Oren Meets World: creative direction playbook: rhode, jacquemus & brand building

In this video, we are going to talk about the creative direction playbook for brands. And we're gonna do this through the lens of how food has been used in recent branding. We'll talk about food and grocery as a status symbol, create a playbook for how brands can develop and use visual themes, talk about brand association, object curation, and all the fun parts of creative direction that should really spark you up in terms of what the potential is for building your brand world. And for examples, I'm gonna go all the way over to Korea, to this cafe, Nudake, hope I don't butcher that pronunciation, that is owned by the Gentle Monster Sunglass brand, just to get off of your current algorithm and show you something completely different in that world. And we're gonna go through Roadskin, because I think their playbook is one that every branding person and creative should understand, even if it's outside of your normal wheelhouse. I've done videos about things like Stussy in the past. We've got a future lineup of these includes stuff like Rick Owens, things you'd expect me to do. But this one I wanna do, because it highlights how this creative direction playbook can apply in just a different industry than you may have considered. And we'll touch on Jacques Mousse, Flamingo Estate, and many more who use food as part of their creative direction approach. And it's just a fun lens you'll look at things through. If you've been looking to expand your art direction or creative direction toolkit practically, this is the video, let's lock in. So first, I wanna talk about food as a status symbol. So you'll notice that something unique happens just in the world as we go through time and we see things happen on the internet is that things happening in culture permeate into visuals. And so right now there's a lot of conversation around the cost of food, around what luxury is, about the changing perception in nature and make America healthy again, and everything that we've considered about what a healthy life looks like. At the same time, things like Air One, my very upscale grocery store has taken over pop culture and some of the cultural conversation ties very well into this conversation we'll have about road skin later, we'll actually have an Air One smoothie. But a lot of it comes down to this idea of everyday luxury of people saying, instead of buying Louis Vuitton bags or lusting after these really expensive things, instead, we take our luxuries every day, that purchasing the $40 jar of honey or getting the rare strawberry or picking out some light, smaller luxury like a food item. But then having that experience be so good and look so good, you get that double reward of the taste and the visual experience is something that brands have noticed and played into. I'm scrolling through a lot of examples here and they've made fun and unique. You'll see here's some examples from Gohar World who make like food accessories. They use the presentation of the food as part of the storytelling and world building of what they do with their brand and their accessories. But you'll notice in particular that food is a motif inside of women's brands. You see all the time, whether it's brands like RODE or fashion brands who are putting this combination of things, whether it's a flavor or a look association the way it is with RODE or just part of a lifestyle that they're trying to sell like you see with Gohar World to a more organic feel like with Flamingo Estate, probably the most unisex brand on the list here. All the way to Jacques Mousse presenting this kind of cute, beautiful cheek life through the lens of destinations and food. This brings me over to my Milanote board about RODE and about food and art direction in general. So I discussed a lot of things in that last section. They're actually really important to dive a bit into. Brands don't just create imagery. You need to do creators. You have to have these ideas and themes that tie things together to make it cohesive for a brand. And they have to be in line with your consumer's perceptions and the insights that they need. So good art direction starts with an insight, starts with something that a consumer wants. The roots into the visuals and things that you make. And there's a lot of ways to approach this. There is a tactical way that a consumer has a problem and you're showing them how to solve it. There's an aspirational version where you're showing them a lifestyle that they want to have. There's almost a subliminal association like you might see here where you look at this and you have that sensation of hunger or pleasure that you associate with food being associated with this imagery. Same thing with a sensation, the way this imagery may make you feel cold or may take you out of the dimension that you're in while you're scrolling your phone and place you someplace else. And there's all kinds of other tools, whether it's fear or whatever it is that actually gets you thinking about whatever the brand wants you to go in its imagery and in its messaging. But in this video, I'm gonna look very practically at a couple of key topics that form your brand playbook. The first is objects. What do you use and how do you present it that associates with your product, that fills out the scene so it's not just your packaging in a photo. And Rode is an excellent example of this where extremely rarely