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Don Moss is the Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director of BrandSync. As ECD, Don is responsible for the strategic and concept development, continuity and overall impact of BrandSync’s work. His experience includes award-winning brand experience design, transformative events and interactive media for global brands on six continents.
My partners and I are, first and foremost, refugees from big companies.
What I mean by this is: if you are in the trade show, production, pr, or communications business, you are, by default, selling clients solutions that pay the bills for that business. You add ancillary services and practices, but it ultimately gets so big and so unwieldy that the cost of running the business – the overhead, holding talent, keeping everybody busy and billable – drives you to make business decisions that are not always in the client's best interest.
I spent most of my career working – like many people in this business – at big companies where billable time was a very important objective. We had to keep the lights on. So, we did what we had to do and we used the talent that was available, not necessarily who was best for the job.
BrandSync was founded on the opposite premise. We match the best people for each job and for each particular client. We begin with one small strong core team, then scale up or down, depending on our needs. With the relationships we have built over the course of our combined years in the business, we have an ecosystem of talent we trust and have great relationships with. We can make a commitment to our clients that they'll always get the best person available for the job.
Another cornerstone of who we are is that we are not focused on any one core business in the traditional sense. Someone reading this might respond by saying, “Well then, you don't do anything well.” I’ll counter by saying our core business is, in fact, our client. What we do best is work with our clients to understand their strategic objectives, architect solutions that meet their needs, then measure those solutions. We all have enough training across all disciplines to understand and solution solve no matter which business we are focused on at any given time.
Rather than beginning every one of our capabilities presentations by saying, “This is what we can build for you,” we ask, “What's keeping you up at night?”
It sounds really 101 and really basic to start with the client and their needs, but you'd be surprised at how many people open a presentation with “Here's who we are and all the stuff we can do.” We believe that if you open a relationship by starting to talk to the client about what you do, you're not hearing what they need.
It takes a certain flexibility and a certain confidence to be able to say “I'm not going to pretend that I know you and your brand and develop solutions right from the get-go.” And that’s what we’re prepared to do.
As we build this relationship, we generally move onto a strategic mapping exercise where we help them look through everything they're trying to accomplish. Next, we look at the tools, experiences and opportunities to engage their specific stakeholders in their specific channels to get that message across. We ask them hard questions about whether what they are doing right now is getting them the exposure they want and the net promoter scores they want – the energy and the impact they want. We want to know, where’s the sore point? Where are the challenges that need to be solved?
Most clients have good agencies and good marketers running those agencies. But what often happens in the process is that it gets fragmented across a number of different agencies that are all specialists for various client departments that very often compete for budget dollars, yet don't connect horizontally.
What we believe at BrandSync is that we can synchronize those efforts. We're not going to be the exclusive agency, and many times we’re not going to be the lead agency. But no matter our role, we’re going to work in concert with other agencies on the client’s behalf
Right now, we’re doing a live event where there’s a production company, a visual development company, and a content development company – and we're all working together. We own the content, and that's an important and critical piece. We partner very well with the visual design company, and we partner very well with the event company. The client has an ecosystem of agencies that they want to work together instead of competing with each other.
BrandSyncc could do three of those jobs. But if we went in and tried to grab any of those other agencies’ work, we would alienate ourselves from our client, who increasingly rely on us to synchronize, cooperate and work together. And that’s what we’re here to do.
It may seem obvious, but creatively, our work gets a lot better when we know you.
Yet, many clients work with production companies who are “one and dones,” and then they wonder why they're not getting results. They keep cycling through agencies looking for the next big cool thing. Maybe they have the confidence as a brand that all they need is some shiny wrapping or a lot of “extravaganza” around a launch or user group meeting, or a developer or a dealer meeting, or a channel meeting or experience. And maybe they even have internal people who came from our industry that are helping them do that. But what they do is they churn through a lot of agencies to do filling, as opposed to working with a team to do the hard work of figuring out exactly who they are, what they need and what they want to get across. That takes time and it takes hard work, but it’s what you need to do to achieve the results you want.
Even after all these years in the business, I still believe in the power of transformative events and experiences. My creative strategy is built on that belief.
And then, I’m prepared to launch something completely unexpected. To zig where others are zagging, to help clients put themselves into an entirely different market space than where they originally envisioned themselves.
Here’s the thing. I believe it’s critical that we create exceptionally engaging work, and I believe it’s equally critical that we measure that work.
Advertising agencies, PR agencies, and marketers have long known this. Net promoter scores, return on investment, return on engagement – these metrics are all integrated into their business models. Most production companies, however, have been slow to adopt this model.
That’s not us. As soon as we agree on a strategy, we say to our clients, we’re going help you measure this. And then, we come up with a clear plan to help measure which of our campaigns or training strategies have been more effective and in what ways.
My personal philosophy is that even if a creative strategy seems “cool” or “amazing,” if it doesn't land with my client or produce measurable business results for them, then it isn’t cool or amazing, and I’m not keeping it. Everything I do is based on my client’s success and, at the end of the day, that’s all that matters to me.
