HOW TO RELAUNCH A LEGENDARY BRAND

In the world of climbing, Royal Robbins is a legend. He was the first to climb Half Dome. The first to climb El Capitan. The first staunch free-climbing advocate who refused to use pitons, bolts, and other rock-damaging hardware. And his clean climbing ethics are still used today. Not to mention, his name was “Royal”. It gets no cooler than that.

The company he and his wife Liz started was conceived on top of Half Dome and born in Basecamp in Yosemite Valley in 1968. The clothes they made were for people like them. People who lived in basecamps all over the world so they could climb, hike, trek, ride, travel, and talk about it all night around the fire.

But somewhere along the way, the brand lost its luster. While Royal’s climbing buddy and old friend Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia and became a mainstay in outdoor gear and apparel, Royal Robbins sold the company in 2007 and it shifted toward more of a travel brand.

That’s where it was until 2018 when the brand was bought by Fenix Outdoor, which also owns brands Fjällräven, Tierra and Hanwag. And that’s when we got a call from an old friend. Erik Burbank, a client back in the Nike days and then again in 2019 when he was with Keen. He was hired as the GM of Royal Robbins and wanted to relaunch the brand. Needless to say, we were happy to help.

Liz and Royal on Half Dome. After Liz saw this picture, she decided they had to start a clothing company.

The thing about a guy like Royal Robbins is that he was gonna spend his life with someone even more impressive than he was. Royal’s wife Liz is a woman of incredible character and a helluva climber in her own right. She was the first woman to climb Half Dome and the first woman to ascend a grade 6 climb anywhere in the world. It was at the top of Half Dome that a famous picture was taken of the couple. Liz saw it, looked at her clothing and said to Royal, “We need to start a clothing company.” So they headed back down to Camp 4 and that’s just what they did.

Once we heard that story of Liz and Royal at the top of Half Dome, we had the line: “Conceived on Half Dome. Born in Basecamp.” Because every great adventure starts and ends in a basecamp somewhere. And that's where you'll find Royal Robbins clothes.

Thanks to Erik Burbank, Gareth Martins and everyone at Royal Robbins. It’s been a long journey getting “Born in Basecamp” into the world. Thanks for inviting us on the adventure. There are lots of great San Francisco ad agencies. We’re glad you chose Division of Labor for your brand relaunch.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor;I added this lining submitted the CO in there whistling thank you people as a great work greatSan Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

Post-it Notes, Passwords and the Future of the Internet.

Our newest out-of-home ad campaign: More than 1,000 hand-written Post-it Notes make up each poster covering the streets of San Francisco letting people know they will soon “Never remember a password again” thanks to Stytch, secure, passwordless login technology.

Hatred of passwords is universal.

No matter what color state you live in or what language you speak, you speak ill of passwords. From the technophile to the Luddite, Gen Z to Gen X, Forever Trumpers and Never Trumpers, one of the few things the internet can actually agree on is our collective hatred of passwords.

That universal truth, that thing we can all agree on, that’s what we look for in advertising to create campaigns that make an emotional connection with people. Find that little piece of truth and make it big. That’s all great advertising does. It makes people feel something they already feel and then promotes something related to it.

Don’t you hate it when there’s just a drop of milk in the carton? Why yes, I should get off my fat ass and just do it. Finding that universal truth is what ad people do. And the truth is, passwords make the internet a frustrating, incongruous collection of sputtering starts and stops - Login, reset, verify your account, enter this code, re-login, incorrect password, ping customer service, scream profanity, wake your sleeping spouse. You know the drill because we’ve all been there. And we all hate passwords.

Hundreds of Post-it Note pads all hand-written.

A billboard from Stytch, Go Passwordless campaign by Division of Labor.

Enter Stytch, a San Francisco startup that just closed series B funding, with a billion-dollar valuation. Stytch founders Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel come from Plaid, so they know the sector, have the product, and are confident in their vision of a passwordless future. Their brief to us was a simple blog post with the title #KillThePassword. And that title is the strategic underpinning for our latest campaign.

One of the ways people try to remember all the passwords they have crammed into their brains is by writing them down on Post-it Notes and sticking them to computer screens, bulletin boards and cubicle walls. And we thought it would be pretty amazing to take all those sticky notes and cover billboards with them. A brilliantly colorful hodgepodge of notes, reminders, and passwords. An analog announcement that the world was going to be changing. Not a picture of Post-its or a computer-generated recreation, mind you, thousands of handwritten Post-its stuck onto billboards around the city.

A reminder from Stytch and Division of Labor: Your dog’s name123 is not a password.

When we presented it they were like, “Yes! We love that idea!” And we were like, “Yes! Of course, you do because you’re amazing and smart and you have a billion-dollar startup as proof!”

So then we had to make it happen.

To do that you need a media guy like Kasper Koczab. Kasper arranged custom-built glass enclosures to house the hand-made boards. He arranged execution tests to ensure the backlighting would be right and got a local artist to assemble each board by hand. Then we ordered 10,000 Post-it Extremes and Post-it Super Stickies and got to work writing.

We brought in about 25 production assistants to create the notes during three marathon sessions with more multicolored Sharpies than I’d seen since high school art class. But by the deadline, we were still short by over a thousand notes. So we arranged one final Friday night Shabbat charity session, invited friends and donated $400 per finished Post-it Note pad to the relief efforts in Ukraine. Thirteen pads amounted to over $5000 raised and pushed us over the number of Post-its needed.

