Rebranding a Creative Agency
Way, way back in the winter of 2019, when the whole world hadn’t yet been brought to its knees by a respiration-stopping speck, the always ideating creative team at Timelapse, looked at their brand and said in unison, “It’s time to shake things up.”
There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the old brand. Quite the contrary. It was contemporary, cosmopolitan, and effective insofar as people stayed on our site, filled out forms for brand assessments, it generated all kinds of business for us, and it represented our work well. The only knock we could legitimately make was that it had lost its uniqueness. In other words, the times, along with other agencies and companies, had caught up to us stylistically. What was once leading-edge design and one-of-a-kind messaging had become, to our eyes, ordinary.
Step 1: Thinking. A lot of thinking.
A rebrand can be one of the most liberating, awareness elevating, joy-inducing activities a business can undertake, or, it can be one of the riskiest, business damaging, sorrow-inducing debacles one may experience in their professional life.
When you stop to think of great rebrands the fairly recent updating of the English Premier League might pop into your head or the work done by Airbnb, or the latest evolution of the VW brand. When you think back on brands that didn’t rebrand well, Pepsi and Tropicana may enter your mind (or not) or when the Sci Fi network and their cool, ringed-planet logo, devolved to SyFy. Ick.
Rebranding a creative agency is a big gamble. Getting it wrong can have a deleterious effect on the health of the business. Conversely, when the job is done right, the world will beat a path to your door.
One of our advantages when it came to rebranding a branding agency is that everyone on the team is familiar with what goes into the process, with the biggest advantage being, we pioneered the Timelapse branding methodology, meaning we already had a rock-solid process in place.
The Timelapse process starts with a Discovery Workshop. When we conduct a workshop with a client we spend anywhere from a day to a few hours with them challenging their existing thinking through intentional exercises designed to get the client to figure out who they are. All the while we’re nudging them to elucidate what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for, in their own terms. We also run them through a handful of activities that get them to begin to define their brand’s personality. Everything we glean from these workshops comes from the client and informs the creation of their brand. Having participated in several of these workshops, I’m always floored by the quality of the information client’s share and the genuine passion they bring to the topic of their brand and their business.
We conducted The Timelapse Discovery Workshop in two phases, the first was in our Denver office. By session’s end we discovered that the audience we once thought to be our ideal target, (startups, green energy, and small to mid-sized biotech) had evolved. Given our growth, expanded global presence, and broadened team skillset, we had the capabilities on hand to service an array of industries on the B2C and B2B side.
Phase II took place in our San Francisco office with the entire team. This session was devoted to defining and visualizing what we do at Timelapse in a way that reflects our culture. From this workshop we determined how we would express our culture in a way that is understandable to anyone new to our brand. Another realization that emerged from the SF session was that we do everything slightly different. Not different for differents sake, but different in the service of doing it better.
The Timelapse Brand Personality
Take the Timelapse positioning statement for example. If you’re a marketing writer you’ve probably been tasked with writing a few of these.
One thing nearly all positioning statements have in common is they follow this formula.
1. Brand X is for… (audience)
2. Who need…(a solution that solves audience problem)
3. Brand X (verb)…
4. Unlike… (competitors, who are always portrayed in the least flattering light possible)
5. Brand X is… (summation of why Brand X is the best thing since ice cream.)
Certainly there’s a time and a place when following a standard procedure is a good idea, like when you’re building a bridge or performing an appendectomy, but when you’re attempting to set your business apart, sticking to the formula often results in setting your business firmly and unseen in the middle of the pack.
So we chucked the positioning statement formula. All formulas for that matter because we learned in our workshops that our brand reflects our culture and our culture embraces being different when being different matters.
Timelapse Positioning Statement
Some agencies talk a lot about how they want to brand and market your business. Others create pretty presentations and charts that they call “work.”
Timelapse builds brands for innovative high-growth startups to Fortune 500 companies across all industries and markets based on simple principles.
Be authentic.
Be of service.
Be creative.
Get results.
Every member of the Timelapse team has worked with brands local and global and brings this breadth of experience to every project, while our comprehensive list of services all point toward getting you results.
Other agencies deliver work that satisfies their needs (and egos) and to collect a check. We don’t. Whether you’re looking for project work, are starting from scratch, or your brand needs updating, Timelapse is your partner.