do you see their products. And you do see them, but they'll mostly be together. But usually they are presented in context of associated objects. And they do this as a creative direction technique to help build their brand world. And as you see here, these are presented all with food. And then by the same regard, you have people. And how are people integrated into your creative direction and art direction story? And in Rode's example, they do a lot of like night out. So for instance, we zoom in here. This is from an email campaign they did where they're showing a model's night out and what she's wearing. She's wearing this lip shape, she's doing X and Y, but it's a bunch of photos of her actual night and the product naturally integrated while she has her matching martini versus just a picture of the product. It's kind of the basics of world building. You get the objects associated with your brand. Then you get the people associated with your brand. And we'll dive into this in the whole, like a deep dive Rode walkthrough I'm gonna do shortly. And then you gotta think about how you want your products to be shown when it is shown. There's objects that represent your brand. They're used in styling of it. But then there's just other ways. Your product's gonna need lots of different applications for different shots, different ads, and probably more than one use case you do for that. Rode has several. So if you even just stick at that core topic, and there's many more here, but what do the objects represent? What are the people that represent your brand? And how do you show your product when you do show it? Those are three things that when put together, give you the foundation of some creative direction for your brand. If you make decisions around those, and they make sense together, that can begin to be the foundation of a world. Then you have to think about where this is actually gonna go. So whenever I'm looking at a brand, I go pop over into their foreplay account. So this is where it actually shows you all the ads they're running. So I can scroll through every Rode ad. It gives me an idea of what they are doing to sell their product, how they use those motifs inside the sales process. Like this, one of the most popular creative direction techniques you see all the time is scale. Making something really big. They're running that in ads. They're not just using it as a social tool. It's something that they are using as a tool to help stand out campaigns they run ads on as well. You'll see they are running tons of creative. They're using people as the face of their brand, using some of the same creative direction. I will go through foreplay and see what ads they are running, because creative direction has application to ads. It obviously has application to social, I'm just looking at social media. And then it has application to brand items like website and email. And so for instance, this is the email that I talked about earlier, where there is creative direction applied. It's not just buy my thing, it's here on sale, or here's this new thing. Instead, it's late nights with this model in Rode. Here's the product in context. Here's what she was wearing inside of her look and the ability to then shop that look. Is there email content? That is the difference between like a standard sales email and a creative directive email. The sales conversion on this email versus a more standard email may even be the same. Maybe it's higher, maybe it's a little lower, but the idea of building that brand association and that world and applying some creative direction to it is what separates just a product from a true brand. And so you have to think about where is it in ads, where is it in email, and then what's happening for things like physical mailers, what's happening in events that you go to, and what's happening with your actual product and how does it tie into it. And all of those together kind of create the basics of a creative direction world. And so to take us somewhere outside of our normal algorithm, I'm sure many of you have seen Rode before, but one of my biggest things I like to talk about for creatives is getting above their normal algorithm, getting to places where you don't know where it's gonna be taken. You're not seeing the same ideas as everybody else. And so I have been spending an awful lot of time in K-pop social media and Korean social media looking at their packaging presentation, their art direction, and the things that are popular there. And so I wanna talk about this restaurant, which is the Child of Gentle Monster, the sunglass brand, they're also owners of this. And they have created like a viral destination restaurant, where if you look at not just how the food, the product was prepared, they said, we're not gonna make a carrot cake, we're gonna make a carrot cake that looks like this, we're not just gonna make a croissant, we're gonna make a croissant that looks like this. But then you get to the actual stores themselves. For instance, this one, which has the massive croissant-themed tables and breakdowns, the statues, this world they are creating around their cafe. This one, which you've probably seen on social media, I know I've posted a few times where it's all this kind of weightlifting, but all made out of bread. It has become a destination, looks more AI than real, that they are using to build their cafe world. And that's why I wanted to do this video where I talk about cosmetics