Ron Lester at Iron Maverick is a San Francisco artist and metal worker who took on the task of arranging each board and layering the thousands of notes so people could just barely read the headline “Never remember a password again.”

There are also buses covered in cryptic, password-style headlines like, d0nTUh8pA55w0rD5L1kETh15? And K1LLpA55W0rD5oNcE&4aLL! Plus about a billion other billboards, bus shelters and bulletins with reminders like “Your dog’s name123 is not a password.” And “The average person resets passwords more than they have sex.” The whole thing starts launching early April to tell the world they will soon be able to forget their passwords, permanently.

Trying to remember passwords does trigger a lot of profanity. But you can’t actually cuss on a billboard.

We’re so proud of this ad campaign. Huge thank you to everyone involved:

Julianna Lamb, Reed McGinley-Stempel, Ali Pulver, Aiden Forest

Rebecca Reid, Faruk Sagcan, Dom Haury, Vassil Vassilev, Dawn Margolis

Kasper Koczab, Ron Lester

All our Post-it Note creators:

Anita Avila, Maia Sullivan, Henry Denberg, Raney Wolfers, Hennessy Boyarski, Lincoln Brown, Gabriel Aal, Jordyn Okumura, Shivani Amin, Sachie Ohara, Dani Steinberg, Bella Hann, Dahlia Zail, Gabriel Lobet, Sophie Letts, Brit Norris, Julia Sigel, Masina Tufa, Julia Dearing, Colton Kitan, David Wong, Mary Friedman, Vanessa Friedman, Deb Toizer and Eric Toizer, Ellie and Lydia Reid, Nils Krueger, Nikita Sriram, Lauren and Cora Arebalo, Emma and Katelyn Daniel, Emma, Eva and Elissa Holyoke, Alessandra and Guiliana Mancini.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

How to Launch a Brand in Three Short Months

Division of Labor’s new ad campaign for 15Five.

We won some new business this past April and launched our new client’s first-ever brand campaign this past August. The process from award to launch was incredibly efficient, which is rarely the case. Why? Well, to launch a campaign quickly, there is one major thing that must be done over and over again throughout the process. What is that thing?

Job One: Make Decisions

The client we’re talking about is 15Five. They're a major player in the employee engagement space. They’ve got a great product, but they’ve also got something many companies do not have; a decisive management team. Decisiveness is what separates the good from the great. The brunt of efficiency problems comes from delayed decision-making, or making decisions and then changing decisions. Or making decisions, changing the decision, and then showing what was intended to be the final decision to someone higher up the corporate ladder who actually has the final say. And then this new decision-maker eighty-sixes all the previous decision-maker’s decisions and now you’re back to square one. Sound familiar?

A well-run brand launch is best approached as one big decision tree. As you move through the process, you have to be decisive and never look back. This latest process was three-plus months start to finish:

Strategy workshop in May.

Develop creative in June.

Production in July.

Launch in August.

Make a shit-ton of hard decisions along the way.

Out of home advertising from Division of Labor and 15Five

The strategy workshop brought all the company players into one virtual room where we explored everything they could possibly say or stand for. (We run good strategy workshops; fast, fun, insightful plus there’s coffee cake.) From there, they had to decide on targeting, brand persona, archetype, main purpose, and a ton of other things that are all important but must be prioritized.

The next step is the creative brief which compiles the results of the workshop into a simple, pointed document used to brief creative teams. Give the brief to any team and they will know everything needed to communicate the brand. (It’s easy to un-decide things in this phase, so be careful.)

Four creative campaigns were presented and the team quickly eliminated two ideas and kept the two that they loved. They did not ask us to bring in other elements from other campaigns. Nor did they consult with their book clubs, spouses, therapists, investors, advisors, children or spiritualists. They decided which they liked best, and stuck with it.

Media plans were developed based on the creative and creative was revised to accommodate media. The client had to get serious about media spend and decide on a budget level for launch. This is a crucial point where delays can happen as the reality of spending money kicks in.

We then presented a production plan and prepared to brief our digital artists, designers, and producers. We presented everything via Google Sheets and in a Slack Channel and all along the way our clients could make comments, choices, and decisions.

They built out landing pages, prepared PPC, SEO, and organic planning. Then we all built out tracking and analytics plans and launched the campaign.

When does this decision need to be made?

Making decisions is easier when you know the effect of your decision. Is it permanent? Is it reversible? Is it crucial to the timeline? In every meeting they asked questions like:

What decisions do we need to make now?

Can you post our options and deadlines in the Slack channel?

What will you be doing next and what decisions will we need to make next?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked if you want to launch a campaign quickly. And if you want to make good decisions along the way. In the end, we have a shiny new campaign and, wait… what does 15Five do, actually? Ah, thanks for asking.

Basically, 15Five helps companies treat their employees better. And helps HR people revolutionize what we all think of HR. Their software helps learn what your employees actually think and does away with the yearly review process. 15Five will increase employee retention and engagement while helping companies behave better.

The entire employee engagement space has been blowing up the past five years as evidenced by all the articles out there including this recent one in Forbes, which is far more relevant and trustworthy than the blog of a small, independent ad agency.

So there you go. How to launch a brand campaign efficiently and some news about the employee engagement space and 15Five.

Thank you Julia Stead and Greg Hewitt and everyone at 15Five. Plus Dustin Smith, Rob Lee, Faruk Sagcan, Rebecca Reid, 29 Black, Rigved Sathe, Resize Guys etc.

The Chief Human Resources Officer is evolving. And 15Five is leading the way.

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