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Lor Gold, who was recently appointed to Global Chief Creative Officer at Schawk, Inc., took a few moments out of his busy travel schedule to answer a number of questions about his background, Schawk’s profile today and where he wants to guide the company, plus the branded marketplace today.
Q: Schawk encompasses both brand development and brand deployment across roughly 3,000 employees on four continents. So what does Chief Creative Officer mean at Schawk, and how is this position a reflection of client needs? What do you see in Schawk? What are your aspirations and your mandate?
A: There are actually three questions to answer (maybe four)— so I’ll take them one at a time.
1) My responsibility (and first love beyond family) is to oversee creative departments for both Schawk and Anthem globally. Individually, each office fulfills extremely important creative communication needs for every one of our clients. In some cases, we are an office that provides broad vision. In other offices, we provide precision on a massive scale. In every case, there is tremendous creative talent, care and concern for every detail—which always ends up as a highly creative expression designed to force attention that quickly leads to a desired action. This is what clients have always wanted and needed from their creative groups. But now, they need it more than ever. They have no patience or empathy for empty promises and inflexible thinking and they are rejecting marketing communications that don’t hit the mark consistently. Schawk and Anthem hits the mark. As Global CCO for Schawk, Inc., it is my role to expand our creative vision and precision and look for those places throughout the world where we can connect our individual office’s creative thinking and precise output to what our other offices excel in. In other words, it is my desire and mandate to make 1+1=3 for every brand we represent.
2) Since I joined the company long, long ago (2 ½ months) I have visited the creative groups of every North American office (Europe and Asia will be visited by the end of the year). Sort of a creativity audit with the objective of maximizing our positives. What I’ve seen is that there are creative treasures in every office. When you talk about the beauty and innovation of package design, or fashion, or digital as it pertains to retail, or the important power of direct marketing via the hand held media of catalogs and circulars, not many can even touch the creativity of Schawk. What we are now doing at Schawk Inc. is building creative connective tissue to for these incredibly important verticals. Global concept teams, advanced design, creative strategists, retail digital designers have been added to the mix to glue our verticals together into a more holistic (and stunning) creative offering. All for one thing and one thing only. Sell our clients branded goods and services.
3) What I see in Schawk is a company that our clients trust. So much so, they actually let us get as close to the brand as humanly possible starting with packaging. We are trusted to physically hold the brand within the work we do. To be the bridge between the brand and the shopper’s hand. That is a tremendous creative responsibility. From there, we can reach customers down the aisle, into the street, on the handheld—all the way to the house and the office. While every other agency thinks about brands from the outside in, we create messages from the inside out. What we think about, what we design to perfection at the point of decision (whether on-shelf or on-line) informs every other piece of communication all along the path. We do what we do everyday. Not just during the new biz pitch. It is not creative wishful thinking, it is creative reality. I think the industry we are in is changing dramatically everyday. Those who think they have creative down pat had better think again every minute of every day. That is my aspiration, my mandate, and my marching orders at Schawk Inc.
Q: Previously you were at Draftfcb Chicago and Rivet Worldwide, both part of Interpublic. How will your experience within one of the “big four” influence your contributions within Schawk’s extensive structure, in terms of services, integration and geography?
A: It strikes me that Schawk is only interested in being of great usefulness for the largest brands in the world. As clients have changed in what they need to successfully sell their products and services faster and in greater volume, so has Schawk. It is my belief that the change in the industry is now going to come faster and with much more ferocity. While other bloated, slow to move organizations are feeling the massive pinch to create change, change is nothing new to the agile and entrepreneurial Schawk. It brings fantastic resolve and significant resources to clients who are growing more and more impatient with those companies steeped in the status quo. Schawk has done so much to get the resources aligned. Now I get the benefit of this unique, progressive, and determined organization that is in complete support of creativity (ideation, design, production, you name it) in ways that are different than anything I have experienced.
Q: You’ve talked about the “old, bogged-down models” of advertising that responsive agencies are moving beyond today. Give an example of the old and the new.