brands, and I talk about a bakery, because creative direction goes beyond streetwear. People often ask, what does that job look like in some of these other places? And this is an example of a creative-directed cafe, from the interior and the quality of the interior to the motifs you see spread across the product and the marketing. They are making intentional choices that say, when we do our investment into our interior design or into our furniture, if we make a creative-directed choice, we can reap the benefits of that. The benefits being that it is a destination where people want to go to, purely because of the aesthetics of it before you even get into the fact that the food is great. And so with that note, you'll notice that kind of perfect merger of product, of mystery, and they're integrating this well. I don't know what this Fog product is, but I would order it. Micro croissants, like tiny croissants. They are making things with virality in mind with that creative direction lens on everything that they are doing. That's a combination of that culinary skillset, the creative direction skillset, and the aesthetic skillset. And then they're executing all of this with campaigns. So how I stumbled upon this is I was looking at K-pop Art Direction. This is part of one of their collabs with the K-pop artist, Jennie. And you begin to see the tool, that same tool of scale we talked about before, presentation, use of color, the objects associated with the campaign, how they present the fact that there are art-directed campaigns and collabs with stars on their website, like as a bakery, and the different aesthetic choices they use inside of their world building. Using holiday cards for their New Year's collab, like everything having some of these kind of cutesy and celebratory through lines. They're using that miniature scale in the same way you see RØDE use the large scale. I love finding and going through these from brands that are unexpected. So you can begin to find and look at that toolkit in a completely different way. And it's interesting when people talk about the cost of creative direction and putting creative direction into life. And I would argue that like, this is the highest end of that, right? They have already taken this into like years and multiple occasions worth of completion. But it is just as fascinating to think about it as, what if you started with one thing? What if you said we were gonna optimize our product? We're gonna use the product toolkit that they have here. And we are going to make miniature versions of popular things. We are gonna showcase that in a really artfully photographed way. Before we even get into campaigns and interiors, it means your brand is taking one step of intention like towards a more interesting world. Going back to RØDE, I'm gonna summarize their toolkit. So I've got a Milanote board here and Milanote is the sponsor of this video. Big shout out to them. I use them all the time because it works the way that I think. So as a visual thinker, when I'm doing things like market research, I will put competitive stuff together for this. This is actually for an exercise I'm working on, a project now where I've broken down a number of these brands and how they approach different art direction techniques like what their creative direction toolkit is. And I will go and I'll literally, I will pull in a bunch of images and I can also pull in links and embeds. Like for instance, this is an Instagram real embed that I can play and watch right on camera or right on screen. I will pull a bunch of these by category into a document. Now I'll make some of my notes over here. For instance, these are the notes I'm gonna go through in the video, the five categories that are related to it. I have a little mini board for each. Yeah, versus just a mood boarding app where I get everything in one place, I can actually have my notes here. I can have some of the embeds. I can structure it where I can say, hey, cool, here's all the section around scale. I have all that in this segment. All right, here's the stuff around people going out. That's in this segment, got videos inside of it. But Milanote helps me work the way I think as a creative. In addition to having all those embeddable types, I can also create little sub boards. Like I have a sub board here we're gonna talk about for Flamingo Estate where I'm able to actually put in all of the different kinds of images and gathering. And I will run everything out of these from my planning for collections and campaigns all the way to market research and competitive research doing like this to how I think about art direction. Anyway, Milanote is a great tool for organizing your creative projects. I'm using it to organize all of my art direction work right now. And if you're not sure where to begin, Milanote offers over a hundred built-in templates to get you started on almost any kind of creative work. And it is available for free with no signup limit. You can get it at the link that I have both in the comments and the description of this video. So big shout out to them for sponsoring. I always love it when it's a tool that I actually use all the time. I can literally just show you the workflow throughout the entire video. Let's get back to it. So I break down Rhodes Creative Direction Toolkit into five things. The use of food, use of scale, sensory application, this idea of like models night out or like models lifestyle, a