Cincinnati
might have more marketing brainpower per capita than any other American
city. The global headquarters of consumer packaged goods giant Procter
and Gamble is here, so the ancillary firms are legion, and one of the
biggest is LPK, an employee-owned branding agency with 95 years of
history.
When
you’re redesigning or inventing products for million-dollar brands,
your creative team has to be in top shape. (LPK has clients including
giants such as P&G, Bayer and Nestle, though the exact projects they
work on are confidential.) And your relationships have to be tight:
Client service is a huge component of any agency.
So LPK had an idea: Unplug the company for a day and get down to brass tacks. Certainly many people have attempted to go unplugged for a day or a month
to recharge their batteries and report on the experience. But I
couldn’t find any examples of entire companies trying to go offline for a
day. So I went downtown.
The tech turn-in
LPK’s
Cincinnati offices flank Piatt Park, a slim green space that wouldn’t
be out of place in lower Manhattan. (They’ve also got offices in London,
Geneva, Guangzhou and Singapore.) The main building is on the south
side of the park, and the Brand Innovation Center, a former senior
center turned LPK conference facility, was the site of the tech turn-in,
a lockable room to be guarded by an office administrator.
It
takes a lot of preparation to be unplugged: Setting up out of office
messages, printing off copies of anything you need to work on from the
server, remembering to bring a watch that works. (Pro tip: If you can’t
find a watch, carry around your full-sized kitchen clock like Flava
Flav.)
People
parting with their devices attached nametags to them and themselves and
stacked the laptops and smartphones on a large table. “I just need 10
more minutes with my device,” a woman said as she scrolled. “I have to
find a real phone to call London at 11:30—is there one in this
building?” one marketing team member asked as another changed all of
LPK’s social media account images to reflect their offline status before
her laptop ran out of battery. “I’m having second thoughts,” a
latecomer said. “I’m supposed to build a Powerpoint deck today.”
1
The
firm planned ahead to ensure every moment of the unplugged day was
documented: A freelance videographer exempt from being unplugged was
filming interviews with a digital camera. One woman took snaps with a
Fuji Instax Mini camera to create an analog Instagram stream; a
makeshift social media wall of butcher paper and markers lined the
hallway of the third floor; someone brought a 10-pack of disposable film
cameras from Amazon.
Disconnected
from their usual feeds, two communications people walk to a bookstore
to get the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Cincinnati Enquirer,
documenting the three-block journey with an old-school Hi8 camcorder. On
the elevator as they returned, a freelancer was arriving for the day
and told the unplugged: “I’m holding. Are you jealous?”
The naming session
A
naming brainstorm for a client’s new eyewear product was powered by
paperback thesauri and Post-Its rather than laptops and projectors. As a
project lead described the results of field research with customers and
salespeople, and copywriters called out portmanteaus and puns, I
noticed hulking Yellow Pages hiding under the cart the speakerphone is
on; the directories were from 2007.
LPK
is often a silent partner in the development of a new product for a
client. The scope and details of the eyewear project is confidential,
but I can tell you that millions of customers will be seeing it next
year.
The
copywriters and project managers made analogies to pizza, cars and
beer. “Should we remove the vowels?” There are no bad ideas in these
brainstorms; even an idea the copywriter offered with a disclaimer goes
on the board as potentially workable. “Or with a Q instead of a K to
make it sound smarter.” One guy who recently worked on a shapewear
account had a lot of synonyms for thin to add to the mix.
I
was mostly unplugged in solidarity, writing in a Field Notes cahier and
using a vintage Polaroid camera for eight select shots. But in a
meeting-induced boredom reflex, I pulled out my phone to check my
notifications (there were very few, and none of any importance
whatsoever) and immediately felt like a cad for doing so. “Our whole
point was to make people feel like assholes,” Chief Creative Officer
Nathan Hendricks later joked.
The trend forecasters
The
sixth floor of LPK was especially unplugged: The recently renovated
space has no landlines at all, so the intercom system used to page
people on other floors was useless. (Rumor had it that someone was
running down messages from the seventh floor when necessary.)
This
is where the trend department of LPK lives, and it is intense: Their
trend analysts regularly create five- and 10-year forecasts for clients,
identifying large cultural movements and influences that will affect
consumers’ lives. Research into the past is key to determining the
future: They create “backcasts” by digging through old issues of
magazines to see how the trajectories of past trends have played out.
Sometimes
clients have them monitor trends and scrape web data; what they’re
after is the global zeitgeist, the metatrends. By monitoring shifts in
values, they can see trends emerge and predict how future events can
inform clients’ decisions today, tomorrow or in 10 years. The team
recently did a 50-year forecast for a client; the analysts read a lot of
science fiction to digest how the way we imagine the future has changed
in the past 20 years.
