the accidental brand

During the tech boom of the ’90s, Nasdaq grew from an acronym into a rather slick and faceless technology brand. While our competition at the NYSE had the amazing theater of the trading floor with traders gesticulating wildly (at least that’s the perception in popular culture) complete with the “ringing of the bell,” Nasdaq was an unintentional brand that had grown up too quickly. Everyone knew about the Nasdaq stock quotes because of the ticker at the bottom of their TV and computer screens but people did not have a visceral sense of the brand promise - only a number.

The early 2000s was a critical time in the history of the Nasdaq brand. As creative director starting in 2001, I set out to bring human elements into a tech brand at a difficult moment in history. I created and implemented a broadly integrated communications plan to align 360 degrees of audience perception with many disparate business needs and media requirements.

when you touch nasdaq, what do you feel?

My first goal was to bring humanity to the Nasdaq brand. Every single communication and creative execution brought personality into the work. Starting with the work we did with McKinney & Silver you can see faces and organic textures dominating. We rebuilt the brand architecture from the ground up, including brand essence, voice, brand guidelines and corporate identity.

where are the people?

While working on the brand essence, I flew down weekly to our agencies’ offices in North Carolina where I would stand in front of walls of images and ask the same question: where are the people? We had to get it right. The “Visionaries” work that came out of this process was all about real people and it informed everything else about the brand.

visionaries - who is nasdaq?

We kicked off the Nasdaq “Visionaries” campaign with a series of TV spots (which ran for years and well over $100m in media buying) featuring CEOs of Nasdaq-listed companies. The spots (shot by the venerable Albert Watson), featured visionary leaders at Nasdaq companies telling personal stories about their own inspiration. He shot them with a lot of close-ups and with gorgeous lighting. The effect is very humanizing.

These commercials did much to change the perception of Nasdaq. Now our brand was about people. Real people.

Using the untapped potential of our rock star CEOs we created a series of dozens of versions based on the Visionaries theme over several years.

Here are a few of my faves:

Nasdaq Visionaries:
Howard Schultz (SBUX), Michael Dell (DELL), Steve Ballmer (MSFT)
“At first, my parents were pretty upset with me when I dropped out of college, but after a while they got over it.” — Michael Dell

Nasdaq Visionaries:
Tom Stemberg (SPLS), Craig Barrett (INTL), John Chambers (CSCO)
“One of the hallmarks of an entrepreneur is to turn adversity into opportunity.” — Tom Stemberg

Nasdaq Innovation:
Jeff Bezos (AMZN), Michael Marks (FLEX), Robert Swanson (LLTC)
“Leaving my job to start amazon.com was a tough decision because we didn’t know if anybody would buy anything online.” — Jeff Bezos

Nasdaq Leadership:
Barry Diller (IACI), Kevin Sharer (AMGN), Carlos Ghosn (NSAN)
“I don’t think you can make up the energy or the passion you have for a business. If you’ve really got it, everybody knows it.” — Barry Diller

how do you translate a successful tv ad campaign into a successful print ad campaign?

Still focusing on the human element, we pushed the idea of quotes from Nasdaq CEOs, in this case, on Nasdaq blue sticky notes. We ran these ads in magazines such as Forbes, Fortune and New Yorker. And we placed them as backlit dioramas in airports that were highly trafficked by our target audiences. In fact, we targeted airports and media outlets where the CEOs and listed companies would see themselves. They loved that!

“Why try to change the world? A better question is ‘Why not?’”
— William Haseltine (HGSI)

websites and the human-computer interaction

The branding work with our agency of record was brilliantly augmented by the work we did to humanize the online brand with our digital agency: digital@jwt. We redesigned four websites, including the flagship nasdaq.com which averaged 3.5 million unique visitors per month at the time.

The challenge of redesigning such a complicated site with so many toolsets that is a vital daily tool for millions of users cannot be overstated. jwt’s remarkable team understood from the start how critical the information architecture and usability would be. We did extensive work creating user profiles, user scenarios, prototyping, wireframing and testing, testing, testing every assumption.

We also brought the brand and those rigorous usability standards to our intranet, our training website and to other sites that brought investor relations tools to our user companies.

the opening bell: giving a 130-year old tradition a new signature

Although the New York Stock Exchange started using a gong in 1871, there were no cameras until the late 1990s. By 2001, the market open had become a daily source of massive media exposure for both NYSE and Nasdaq. But the visual experience of pushing a button left a lot to be desired. So we sought to bring the same humanity into the market open and closing ceremonies.

We chose the experiential branding agency, Imagination, to rebrand the open. Again, we went through extensive rebrand exercises and again, I cajoled everyone to focus on the personal. Imagination’s brilliant outcome was to have the CEO, celebrity, etc. opening the market “sign” the market into activity. In other words, instead of pushing a button or banging a gavel, the person signs their name across the podium and that action — the signature — is what initiates the trading day.

