Yahoo will debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO. Futurelab has an interesting take on how what most marketing execs do: burn through media money and leave.

She  has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus. There’s nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand.  It’s what they do.

Here’s what usually happens next:

• Within about 18 months or so, she or he gets fired because the beautiful new branding didn’t have any measurable impact on the business
• The exec swaps jobs with another similarly failed exec at another company
• They trade vendors, and hire new teams to do new branding, and
• Repeat

What this means for ad agencies and marketing firms is that they need to start reaching into other parts of the enterprise than the marketing team. Agencies can’t just keep working with middle-level marketing managers, who approach things from a narrow, “my-way-or-the-highway” perspective.

When Marines get rifle lessons, they learn the acronym BRASS: Breathe, Relax, Aim, Squeeze, Shoot, and Bruce Temkin wrote about how these can apply to marketing:

Breathe: Set aside time every week to focus on what your brand is communicating. Don’t just assume you have it right for the next few years.

Relax: Remember that the brand will not fail if you pause for a moment to focus. It may fail, however, if you continue to waste marketing shots that are off-target.

And of course Aim: know exactly who your target audience is, their desires and emotional perception of your band.

I think the new agency site for CP+B is fantastic for three reasons:

1. The aggregation concept is a solid approach for companies (@Jowyang points that out) — bringing together all the conversations around a company from across the web fits the paradigm of open and transparent.
2. They’ve launched the site in an “open-beta,” the same way Google would. It’s rough around the edges from a functional perspective, but it’s up there and they’ll make it better.
3. They have plans to release it open source (see the “developers” link at the bottom of the site).

But despite that, I think the site is weak, because it looks like “beta,” unpolished, un-thought-out, with cliched tabs on the top right hand, and a standard grid layout. Across the web, there is a minimalist aesthetic shows beauty with just a little code. Poccuo is a small design-shop who does it right, among others.

While I’m not one to talk with the look of my blog, I do honestly feel CP+B would have done better had they just coded up an elegant wireframe, with clearer navigation and clickable elements.

If you own an iPod you’ll know Dieter Rams’ work by absorption. He was the head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, and influenced Johnathan Ives, who designed the iPod:

His “ten commandments” for good design focuses on simplicity and minimalism. This is a list a lot of industrial designers know, but take a look through the 10 qualities of good design below and see if there isn’t something that applies to what you do: I just recently came across it.

Good Design…

1. is innovative.
2. makes a product useful.
3. is aesthetic.
4. helps us to understand a product.
5. is unobtrusive.
6. is honest.
7. is durable.
8. is consequent to the last detail.
9. is concerned with the environment.
10. is as little design as possible.

[via BBHlabs]

Whether you’re an operational executive, or a creative director, one of your goals is to push out  forward-thinking, innovative work. But is process the antithesis of creativity? Is discipline a dirty word? Not at all.

For a while, Google as been synonymous with innovation. The company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren’t part of their jobs. Those “wasted” work days that so many execs would squawk at brought us GMail, Google Trends, and now Google Squared.

But Google has recently taken a further step towards fostering innovation, by establishing some basic managerial processes to ensure employee’s creativity finds its way to high-level management. After all, more than 95 percent of Google’s revenues trace back to Web-based search advertising. It’s been great at launching services like GMail, but Google has yet to have the company really rally behind these services as legitimate products (GMail is still in beta).

The Harvard Biz Review writes:

Google is creating “innovation reviews” where department heads share promising ideas with Google’s top leadership, helping executives focus attention and resources on promising ideas early. As CEO Eric Schmidt said, “We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed.”

It doesn’t seem like Google is walking away from its ideals. Rather, it’s trying to couple its world-class approach to the “front end” of the innovation process with the world-class discipline exhibited by companies like Procter & Gamble. It might yet struggle to bring these two approaches together. But success could allow the company to create an innovation capability that actually lives up to the hype.

The take-away here is that processes which push innovation from the bottom up are  good. Remember that saying: “sh*t flows downstream?” All companies need help defying gravity.

The parallel between enterprise and organism isn’t new, but this Booz & Company article explains marketing in that way, and I think it’s pretty insightful. Connecting the idea of biological DNA to corporate DNA, the lifeblood of an organization or organism, but also how ad agencies and marketing services providers all feed off one another.

“An ecosystem is an appropriate metaphor for today’s marketing environment. It is a dynamic, complex, and interconnected community in which marketers, advertising agencies, and media companies depend on one another, to a certain extent, to survive and thrive. But it is also a brutal, competitive arena, where a kind of “digital Darwinism,” or survival of the fittest, holds sway, rapidly distinguishing winners from losers. Companies that possess certain preferred traits in their organizational DNA or that have superior skills of self-adaptation are positioned to flourish in this ecosystem. Those without either face almost certain extinction.

The marketing and media ecosystem has arrived at an evolutionary threshold. Old structures and ways of working persist but are fundamentally challenged by newer, more dynamic, more innovative alternatives. Numerous developments have brought the industry to this transition point. Consumers have more control and choice. Their media usage has fragmented. Many more advertising platforms exist. And marketers are insisting on greater precision in targeting and accounting for their ad spend.

The recent economic turmoil only accelerates this evolutionary transition. Companies across the ecosystem have to acquire or develop three dominant traits to survive: relevance, interactivity, and accountability.“