simple surreal little bucket in there. And the last thing I'll note they also have is there's a whole segment on celebrity, which we'll get to. So what do I mean by that? So food like we talked about earlier in almost every campaign they're doing in everything there's a food association with it. It is merely as simple as placing the product on food. They do it extremely basically for the majority of this. It is on white or black. The food is extremely artful in how it is portrayed. That matters almost as much as anything from the heart-shaped French toast, the artfulness of the strawberry or the size of this ice cube. Those are intentional decisions. But also you'll note that they experiment with this as well. And this is where I like to talk about the overlap of creative ideas. We'll get there in one second. So you'll see some other applications that they have of the same food idea inside of basically every campaign, every product they're doing has its food connections. Then they also have this idea of what I call models night out. That whether it is Hailey, the founder, or people that are on their influencer team, they're always showcasing people actually doing things. And so for instance, it was like ordering room service. This is an influencer they have and it's got the shot and there's actually, it's just, it's all the makeup too. This is the combination of the look that they had, the food that they were having and the display at their event. They are showing all those things in there together. And since those worlds are kind of far apart between that food here and the word over there, you'll see they bring it together with some of the shots that they do, where you begin to bridge the gap between those two, like inside the art direction. So I feel like a good creative directive brand takes some of these motifs and allows them to kind of work in between each other. And that impact of food creeping over into the more lifestyle content, like in the same way, I think is really well done. And second, I want to talk about sensory. When the product is not shown with food, which is relatively rare, it is shown in some kind of environment that makes you feel something. This is an amazing tool in the Creative Directors Toolkit. I talked about this in my art direction video with the fridge exercise. But if you see this in ice or in snow, it makes you feel cold. Same thing in hot, same thing feeling wet. That is something that separates an image from just being a standard image of a product and can get people to stop scrolling, which is the ultimate goal of the majority of these ads and copy. Then we have the idea of scale and making everything big. This is again, a popular one for brands. People will talk about how this is probably overdone. I think basically if it works, keep doing it. I think the idea of making something really big or making something really small, like we saw with that cafe, is just an easy thing almost any brand can execute on and have some fun with in their shoots. And they have done all the time. But I think about their toolkits, these aren't extremely out there, amazing creative ideas. They are basic ideas executed excellently. A reminder, you have to overthink some amazingly deep creative strategy. Same thing with the product shots. When they do show just product without some of that same context, they all have this lightly surreal nature to it in terms of those don't actually stand like this, what's happening in this corner, the way these are kind of drifting or flying, the fact that these are on the clothespins, even their basic shots, all just have a little bit of intention. I call it simple surreal. I also wanna call out the celebrity face. So Hayley is obviously the founder of this and she is all over their ads and content. And if you are an influencer brand, even a small one or a celebrity brand, you should be using that. When you go to my valuables page, I am all over it. Not the only model, you probably wanna be the only person telling a story, but a lot of brands feel like they need to step back from some of those founders and integrators. And guess what, if it works, keep that as front and center as you can. And so I did how this plays into the other things they do, like putting the juice boxes as an item that they have inside their events or using the scale and the packaging as a design for an interior. But this is basically a creative direction toolkit visually for a brand. And what I would encourage you to do if you're looking for how do you build that world yourself are just to break this into a couple of key things you can use as a playbook. What objects do you associate with your brand? So for instance, you say, I wanna do food, I wanna do luxury objects, or I wanna do machines, cars, whatever it is. What are the objects you associate with your brand? And then there's the people, and what are the people doing? It's like, who are the folks? Is it always models? Is it always everyday people? Are they certain racial makeup or age makeup? But then what are they doing? Because they're almost always having a night out inside the road. They are going into a lifestyle of a road girl. You need to think about what that lifestyle looks like for your people. That's an exercise in itself, and then showcase that. And when you do product shots, what do you do for product shots and not have them be standard? Is there a technique or a look you can do that makes it stand out in