Branded Utility: Interview With Jack Cheng

Jack Cheng is a good friend of PSFK. He designed (and coded) much of our layout and he’s helping us rework Marktd for a new launch soon. As part of our search, we asked the young creative about his take on the concept of Branded Utility.

Jack, you picked up on the concept of Branded Utility quickly on your blog. What attracted you to the concept?

Johnny Vulkan mentioned the term "branded utility" over coffee one day and I was drawn to the concept because it resonates with me on so many different levels. For a while now, I’ve been trying to convince some of my advertising friends that agencies should be doing work that’s closer to product development. My argument was that if it’s true that we have some of the most talented and insightful thinkers around, why should we limit ourselves to just advertising and just operating on the outermost layer of the brand or product? And as Ben pointed out, advertisers are spend ridiculous sums of money on making ephemeral pieces of entertainment when they even a fraction of that could be put towards creating something that communicates the brand’s messages in a more useful and permanent way. It just seems like common sense.

I’ve believed for a long time that if you do what’s right, everything else will work out in the end. If brands and advertisers genuinely give us something of value, then we’ll thank them for it. It’s good brand karma.

As a creative at an ad agency, how do you think this idea will affect your approach to your work?

Though I’ve recently been freelancing at SS+K,
prior to this I was doing full-time web-application development work at
a startup called Netset. Naturally, I try bring my experience on the
software and web-design side of things into the work I do on the agency
side. I think "Branded Utility" amplifies this tendency by giving it a
name and making me more conscious my thought process. The first
question I ask is "how can the solution to this brand’s problem also
solve a bigger, more societal problem?" It’s kind of like using a
creative brief as a means toward’s making people’s lives better.

If you could work with any brand on a Branded Utility project - who would it be with, and what would you do?

I think that the most interesting branded utility
opportunities are actually among big companies that have a massive
reach. Why? Well, for a lot of applications, you don’t need the backing
of a big brand because a couple guys in a garage can go ahead and build
it on their own (and they can probably do it quicker and better,
because they don’t have to deal with all the levels of bureaucracy).
However, there are certain apps (like the Nike+ iPod initiative I write
about on my blog)
that can’t happen unless you’re Nike or Apple because it requires
integration on so many different levels. Sometimes it takes giants to
move mountains.

I’d personally love to work on something for (PRODUCT)
RED - the brand’s message is already tremendous and RED could be using
all those partnerships to extend its cause in some really interesting
ways.

Apart from your blog, do you have any links to any articles we could use to brush up on this subject?

Yep, just use those links here…

There’s a company called Teknision whose business is based around branded applications. (I think they’re pretty new) http://teknision.com/siteVersions/tek2/index.html

I saw them in my stats when they delicious’ed me: http://del.icio.us/branded_applications

David Armano’s touched upon something similar a few times- he points
out how R/GA hired an interaction designer from frog design and is
probably thinking more about building mobile applications: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/10/going_mobile.html

Om Malik wrote about the business opportunities in widgets:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384338/index.htm?postversion=2006091105

JackCheng

Technorati Tags: branded utility