Promax/BDA USA - New York

Yet another conference and yet another opportunity to preach the gospel of true branding, this time to an American audience (although there were a lot of European mates in the audience as well). I did a session on the relationship between truth and branding and that the only way to really be able to create a meaningful brand is to understand who you are and who your company is.
It seems to me that so many Americans understand the need for counselling and psychotherapy etc. - it's time we introduced a bit of that into our corporate cultures and did some company therapy to work out what kind of corporations we're building for the future.

The session seemed to go well, at least the room was packed and people were being turned away, and I had a few responses afterwards. If anyone reading this wants a pdf of the presentation please email me on martin@swaymedia.co.uk and I'll send you a copy.

I also wrote another state of design article for C21 about the US broadcast design scene which seems to me to be in a pretty difficult situation. You can download images of the article here or again email me and I'll send you a pdf. Just looking at American culture and particularly at American TV I wonder what is going on designwise as very little of it seems to be very carefully considered. The US way seems to be to shout as loudly as you can in the hope that you'll get heard above the rest so there's lots of brash graphics and loud colours and little sophistication or thought going into the work. That's how it looks to me as a Brit - if anyone can correct me I'd be very pleased to hear arguments to the contrary.