"Identity is Having a Moment."
As a cyber-tech startup, AKA is solving one of the largest challenges in modern IT: Identity and Access Management. With venture capital funding, they are building the intelligence layer to help enterprise organizations more safely and effectively manage their businesses.
As the Director and Producer on “The Future of Identity”, I partnered with Writer and Creative Director Chris Cochran to film a branded documentary that pushed beyond typical B2B marketing, and that achieved remarkable results by connecting with their target audience on a more meaningful, emotional level.
Our goals for the project were:
- We needed to introduce the leaders of AKA and establish their credentials within a highly complex, technical, and dynamic marketplace.
- We needed to accurately frame the problem that they were addressing for their prospective customers;
- And we also needed to position AKA’s solution as being uniquely effective and human centric compared to other competitors in their sector.
Every Story Is a Design Problem
Question: How do you earn the attention of your audience, connect with them, and establish trust among people who are fatigued, suspicious, or even disdainful of advertising?
The Answer: We must be more effective storytellers. As the advertising innovator Howard Luck Gossage once said, “People don’t read advertising. People only read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”
"People don’t read advertising. People only read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad."
Working-From-The-Inside-Out is a process for discovering the North Star, or the Central Idea that you are seeking to share with your audience. It is a philosophy that is heavily influenced by the teachings of screenwriting coaches like Robert McKee and David Trottier; yet the greatest influence on my approach comes from the Double Diamond Design Methodology, which was developed by the British Design Council, and uses alternating phases of divergent and convergent thinking to discover the Central Idea of the project.
Phase 1: Discover (Divergent thinking)
Phase 2: Define (Convergent thinking)
Phase 3: Develop (Divergent thinking
Phase 4: Deliver (Convergent thinking)
The Five Stages of Creative Development
Stage 1: Understand the Project. First: Discover, who is the audience? And, for the client, what is the goal of their message?
Stage 2: Find the “North Star”. This is the most important step in my creative process. I start with careful research: collecting inspiration, unique associations, and identifying our creative references. Understanding your North Star is the key step to launching an effective new campaign. It is the thing that the audience must grasp, contemplate, and that must resonate inside of them. It must be intuitive, and it must transcend language. In other words, it must be emotional.
Stage 3: Refine For Our Values. Creating work that is inconsistent, careless, or poorly crafted will not only fail to connect, but it can even work against you and undermine public trust.
Every campaign is faced with the risk that bad content can hurt more than it helps your brand.
My role as the director is to clarify the goals, refine the vision, and then gather together a team that is equipped to ask: With our unique skills how can we elevate the vision of this project to dream even bigger and better?
Stage 4: Define the Project Parameters. With the project taking shape, I create an initial pitch deck that includes our creative approach, a description of our audience, and a proposal for both the budget and schedule.
Stage 5: Deliver the Proposal. With the team and project parameters established we then propose how the project can be produced.
For The Future of Identity, our final creative treatment was 43 pages long, including Chris’s script for the AKA brand anthem, and a detailed story outline for our short documentary. It was a document that we shared across the entire creative team, though I haven’t included the full treatment here for copyright reasons. If you are interested in seeing a sample please feel free to reach out to me here, and stay tuned to learn more about my 300 Steps of Production in a future article.
Every Great Launch Needs a Great Launchpad
These 5 stages of my creative process take me through the first diamond of the Double Diamond Design Methodology. The second diamond of the methodology is what guided the team and I through Pre-Pro, Production, Wrap, and Post-Production.
This design methodology may seem obvious and simplistic, until you realize just how rarely it is followed. For AKA and The Future of Identity it built the groundwork for our success, and it helped uncover the North Star that guided us along the journey.
After the project was completed and broadcast at RSA, one of the largest Cybersecurity conferences in the country, Chris followed up in a text:
For a closer look at "The Future of Identity", contact me here and I will be happy to share our case study materials with you.
Conclusion
