BaM at 20: The Mysterious Disappearances of Entire Brands.

Everyone in the agency had worked for years to build a brand, and suddenly it was obsolete.

I’m a total gadget nerd. I’ve been an early adopter since there were adoptable anythings you could get earlier than other people could. I had an Apple Newton. I had two Newtons actually, because surely the second one would work.

I was also one of the first few hundred people in the world to have a smartwatch, and I mean way, way earlier than you think. Because Microsoft made one in 2004, and while it told you the time and current weather on a screen that was more Tamagotchi than timepiece, it could also deliver the headlines of the day with the same amount of editorial detail you might expect from, say, the ribbon lights on Times Square that announced V-E day. I was wearing it one day, in the building we had bought mostly by having Bank One as a client, approving an employee’s layouts for a Bank One project and thinking we might need to swing by Bank One at lunch to deposit some checks from Bank One. Then my watch made its tiny, tinny 2004-style alert sound.

“Bank One brand to disappear after Chase merger.”

WT actual F. And we learned about it on my dumb new show-off watch. This was smartwatch karma, surely. I snapped a picture of it with my new show-off smartphone, just for good measure.

Soon the news was all over the Internet. All our files, prototypes, ads, billboards — a huge part of our business — would be obsolete in months. Different assignments relating to the Bank One brand were, at that time, something like 60% of our gross revenue, because 60 is something like 70. So, yeah. It was a lot.

Now, Mark is a very good person to be in business with. We never had loans, we liked to keep cash on hand, and we didn’t blow agency money on unnecessary things like smartwatches.

We designed the walls with electronic merchandising screens, and then did the electronic merchandising content. We were such scamps.

That’s in part because we’d seen our former employers lose their biggest client, a contract furniture company, on the very day they moved into grand new offices. And to their great credit and financial planning, they did not have to fire anyone, including, importantly, us. We’d paid attention to this and by we, I mean, Mark had paid attention to this, so while there was real concern, we felt ready to weather it. Still. You can control nothing in this business. I don’t care what is confidently posted by marketers about always-be-closing seminars and faking it ’til you’re making it and whatever passes for Successories in your LinkedIn timeline these days. Even if you think you control your destiny, you don’t. All you can ever do is to be as brilliant as your brain will let you be, and work hard to keep it producing; to be as fair, as professional, as responsive and as trustworthy as you can possibly be, make people delighted to work with you and for you, and the rest is dumb luck. Sometimes it’s bad luck.

For instance, at said former agency, we’d both worked on an award-winning campaign for Mayflower, the moving company, that increased sales 17% in measured markets, which, it seemed, only made Mayflower, the asset, more valuable — within months they sold out to United, causing it to disappear from the agency roster. From our perspective, at least, it really looked like you could “success” your way right out of an account. You still see an occasional Mayflower trailer on the road, but mostly because someone was too cheap to paint it over. For the most part, another iconic American brand had disappeared.

But this time, luck was with us.

We were invited to participate in the rebrand of hundreds of Bank One branches into shiny new Chase branches. Merged companies have two marketing departments until they don’t, and we ended up lucky.

Several companies were hired, others fired. The new lead agency was creating more modern branding, another was working on signage systems. We’d apply everything and help manage retrofit branches — but we were always getting jump balls: what does BaM think about the ATM design? The surrounds? Direct Mail? Messaging? Could we do some designs for wallcoverings? Variations on a new Chase logo?

This is the Chase Octagon. I may or may not have saved it from brand oblivion.

This last one was like asking if we wouldn’t mind choosing some paint swatches to cover over the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. To me, at least, the Chase Octagon was a milestone in the history of graphic design. It was designed by Chermayeff & Geismar in 1961, and it was the first major corporate mark to connote institutional strength, not through the use of an eagle, lion, bear, bison, frog, greek statue or a stylized letterform, but from an interlocking abstraction. It was dynamic and breathtaking, it looked like the New Frontier or like maybe they financed rocket engines. It looked like your money was surrounded by a fortress of blue corporate massiveness. Soon every board room clamored for an identity system that looked as clean and geometric as a Swiss road sign. By 1962, every corporation in America wanted a Chase logo.

But nearly a half century later, the new lead agency from New York wanted to be bold. They were a very good agency, but what they came up with was not. It was overlapping circles arranged in a pyramid. A pile of disks.

“What do you think?” David, our ally in Chase retail marketing, asked. This seemed like a very bad idea to me. It didn’t have the implied motion. And it seemed obvious, like a pile of coins — but you just knew there was some business-unit synergy pitch that had gotten it this far. This! This was like tearing down the Robie House to put up a Pizza King! It was the shape of the poop emoji, if the poop emoji had been invented then! “Can I be honest?” I asked, and without waiting for permission, immediately launched into the rant two paragraphs above, on the significance of the C&G mark in the history of design, only this time with exclamation points. David was not much moved.

I tried a new tactic.

“Okay then, I want you to do something for me. Have you seen the movie, Catch Me If You Can? No? It just came out on video, rent it tonight. It’s good. About 18 minutes in, there’s a scene where Christopher Walken is giving Leonardo DiCaprio a book of Chase checks, which he flips through, the octagon practically fills the screen. And Walken says, ‘There are fifty checks there, which means, from this day on, you’re in their little club.’” David smiled.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not against change, I think every company should go through the exercise to make sure a brand still resonates with the people it’s supposed to. All I’m saying is, if you’re going to throw it away, make sure you know the value of the thing you’re throwing away.”

David went home and, I assumed, watched the movie. All I know for sure is we never saw the pile of circles again.

Did I save the Chase Octagon? Who knows. But after watching quite a few brands disappear into thin air, I felt like I owed it to this one.

It also took me over a decade to wear a smartwatch again.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.