Our goal is to portray your brand in all its vivid colors and have it speak in a voice all its own. We’re here to help you master your messaging and to propel your brand out into the world.
Step 2: From Workshops to work
Not too long ago I was on a call with one of our clients who observed, “I’ve always watched the creative process from afar and was always jealous. They got to debate which fonts to use, what color palette looked best, headlines, all kinds of decisions being made. It always looked so fun. Now that I’ve participated in it I love it! But, it is a ton of work.”
It’s also a lot of research, debate, analysis, critiquing, tweaking, comparing, throwing out, starting over, resurrecting ideas that were thought to be dead, and about six dozen other things that whoosh past so fast they don’t even live long enough to make the list.
Atop this, ‘this’ being the controlled part of the process, is a layer of coherent pandemonium. Meaning, primal urges aren’t repressed. Spontaneity is encouraged. Impulsiveness of the, “Eff it, let’s do it and see how it looks,” kind is allowed. What makes the chaos coherent is that we’re all thinking of ways to solve the same creative challenge and driven by the same goal, to make the client’s brand real.
So, after a lot of debate and iterations, the new Timelapse visual system and voice and tone emerged, or in this case, kept returning to the first proposed concept.
For a lot of creatives, the first iteration of anything is often viewed with suspicion or produces more doubts and questions than ‘feels’ right. This was not the case with the new visual identity that expressed itself through its minimalism.
Visually the brand is understated, austere, clean, refined. Again, the source of going the less-is-more route came from our culture. The train of thought went like this: As a team we’re focused on client work. Everything we do is in service of presenting their brand in the best light. That attitude, we decided, ought to be the one that informs our visual identity. To do this we would keep the Timelapse brand economical or reserved and spotlight the work, the client, and their brand.
“We wanted the new visual identity to be grand yet understated,” explained Executive Creative Director, Natasha Mozz, “…like when you’re in the company of a smart person who doesn’t speak much but when they do speak everybody listens. In the end, we found a perfectly balanced visual system. The empty space speaks louder and clearer than thousands of extraneous elements and beautifully showcases the work.”
Art Director, Judikael Le Bayon remarked, “The new identity is clear, no fuss, simple, straight to the point. Also, I’d say the well-crafted typefaces, simple color palette are elegant. We’re not ‘in your face’ with crazy visuals, big words, complicated animations, etc. Our visual identity combined with the tone and messaging makes us approachable and direct.”
Step 3: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
Writing a voice and tone to compliment the brand’s spare style was more of a gradual evolution. In typical writerly fashion, the impulse was to cover as much of the white space with words as seemed fitting. (Writers see empty or unfilled spaces and experience horror vacui. Nature, like writers, abhors a vacuum.)
Early iterations of the brand moved through stages. First was aspirational, then came a kind of directness bordering on standoffish. The third pass came off as annoyingly clever. For the fourth try we took the client angle again. The brand voice and tone had to pass this test: If you’re a potential Timelapse client, how would you like to be spoken to? What would convince you to work with Timelapse?
This is where we landed:
The Timelapse brand voice balances clarity with originality. We use language that is precise and concise. Our words excite, inspire, and entertain. The Timelapse brand voice never dumbs stuff down. We talk smart because we are smart. We’re a brand whose voice tells the reader “like it is” and leaves the reader feeling we can do anything.
The Timelapse brand tone reflects our upbeat, cooperative, attitude. The tone possesses the proper amount of congeniality, competence, and confidence. It’s the kind of tone that creates an emotional connection. A tone that puts you at ease because you’re with peers who “get you.” All copy and messaging directly and clearly convey that Timelapse is the first, best, and right choice when it comes to strategic creative agencies.
Step 4: Making it look easy is hard
Then came the day it came time to launch the new Timelapse brand and website. In advance of the big day we QA’ed the hell out of the thing. We proofed once, twice, then proofed it again. The devs did all the stuff that devs do and leaves creatives mystified. All the leg work that needed to be done to get our social channels shored up had been done. We drafted an email announcement. We even wrote a fascinating blog (it is fascinating, right?) about the process, and just before we pushed it out of the nest we sighed a collective sigh acknowledging that we had created a brand that, as CEO & Founder Olivier Roth put it, “…reflects who we are as an agency: Strategic, organized, driven by top-notch design and great marketing, but also sincere and approachable.”
Tell us what you think? Or, if you like what you see, contact us heyo@teamtimelapse.com
