Abanka & Banka Celje: Together

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And now you have it: the first leg. You are now a heron. You stand proudly in the middle of the swamp, with your ass high above the moist ground, your head turned up to the sky and you are enjoying the enviable view. Until the first breath of wind blows across the plan or you face a starving cat. Then: trouble.

All because idea by itself is worth almost nothing. It is merely a what of our existence. What would we like to do. What have we come up with. What do we think the world needs. What is special. What is necessary. What is everybody waiting for. Yeah, what. So what!

For idea to succeed, it has to grow from idea to a brand. OK, we could also call it something else, like a successful company, nice job, strong business, great firm, serious investment opportunity, golden nugget, the future of the world, eternal glory or a table at the hottest bar in town… Brand sounds better, because it incorporates everything a company is. A brand is far from only a word, connected with marketing and advertising in the company, it is the alfa and the omega of the company. Often it is also the biggest capital of the company and it’s value can rise sky high. And for it to have at least a theoretical chance to be mentioned at the next night out with the friends drinking beer, it also needs strong foundations. Foundations that will hold it even when the butterfly flaps its wings in India, as well as when the wild storm shows its teeth.

The pillars of the Pantheon

So what are the foundations needed for that? Pillars of the Pantheon, four strong legs for the solid future?

• First, as stated earlier, a what of our existence. What do we do. What is our business. What is our product, services. Without this, it will not work, right?

• The second question to be answered is a now very famous why. Why we do what we do. Why are we here. Why have we installed a motor in a SUP, why we want the whole world to learn programming, why it is good that our customers live healthier… These are the goals of the company and the brand, the purpose and meaning of our existence, it is our reason. Why do we get up at five in the morning and hang in the office until eight in the evening. Why do we do it at all. And even where we are going, why we are on this journey and where we want to get. Where we see ourselves in the next five years (sic). Why is the second leg, another key question which it would be wise to answer at a very early stage of existence of the company.

• Then comes our inner essence. Who we are. The values of the company, business and brand… These are the rules and criteria, how we do what we do. Our gods and prayers. What we believe, what is important to us, how we communicate with colleagues, suppliers, customers, clients. What principles are used, what is the ethics of our existence… Are we are honest or a priori ingenious fraudsters? (Both can be almost legitimate answers.) Will we ever share a part of our success, or rather die than pay a dime of the taxes? These are the tools of our work and the heart of our existence. They define who we are. We are who we are. And it is a smart decision to write these answers down, for example with Helvetica Black and letters two meters high on the biggest wall of the office.

• Then, and only then comes the fourth leg. Since this one is almost no longer necessary — even chairs with three legs can stand very well, they don’t even rock. Well, sometimes they can fall if the weight leans too much to one side. But three legs are almost all you really need. The fourth leg is a much appreciated bonus. The leg that turns the chair into a firm, glorious armchair, into a solid palace, is the identity of the brand. The how we are. It’s the image of the product and our logo. It’s the company’s name and brand. It’s the design of the packaging and tenderness of the cashmere wool, a friendly greeting and one-two-three resolving of user’s complaints. It’s everything what you can see at a glance, on the outside of the buildings, on the trucks, on the web site and in an ad, it’s your tweet and your likes, in short, it’s all you often pay a fortune for to the design studio or advertising agency. How can be a competitive and glossy advantage and it’s a great manifestation of everything that reflect your what, why and who. And that’s why you should take this piece of the brand very seriously…

Voilà, now this is a solid brand. A brand that knows what works, why it works, who it is and how it is. Beautifully stable, peaceful and firm, resisting all those average achievers that wake up some mornings with a more genius what, but don’t realize that it’s just not enough to have an idea.

And this solid, what-why-who-how brand knows something else, and it has the secret fifth element, the one that keeps saving the world and propel it a step further. This brand knows that it is not enough to have four solid legs, but one must also have the solid ground beneath them. Solid foundations. And that this foundations are its people. People employed by the company. Collaborators. Leaders and managers. Suppliers. Families. All who are involved in any question of those four legs. And because it knows that this fifth dimension is the most important, this brand finds answers to the first four questions very fast, but is engaged in finding the answers to the fifth question all the time, every day. Since this question is really not even a question. Because people are not a question. They are a fact. The most important one.

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I just want to argue the fact that I now have to pay to watch a video on national television Internet site by watching a 15-seconds commercial package of suffering. At least I can turn off the volume… So, all this advertising, worse, promotional cacophony, as it approaches the climax, throws me into the state of self-reflecting analysis of the reasons, causes, consequences, and drivers of the business I am, truth be told, also a part of, inevitably.