any way, shape, or form? Yeah, we always do concrete product shots, but we have animals on them, or whatever it is. What is one thing that makes it stand out? And then think about application. How do you actually show that inside your website, your email, your events? So I like this models night out example perfectly because they said, hey, we are gonna do this, we're gonna put it on social media, but also we're integrating it into our email, and maybe that's vignettes on some sort of landing page. Same thing on that site that we saw for the bakery, they have a whole section, they're thinking, we're displaying our creative direction, not just in campaigns on social, but it has a whole website, it's a place where it lives, where we don't expect you to go to our website and order a cake you can't have, but you can go there and lose yourself in the art direction of the brand for a bit. It's basically a portfolio as much as anything else. But that's where your job is, is to be like, with these things we create, where are they actually going? Where is it useful? And the answer is never just organic social. It needs to be social plus ads, plus website, plus email, plus events. Where do we able to bring our toolkit inside of? If you just go through that basic exercise, the objects we associate with, the people we associate with, and then how do we show our product? You're basically building a foundation of thinking more about creative direction for your brand. And if you wanna go one level deeper, I think about how do they overlap? How do I do this, how my people show, and that object motif, how do they relate? In the same way that you see them combine food and into the displays of what the models are eating, or maybe the product is on a tray in room service, they're combining their two ideas. How do you do that same thing? I'm gonna pop into a sub board here. I want to show Flamingo Estate as the last example I'll walk through here. So they're another brand that has used the association with food extremely well. And so their background, Flamingo Estate, they're a very popular LA brand that has everything from like candles, to body wash, to like boutique honeys, and things like that. But they started as a vegetable delivery service. And they have these vegetable themed, like tomato themed, or scented, or included washes, things like that. And they include that in the art direction heavily. And so they're always incorporating, basically sculptural fruit is what I would call, or sculptural vegetables, sculptural garden even better, inside their product art direction. All their products are rarely shot just product. They're shot in this context with extremely healthy and organic looking tomatoes. Second thing, when they do shoot their other product, you see tons of these shots of them surrounded by the greenery of the garden. They're putting the garden in context in their product shots. Another tool they have in the toolkit. They take this to the next level with some of these kind of like display shots, and more artful applications. But again, always centered on the food itself, even if they are selling like a honey, et cetera. And the last thing, which I didn't dive into on Rogue, because it doesn't have it, but another thing that really helps set a brand that applied to that bakery and applies here is location. So Flamingo Estate, part of what has given it its resonance is there's this amazing location that's the home of the brand, has a lot of storytelling. It's this beautiful 1970s estate in LA. Not all of us have the ability to have a state in LA, but even your little creative studio space, your house you run your business out of, your smaller cafe, your cafes in Korea with croissant themed weights, whatever it is, is that story in the brand. What I like about Flamingo Estate and what they've done with their creative direction is the estate itself is a character in the brand. This is the debut of a rug collaboration that's happening inside a room in the estate. To see the brand process happen is a part of the lore. It's another thing that's inside that toolkit. We'll probably do a whole location-based creative direction video later on. That's where we are here. So anyway, if these are new concepts to you, I do have a video, Art Direction 101, that will start really breaking down the basics of what this looks like, because this is getting a little more integrated into it. Pop that video at the end. But I love talking about these visual worlds of brands and thinking about the steps that smaller brands and creative directors and aspiring creative directors can take to begin building those worlds around whatever you're working on. So hopefully this was both a glimpse at what something amazing looks like in a few different industries, but also some practical steps on how you can think about it yourself. If there's any categories or any brands you'd love to see me dive into, I know someone asked for Palace the last time. I did think about having them in a video recently. I know I've got Rick coming up. And we just did Stussy recently. Please let me know in the comments and I will definitely consider it. It's always kind of a work in progress. I usually base these on things I'm working on day to day in my day job. Actually doing some of this work, but I'm always open to ideas and love to dive down the rabbit hole. Anyway, I appreciate y'all watching and getting into this with me. And thank you so much.