Tech
has decentralized the generation of trends and has accelerated the
churn. The general lifespan of a trend—often starting in fashion, then
going to beauty and home décor before landing in the baby care and pet
care spaces—is getting shorter. That trend diffusion used to take two or
three years; now it can happen in eight months to a year, creative
director Bryan Goodpaster tells me.
The
economic downturn majorly shifted values. A series of charts in one of
the trend war rooms outlines seven big categories they’ve identified,
each broken down to three or four macro trends, with micro trends under
each of those. (The micro trends are what you’d actually see on the
pages of Vogue or morning talk shows.)
Many
of the products the trends team is working on won’t go to market for
another decade. So is LPK predicting trends or prescribing them? It’s
hard to say.
The pattern makers
On
the same floor, designers specializing in patterns and prints are
working on creating a pattern that evokes LPK itself. Pattern creation
is an exercise they do for clients all the time but are just now doing
for themselves. It’s especially essential in the baby care and feminine
care spaces; I spot a foam-core board covered in unfurled maxipads
nearby.
The
in-house pattern project kicked off last month with coloring books of
sorts sent to their international offices. The team developed their own
ideas, based on five concepts, and they’re now tearing apart the books
to add the ideas to the mix.
The
creative team—all women, most of them young—seem to have a uniform of
skinny jeans and boots. (Other departments trend all-black euro-cool or
lumbersexual.) Some of them sit cross-legged on the floor as people talk
about the patterns on the 3×5-foot boards they’ve developed. An intern
braids colored pipe cleaners into analog watches and friendship
bracelets. “Can you make me one with a sundial?” creative director Jenny
Sauer asks. The intern offers one to Hendricks, who has poked his head
in, and he says, “Yes.”
After
the team has talked through the iterations, it’s time to
powerdot—everyone gets three hot-pink stickers to vote for the concepts
they can’t live without. The goal is to create 100% ownable artwork for
LPK. The team often buys artwork they manipulate to create on-trend
patterns for clients, but for this project they want the final result to
be all them. The pattern will be added to the brand’s toolbox, for
presentations, internal documents and their upcoming website redesign.
“It’s playful, but it’s also serious business,” Sauer says. “We want to
avoid being really corporate and boring but not so off-the-wall that
people can’t see themselves in it.”
The reconnection
The
device room wasn’t supposed to reopen until 4pm, but I am notified on a
walkie-talkie that the doors have opened early because some people had
to leave. This causes a bit of a reconfiguration of plans. They want to
make the release dramatic for their documentarian: “I want a military
tarmac moment,” Hendricks says.
Sitting
in the device room after they’ve shut the doors again, all of the
phones start buzzing and beeping for the 15-minute reminder of when
everyone can have their devices back. Though I did look at my phone a
number of times throughout, I didn’t touch my MacBook Air once; the only
thing I got for lugging around my three pound security blanket was a
back spasm.
All
told, about half of the more than 200 employees at LPK’s Cincinnati
headquarters unplugged; many in London and Geneva joined in, and a
select few from the Asia offices disconnected in solidarity. Since many
employees were going to be out of the office for the holidays after
Friday, some couldn’t pull themselves away from their computers. But
most of them got creative: The feminine care group did an offline
brainstorming session about—get this—digital audits.
Creative
work largely happens offline anyways, but without tech distractions,
you work much more efficiently. One executive said all of her meetings
ran 15 minutes short of their scheduled times. “Meetings went a lot
faster because everyone was paying attention,” says Vice President Amy
Steinmetz, who usually is based in London and Geneva. Rather than
creating a massive slide deck to give her year-end European financial
update, she sketched out the bullet points on a single piece of paper
and photocopied it. She presented it in four minutes. Another employee
reported connecting with his coworkers more, rather than turning to
Pinterest or Twitter any time he was bored.
Some
found being unplugged refreshing and freeing; others found it
anxiety-inducing. One designer estimated she spent a cumulative hour of
her day just walking around the building trying to find people she
needed to talk to. Staffers coped in different ways: One wrote texts to
her boyfriend on sticky notes to give him when she got home. Another put
a Post-it pad in her back pocket as an ersatz phone.
When the device room doors opened at 4, staffers excitedly grabbed for their phones and then seemed disappointed that the world didn’t end without them. “No new notifications,” one reported. “I’m apparently not that popular.” “My first message: ‘Check your email.’” “Three emails, no texts. Dumb. Stupid. Put me down for another 24 hours.”