A: Old: The answer is a TV spot. What’s the question? Or: The answer is a promotion. What’s the question? Or: you get the point. The answer that comes from old models is always whatever they do. Because it’s what they do best. And because it’s what they’ve always done and often they are heavily invested in it. And often because the people at the top know what they know and don’t want to risk taking on something new. Creativity is about always looking for a new way to do something. Yes, creativity must rest on the shoulders of experience. But experience often tells you what not to do. What hasn’t worked. New models use experience and data and insights derived from an observation of behavior to open new paths where creativity can travel. This is a wildly creative time. New channels are opening up daily. The strength and power of technology has done that. But it is creativity that must fill those channels. The new models are unafraid to fill these channels that lead to the coveted shopper. To do that, old models may have to give up what they have always done.
Q: Schawk has traditionally meant packaging but has moved decisively for many years into many more brand lifecycle segments and into many other media. How do you see packaging functioning today within these broader contexts – brand and media? What IS packaging today?
A: Nothing in marketing communications resides closer to the brand itself than packaging. The brand itself—all of it’s benefits, all of it’s innovation, it’s color, it’s shape, it’s promise) lives inside the package. The substrate that the brand lives in is often a very thin line between the product(s) and the shopper/consumer. The amount of insight and design and copywriting and innovation that goes into this very thin line is staggering. So much rides on it. It truly protects and defends the brand 24/7. It is the one medium that is on all the time. But rarely is the package design and the thought and the strategy and the care and the talent that went into it gets carried forward into other forms of brand marketing. I have never fully understood this. Why other forms of brand advertising and promotions would not be fully informed by what went into the packaging feel slightly out of whack and counterproductive. If the thinking that goes into packaging were carried forward from the all-important point of decision, one would be assured of total creative integration. Somewhere along the line, agencies have convinced their clients that the actual brand itself is somehow different than a branded message about the brand itself. I don’t buy it.
Q: The newspapers prove it every day: these are interesting times. How are brands reacting to the changes, the uncertainties, the opportunities?
A: I believe the world’s great brands are farther ahead of their agencies in thinking about “what’s next”—especially in what makes a shopper shop and buy. They do want to keep creating and developing brands people want to use and they continue to look to their agencies to help them communicate it in ways that lead to the sale—but clients are getting impatient. Rightly so. As I said, this is a time for explosive creativity and many marketing communication are still holding on dearly to what was rather than what is. In the end, the brands are showing far more creativity than their agencies. Balance through a closer partnership must come back for our industry to thrive.
Q: Are brands taking advantage of the opportunities to integrate brand development and brand deployment, in terms of collaboration, workflows, materials, vendors? What can get them to the next level?
A: I think they are—some much faster than others but it is accelerating—like everything else. We are a world that is demanding instant gratification—in information, in entertainment, in delivery of benefit. Long-term loyalty—like waiting patiently—is getting harder to find. The ask for loyalty is requiring more frequency. Proving your worth is requiring more frequency. We, at Schawk, call this Kinetic messaging. We believe the “We are open” sign must stay lit all the time. Brands understand this. Packaging agencies have always known this. We are taking what we have always known and we have expanded it into many new channels. It is our stand that the intersection where vision and precision cross used to be like two streets with a traffic light. Now, precision and vision are like two multi-lane freeways with no traffic light—and no slowing down. Brands want their agencies to keep looking ahead while navigating the present.
Q: If you hadn’t become a brand marketer, what career do you think you would have chosen – or would have chosen you?
A: I was a Sunset Strip kid playing all kinds of drums in all kind of bands. I loved the world of music and the power it has to make people feel something, do something, influence lives—one passionate beat after another. Still do. My kids are musicians. I have had many ideas on how to build branded venues for live opportunities for which talented musicians can express what they’re feeling. Each band is as much a brand as anything you can think of. It is this thought, this notion that is still part of my need to create—It is what I’m doing now, this aspect of my life—but it would just be traveling down a different road.
About the Interviewee
Lor Gold is Global Chief Creative Officer, Schawk, Inc. who oversees creative departments for both Schawk and its daughter company Anthem globally. He has focused his 25-year career on envisioning and creating innovative branded promotions, in-store and online retail experiences, and strategic shopper marketing where he fused the form and function of shopper behavior with newly conceived digital technology to create imaginative new brand experiences for consumers.