The signature podium can even be used remotely. The signature is simultaneously shown across the seven-story tower in Times Square.

Richard Branson signs to open the market from Davos.

what do you do with the world’s largest video screen?

One of my favorite media toys at Nasdaq was our marketsite in Times Square. In addition to having the world’s largest video screen to play with, we had multiple TV studios and tremendous traffic. I oversaw design work for the tower and created technical standards for advertisers and listed companies to build creative.

September 17, 2001: With a giant OPEN sign over a fluttering American flag, we declared America “Open for Business.” We had spent six days working with hundreds of our listed companies, coordinating with the NYSE to prepare for the first day of trading after the attacks of 9/11. Since our offices were across the street from the World Trade Center, they were within the red zone protected by the National Guard. A small group of us worked out of our SVP’s apartment. In the days that followed, we helped more than 400 of our listed companies execute corporate share repurchase plans to instill market confidence.

August 31, 2001: Michael Jackson’s 43rd birthday. About to tour Europe and Asia. He had more security than Bill Gates, but he hung out in our offices eating cake for hours. I worked with his concert promoters in Paris to create video versions of his posters that they ended up using for his tour. Very exciting! And for historians looking for the moment when celebrity appearances on the stock markets reached a new level, this may be it.

how do you maintain the integrity of a brand across dozens of agencies around the world?

Bring your A game. And have a clear vision. My mantra for this brand was to be human, personal and visionary. It’s also important to clearly understand your audience for every type of communication. And it’s helpful to write creative briefs with every agency.

Because of Nasdaq’s large media footprint, we worked with many different agencies. Part of my job as creative director was to maintain the brand essence across all of them. Evolving from the branding work with McKinney & Silver and the other agencies mentioned above (jwt and Imagination), I worked to steward our message with direct marketing (RTC and others), market research (Y&R, Wirthlin) and others, as well as multiple PR firms and agencies throughout Europe and Asia.

4 sales teams; 80 sales people; one you; now what?

It always presents a challenge to work with large sales teams, but when they have different missions, different messages, different audiences, it becomes even harder to help them create presentations and sales collateral that are consistently on brand, on message and … well … not awful.

Here’s a blog post on some key areas I focused on at Nasdaq as well as with other companies that I’ve supported large numbers of sales people.

experiential marketing:
using events to create a live connection with your brand

Whether it’s at an industry conference or a cocktail party or a product launch or an event you sponsor (to name a few examples) an event can be a super-effective strategy to engage your audience with your brand and clearly communicate your message.

Our largest event was the Nasdaq-100 Open tennis tournament in Key Biscayne. The largest title-sponsored event in all of tennis, the Nasdaq-100 Open was broadcast in 160 countries with over 900 hours of television coverage. It gave us incredible reach to spread the Nasdaq message to investors and it gave us another media platform to use with our companies.

During the tournament, we held a CEO Thought Leadership and Corporate Governance summit. In addition to about 25 Nasdaq CEOs, our invited guests included a governor, senators, congressmen, ambassadors, professors and a think-tank. Our CEOs were able to hold very high level dialogue with actual decision makers. For example, several senators working on the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation were able to hear directly from CEOs at several of the largest corporations in the world exactly what would work and what wouldn’t for good corporate governance and good business practices.

To incorporate the themes from the branding work (humanity, visionaries, quotes, signatures), I flashed relevant quotes in real time on LCD screens at everyone’s tables and around the room. It was fun to see these brilliant minds competing to be the most quotable. Many would approach me during the break to give me their quotes on the topic in advance.

how many patents does that thing need?
market intelligence desk

We found that besides the large amount of marketing and media support, the most critical thing we could provide to our companies was information. So we created the Market Intelligence Desk and the Nasdaq Corporate Services Network. We pulled together all the data sources necessary to be able to give companies information on investor relations, market insight, research, corporate governance and much more in real-time.

During the process, we filed 26 patents and created a sort of Bloomberg-terminal-on-steroids. As with the web sites we built, this required an immense amount of information architecture insight and usability testing, testing, testing.

how does all this work?

Listed companies were arguably our most important constituency, so to finish the case study, I’ll give you some insight into how we won JetBlue’s hotly-contested IPO listing using all the tools I’ve mentioned, in an integrated way. We created a full-day media event in Times Square with JetBlue flight attendants handing out goodies, coordinated with advertising on our tower, a market open, TV interviews in our studio, coverage in Nasdaq magazine (which could also be found on all JetBlue flights), coverage on our website, opportunities to take part in our Visionary TV and print ads as well as the Nasdaq-100 tennis tournament. JetBlue listed on Nasdaq.