ARM Your Work

This week I was fortunate enough to attend the Steve Hayden memorial at the Harvard Club.

For those of you who might not know, Steve Hayden was one of the giants of modern advertising.

The writer and creative partner of Lee Clow on the Apple “1984” commercial. And the creative leader of IBM, Motorola, Kodak and Dove to name but a few of the brands he influenced and touched.

And while the memorial night was filled with great stories of Steve’s brilliance, optimism and quirks, I want to share a few observations about his work.

Namely, I want to call out something that I realized as his campaigns unfurled through the course of the evening.

Steve’s work for brands had importance, scale, relevance, humanity and an uncanny optimism.

I walked away from the event and could not stop thinking about it. Somewhere around 22nd Street and Fifth Avenue, an acronym hit me. Everything Steve did was Ambitious, Relevant and Memorable. (ARM).

Three examples.

It starts, of course, with Apple. The epic spot, yes. But the demonstration of the idea of a “Computer for the rest of us” in the 20-page insert that dropped in the newspaper the next day. It was an invitational tutorial you could explore and be seduced by simply traipsing through the delightfully written and quite educational material.

The TV, the first Super Bowl spot, was ambitious. The positioning and writing of the 20-page insert, relevant. The whole idea 40 years later? Well, we’re still talking about it— memorable.

Next, I loved seeing and being reminded of the exceptional IBM “e-business” campaign. This stylish and powerful work ushered in the digital age with its graphic red “e” and its dramatic black and white photography. It’s language so precise and simple as it declared: “Boeing is an e-business.” And “Hertz is an e-business.” And “Visa is an e-business.”

This campaign ushered in and chronicled the digital revolution. And it positioned IBM as the authority in the space. (When was the last time a B2B brand was as stylish and captured your imagination like that?)

Ambitious. Relevant. Memorable.

The third campaign that I was reminded of is one of my all-time favorites: “Hello Moto” for Motorola. This too felt like a revolution. The playful, yet branded language. The quirky sound of it. The whimsical art direction. Hello Moto. I can write it and you can hear it.

It made old-school Motorola feel cutting edge. And it was a campaign you would see all over LA, Paris, Tokyo and points beyond.

Ambitious. Relevant. Memorable.

Now these are but three that emerged that night. But they all got my mind racing and my heart pumping.

It also got me asking, where are these kind of ideas today? Surely we have important brands with breakthrough technology.

If you’re on the agency side or the brand side, study this work. Gain some inspiration and insight. Then lift your thinking. Reach people more unexpectedly, deeply and widely. Show us the power of your brands and products. And quit playing small-ball with all your disjointed gimmicks on social media.

ARM yourself.

And if you don’t know what to do, start with the most basic question: what would Steve Hayden do?