The fact seems to be that almost no one really likes advertising. “Almost”, in this case, means I have to exclude all of us who actually do like it, because it can be something fun, creative, and very emotional. And all of those who make a good living because of advertising. And all the media who need it like a desert needs water. And all those and others… So, does it mean that, in fact, many people love it? Well, not quite. The real emotional-erotic feelings of humanity toward advertising range from platonic-ambivalent-ignorant to extremely repulsive. 5-year-olds who can repeat every latest TV ad they saw in the commercial break are excluded here. Their brains are still very much like Sponge Bob, and they still can’t tell what’s really important or what’s just useless, but they will learn soon enough. Many others, on the other hand, would give couple of fingers to get rid of it, but you can’t.

Advertising has grown a beard so long and roots so wide that I won’t even dare to try to find its origins, but if not before, it was well alive at the ages of goods trading when some miserable sheep keeper, full of milk and sweaty under hundred layers of wool, which he had pulled over his head, was able to cleverly rename that same wool into a merino and angora and cashmere wool (with capital first letters) and what-not, so he could exchange it for a few pounds of carrots, apples, a prehistoric version of PlayStation, and a pint of milk for a home-made beer, which effectively erased his memory of where he gets home to his better half while the beer was still fresh enough. Must have had a marvelous brainstorm in his synapses to have figured out the integrated marketing strategy, where to hit the target group and which media to use. Later this undoubtedly became a real hobby to many, until in the twentieth century, it finally became quite serious, multi-billion and world spinning business.

Then came the golden fifties and sixties, Beetles and lemons, real Mad Men, colors, festivals, media, and it all crashed in the previously described unbearable whistling and buzzing and screaming and glaring, and there was soon too much of everything. Unfortunately, the radio did not destroy the print, television did not destroy the radio, the Internet didn’t destroy the TV, everything is just accumulating and multiplying. And then we felt that there will be a big bang, when all three thousand or how many advertising messages hit us every day, compacted in an extraordinary concentrate, would suddenly burst into the width of the universe, flow far away from us, and suddenly leave the liberating silence all around us.

We grew used to overlooking. Watching beyond. Closing our eyes. Ignoring it. Not seeing, not hearing, not feeling it. Not registering. We are no longer a wall, we are more like the horizon over which the infinite and continuous murmur of the sea in the distance spreads. A murmur that never mutes, but we aren’t listening any more. Once we used the advertising block to flee to the bathroom just to be hit by another ad from the magazine there, but now we can stare at the TV, but we don’t see anything. Perhaps the future will put this almost revolutionary leap in the evolution of mankind onto some exceedingly eminent pedestal, and today, we still don’t quite understand it.

But there is something else we don’t understand. That same advertising (if all this mess of messages that occupy a myriad of forms is pumped into one word for a simplification) moved from a violent, omnipresent, and completely visible at the same time into almost imperceptible and hidden somewhere behind. If it has previously been mostly noticeable (because it must be by definition), it’s now mainly a must, omnipresent and omnipotent. If it was previously only the tip of the iceberg, it’s now everything that is hidden under the sea. Previously, it was the horn of the car, now it’s the engine. Advertising has perhaps imperceptibly, yet effectively, began to run the world.

Am I exaggerating? Absolutely. A bit of this, however, is true. Think about just how much time you spend on the Internet (in one form or another). How many hours? Every day? Okay, you have a number in front of you? And now think of the Internet and the one-two-three pages you frequently visit. Did you just mention Facebook? What about Google? Only two of the biggest. All, or almost all, of what they give us, especially Google, which seems to be more altruistic and omnipotent than the good man who visits us in December, is apparently free of charge. Search engines. Mail. Photo services, chat rooms, walls, apps, maps, games, translators, and much more. As if somewhere far away, someone is sitting at a giant table and pushing buttons for the gifts that are being sent to us, gift after gift. But “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Someone has to pay for all of that. And that someone is advertising. That someone is millions of businesses that pay for ads, information, links, contacts, databases, analytics, and targeting, and thus enable Google and Facebook and all the others to keep giving us everything that we wish and need, and which we can’t live without anymore. That someone is you who clicked with the mouse, typed “how to lose weight and a week without starving” (tip) into the search engine and watched and explored and visited… All I can say is: thank you.

Today, the entire world is one giant advertisement. And without advertising, it would have probably just stopped. All that we have left is a bit of ignorance, pretending that the unbearable noise really started to move away, or face it. But there is another way. We can try to be Elon Musks and create better, different, more advanced and friendlier machines that drive the world. At the end, the essence of all the advertising is a message, a piece of information that needs to find its way from the sender to the person to whom it is intended. Maybe next time, we can send it in a better, friendlier, and more efficient way. There are many ways, some of them are good. And we can always look for those that are better than the others.

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