We aren’t fans of hyperbole. But it’s probably true to say that no single aspect of marketing is more important to success than brand strategy.

You can’t be all things to all people. So who do you target? What matters to them and how can your brand help? What’s your purpose? What’s your personality? What do you offer that is intuitively, emotionally better than what’s already available?

If you can’t answer these questions, your communication efforts will be scattered and your media dollars wasted. We can help craft a plan to differentiate your company, product or idea and drive growth.

In the same way that your personal identity is more than just your face, a brand’s identity is more than a logo.

It’s an entire ethos of visual elements that includes brand marks, typographical systems, color palettes, brand patterns and the dozens of unique visual extensions that make a company or product memorable and lovable.

It’s the wardrobe your brand selects from each morning as it heads out into the world. And it should be created with expertise worthy of the investment you’ve already made in your brand.

Here’s a paradox for you. Almost every single rule of advertising has changed in the last ten years. And the only ones that haven’t changed are the only ones worth paying attention to:

Have respect for your audience. Make your ideas beautiful and graceful. Don’t shout at people. Be interesting. Earn attention.

Everything else is about format and distribution. Those are important considerations, but we have people for that.

Most advertising sucks. But yours doesn’t have to. If you’re wise and brave enough to advertise well, the rewards can be extraordinary.

You’ve probably read too much about content already. It’s a buzzword. And what tends to happen with buzzwords is they give birth to "best practices" instead of the much rarer and more valuable "common sense."

Creating good content is simple, but hard. It’s simple because all you have to do is answer the question: "What’s the most valuable thing I could give my customers?" It’s hard because most organizations are hardwired to do the exact opposite, which is talk about themselves all the time.

Helping clients navigate this new territory is something we’ve become quite good at. And we’ve got storytellers, illustrators and filmmakers in-house who can help.

We won’t throw hard numbers at you, but let’s just say that approximately everyone you know is watching more videos online than ever before.

Brands that want to increase engagement with their customers need to create video content. This isn’t just true for consumer brands; it’s true for every single company.

The tools for creating video content are ubiquitous and relatively cheap (there’s probably one in your pocket right now). But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to produce video content that works effectively as a marketing tool.

We have experience telling compelling brand stories with video, and we can do it with a wide range of budgets.

The media kingdom has fractured into a thousands small republics, each with its own laws and customs. To keep track of it all, most agencies our size have out-sourced planning to media agencies.

We have kept this discipline in house, because we believe we need to be as innovative with how we spend your media dollars as we are with your brand messages.

Our media planning department works in tandem with our strategy and creative leads to find the most effective ways to reach your audience and measure the effects of your media investment.

It’s not enough anymore to wait for Silicon Valley to deliver the next cool device or platform. If you want true innovation, you have to do it yourself.

We have an in-house team of developers and technologists who practice "innovation tithing" on behalf of our agency—they devote 10% of their time to experimenting with new technologies, software languages, robotics, manufacturing tools, materials, printing techniques and augmented reality.

A lot this experimentation turns into ideas we can give to our clients as novel and practical ways to solve both critical business problems and marketing communication challenges.