Co. of creativity.” And Braniff may be just the man to make it all happen. He began his career at MTV in charge of its international syndication arm, taking U.S. programming and translating it around the world. “It was about understanding what the underlying essence of a program was and letting the particularities of the region influence the show. It informed for me the beginning steps of defining what it is to get down to the core of something, the basic tenet of what makes that thing that thing.” He then changed gears and ramped up the MTV Books division, beginning to analyze how stories resonated with people and how to convert one audience (a viewership) into another (a readership). Next he went Hollywood, producing a string of movies, including 2001’s “Kissing Jessica Stein.” It was during this stint that Braniff “learned what it’s like to rally a team over a very concentrated period of time, define a story, and express it in a given medium.” And then he joined Imagination, bringing with him a background steeped in storytelling, business-building, and live theater.: the perfect combination for company founder Gary Withers’ grand plans. Opened in 1978, Imagination cracked the £100 million mark last year. The company employs 372 people in London, Stockholm, Cologne, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, New York, Toronto, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The bread-and-butter work is in the event space, but Braniff is quick to note that Imagination remains media-neutral. Spend some time with him, as we did, and you’ll hear a different view on the industry. For Braniff, it’s not about integration, it’s about calibration. It’s not about message consistency, it’s about message alignment. It’s less about the perception of the brand and more about what’s inside it. And insights are, absolutely, everything. Everything. “Whether it’s a one-off event or something high-level, consumers are not looking for what brands contribute to their lives, but moreover what the company behind the brand stands for,” he says. “We are in an upstream move to get to the fundamental ethos of a company and align all communications in an integrated messaging system that gets delivered through any number of channels.” So it’s not enough to be relevant. Messages must be tuned perfectly via what Braniff calls calibration. “All marketing endeavors need to challenge themselves as to why they are trying to communicate a message and if that message is correctly calibrated for where the audience’s mindset is,” he says. “Then we have to shift that mindset so the message resonates more clearly.” He looks at integration as a platform for “aligning” brand communications, not a gauge for mere consistency. “We could go back to 1992, when it was all about making sure the billboard looked like the direct mail piece, but truly integrated design happens at a more fundamental level—which is to say that if a graphic is informed by architecture and vice versa, both of them will be decidedly different than if the graphic designer were to just put the graphic on a wall. Were a digital designer to be in that same room bringing to the conversation an understanding of how pixels move across screens, the architect and graphic designer would listen and then push the design so that when those two elements appear in the same space they look like they were conceived by the same hand.” The consultancy’s work speaks for itself: The jaw-dropping multi-acre global auto show exhibit design for Ford (look left). Last year’s celebrated Intel rebranding at CES. The game-changing Samsung Experience environment in New York City. Media-infused launch events for everyone from NASDAQ to Harry Potter. Internal b-to-e programs for JetBlue, and, well, hundreds of others. And while the temptation to focus this story on the design process, next-gen media, and scale of some of the programs is great, we found something just as interesting happening behind the scenes. Braniff is carefully playing chess inside the organization with a series of dedicated groups and new ways to inject white-hot insights and strategy into Imagination’s veins. The company is also uniting its offices around the world in ways that make them horizontally connected yet vertically relevant, and building a global network of partners that will one day resemble a Hollywood dream team, with freelancers retained much like Tinseltown writers are optioned by studios. At the center of the blueprint—and growth plan—is an expanding dependence on a centralized Insight Group, used for both internal and external functions. This group, started a few years back and becoming the backbone for much of Imagination’s strategic thinking and creative reasoning, has literally become a tour de force. The unit is leveraged in multiple ways. Internally, the Insight Group commissions regular thesis-type papers, trend reports, and analyses, then partners with the Imagination rank and file on execution. A designer in New York, as an example, was recruited for an analysis of social networking sites’ impact on 3-D design. He went out, researched, compiled information, and came back to the Insight Group with a theory on what he termed “design density” stemming from the social networking phenomenon. “Online, there is a convergence of people, things, and conversations,” says Braniff. “This project resulted in our designer coming back with thoughts on how we can use that density to engage people with over-stimulation in physical environments.” Other efforts have yielded additional thoughts and information, something Braniff says is huge. “The Insight Group then collects the information, filters it through the original thesis, and comes up with a point of view on what’s going on, seen through design, media, content, and technology,” he says. “The goal is to have, at the baseline, a very unique and robust understanding of that topic as related back to the experiences we are delivering for our clients. At the minimum, we’re educating ourselves more. But at the high end, this becomes an asset of intellectual property that we can share, sell, or distribute to clients. We’re doing our best to stay ahead of trends so that when it’s relevant, we’ll be ready.” It’s also providing constant content and design stimulation. “We are putting more brains behind our brawn. We’re taking the talent we have in-house and giving them the means through which to explore areas of interest, focused on a particular topic. We’re creating a cache of knowledge that betters our talent, makes us more conversant in relevant topics, and grounds our work in an understanding of the client.” When a new client does engage Imagination, the Insight team analyzes the opportunity. “More often than not we find the essence of a brand is assumed by a company,” says Braniff. “But when you start to query and inquire as to the understanding of the brand, we find that many aren’t as aligned as they assumed.” Why? Because most brands were never marketed in the medium of live. “Many companies haven’t thought about their brand experientially, about what it communicates when it’s in the form of a physical environment,” Braniff says. “We start to define, and then we refine. All clients benefit from a process of us challenging and understanding the opportunity.” The Org Chart Going global is hardly unique in this business. But the way Imagination is building its worldwide org chart is. For one, the company has set up offices around the globe that are horizontally integrated yet vertically relevant. A taste: The New York office is anchored in content and strategy, Australia in insights, Hong Kong leans on production technologies, and Los Angeles on digital, sports, and entertainment. “There are a few ways to define global,” says Braniff. “One is to have a collection of addresses around the world. Another is to network those addresses in a way that they collaborate and understand each other. All of our enterprises around the world sing off the same sheet.” Second, the company is obsessive about investing in its knowledge base. In addition to the Insight unit, Imagination has a bustling Production Technologies Group charged with non-stop research and development. “They research ways for delivering messaging and content in new and unique ways,” says Braniff. “From hardware to software, when coupled with the Insight Group this forms a powerhouse of what’s possible.” And finally, the company has built itself what Braniff dubs “a global consortium” of partners tying together thousands of 2-D and 3-D designers, lighting designers, writers, sound designers “and every possible discipline that can be used to create a relevant message between an enterprise and an individual.” It’s less a network of freelancers and more a collective of “members.” Braniff likens it to Hollywood. “We will evolve this into a new global platform, working in much the way Hollywood options scripts from writers.” Multidiscipline design is evolving into a new medium in which the pieces are being fused together, Braniff says. “Can we stop calling it multidiscipline design and just start calling it design? What was once about multiple people each holding a discipline is now about individual people holding many. By bringing together multiple elements of design, it elevates each to a different place by virtue of their integration.” That’s only the beginning. The Era of Imagination will continue with new offices, additional offerings (a white paper-level consulting practice is already booming), and more global work for more clients. “Transformation is the next chapter,” says Braniff. “We can easily evolve—evolution within any organization is one of the most invigorating challenges, and we are poised for it. The discipline of design is universally applicable,” says Braniff. “It can become a piece of retail, an exhibit, even a strategic planning session in which you design the discussion, the ideation session, and how you communicate results.”
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