Following our recent feature City Brand Leaders – Liverpool, we interviewed a select group of leaders from Liverpool’s top agencies to help focus on the Liverpool brand and consider their own agency vision.

Creativebrief Founder & Chairman Tom Holmes talks to Jon Egan, Head of Strategy at Aurora Media.

TH: Jon, what does the Liverpool brand stand for?

JE: There has been a huge amount of research undertaken by the city’s promotional and inward investment agencies around the Liverpool brand both before and after 2008. All of this has coalesced around words like creativity and dynamism, but these words don’t really have any meaning or impact. They have been appropriated by virtually every other city and repeated ad nauseam in place marketing campaigns across the globe. We have got to try and find a more original way of communicating originality. In a homogenized world Liverpool is still a city with a distinctive accent and attitude. What makes Liverpool different is that it is different. It feels different, it sounds different and it looks different. It’s less polished, less self-conscious, less rehearsed and never quite finished off. Philosophically brands are presented as being the immutable essence of a product or place. It’s a kind of Platonic idea, but Liverpool’s brand defies that model. Liverpool is pre-Socratic; it’s flux, unpredictable and slightly disconcerting.

TH: If you were responsible for marketing Liverpool, globally, what would you focus on?

JE: Surprising people! When we launched the creatives for the it’s liverpool / i’m liverpool campaign, we related a story by Milan Kundera about the man who fell over in the street. A man falls over on his way home from work and cracks his head on the pavement. After dusting himself down and wiping the blood from his head, he goes home and gets on with his life. At that precise moment an internationally renowned photographer passes by, on the other side of the street. He captures the image and makes it the centre-piece of his big global exhibition and best-selling book. This is the moment when the man and his image become tragically separated. Liverpool is the city that fell over in the street. Its’ external image is fixed in a series of snap shot images, and not all of them are especially flattering or accurate. The journalist and Mayoral candidate Liam Fogarty described Liverpool as the “city that rewards investigation.” This sentence provided us with the direction for the work we have been doing with Liverpool Vision on their Liverpool Plan. In very simple terms Liverpool needs to start telling people things that they don’t already know, and one of those things is that it is an exceptionally beautiful and visually dramatic city.

TH: How does being based in Liverpool influence your creative output?

JE: That’s almost impossible to quantify. The Liverpool Biennial has featured a program of collaborations called “Cities on The Edge.” It explores the affinity that exists between port cities that have similar rebellious, creative and counter-cultural personalities. Places like Marseilles, Seattle, San Francisco, Naples, Rotterdam and Barcelona.

I think it might also have something to do with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about right hemisphere thinking and what he called acoustic space. Ports face outwards they are perched on the edge of a vast formless abyss. It’s an omnipresent reminder that there no limits,

TH: Why should clients consider sourcing work from Liverpool agencies?

JE: An original perspective. To paraphrase Steve Jobs – a great spiritual Scouser  – we think different.

TH: What makes your agency offer different?

JE: It’s a good question and it’s something we have been asking ourselves a lot over the last 12 months. It’s led us to the threshold of creating a new entity with a much clearer sense of mission. We were hugely inspired by Bruce Mau when he came to Liverpool last year to lead on a project to re-imagine an inner city park. It confirmed our own growing cynicism about the ideology of traditional marketing and PR. It led us to redefine our own offer and stop describing our business by the tools we use (PR, design, new media etc) and instead concentrate on the essential creative process. What we do really boils down to two things: helping people discover who they are and helping them develop relationships through communicating that identity authentically and imaginatively.

The new entity which we are launching later this month will be called Intelligence Agency. Of course there is a bit of irony in the title, but it’s still more accurate and descriptive. It will also give us more room to discover surprising solutions to problems. As Mau observes sometimes the prescription to the client is not about changing communication, it’s about changing behavior. This has certainly been true with respect to the work we have been doing recently with Liverpool city on its cultural programming. Actually it is the breadth and ambition of its future events, and particularly the proposal to replace the Mathew Street nostalgia-fest with an international music and interactive festival on the model of SXSW, that will convince people that the city still has a creative pulse and a global perspective.

TH: What local brands do you most admire and why? 

JE: I love the work of Jon Barraclough who helped found two of the city’s most consistently inventive agencies, Nonconform and Smiling Wolf.  Jon is both a visionary and a master craftsman. He has produced some beautiful brands for cultural institutions like the Bluecoat Gallery and an exquisite original typography for Liverpool Cathedral.

There has been some very creative and brilliantly executed life-style brands emerge in Liverpool over the last few years. Hope St Hotel must be the only hotel in the UK that has a Creative Director in Mary Coulston, but her focus on art directing every aspect of customer experience is the key to the success of their product. Similarly Natalie Haywood’s LEAF cafe is a phenomenal success predicated on an entirely original idea (it’s a cafe, live venue, cultural salon, reading room…) and an exquisitely choreographed brand.

TH: Which local marketers have inspired you?

JE: Jon Barraclough, and more recently another free-lance designer and creative Chris Blackhurst. We worked with both of them on theit’s liverpool project and also worked with Chris on the Show Your Beautiful Face  campaign in North Liverpool. I love Chris’s restlessness and impatience. He is an ex-architect, former journalist and will probably be an opera singer this time next year. One of the big motivations for our new business is the desire to work in a looser and more collaborative way with people like Chris and Jon.

TH: What business would you most like to win?

JE: The sort of jobs that really inspire and excite us are about rehabilitating and renewing failing brands or lost causes. We did a piece of work for the Equality Trust earlier this year to present a make-believe campaign to a conference of policy-makers on the issue of social inequality. It has led to two really interesting and challenging briefs working with the TUC and International CND. The TUC project is about developing creatives for a campaign that challenges the economic values of The Coalition and their austerity programme. We did some ad van designs for The Labour Party in the last few days of the 2010 election campaign. It’s depressing how those warning messages about three million people out of work have come to fruition so quickly. 

These would be fantastic projects to win. They pose enormous creative challenges, but they are also causes that matter. I know there are a lot of agencies who can and will turn their skills to any prospective account, but we have got to believe in what we are doing.  

TH: Thanks Jon!

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