PPMG's New Creative Director

PPMG is very pleased to have David O’Higgins on our team as our new Creative Director. Dave has played a key role in developing some of the world’s largest brands such as: Ford Motors brand in France and the American Express Blue Card in the US. He has extensive brand development experience with fortune 100 companies as well as smaller, cutting-edge clients. David’s expertise is not limited to brand, he is also a brilliant designer who helped create the US Airforce logo, and his illustrative work was published in David Carson’s book, “The End of Print.”

He has ventured into the theater realm by designing sets for the Ballet Rambert and David Byrne.

David is an excellent leader and continually brings fresh, innovative branding concepts to PPMG’s clients. Please check out the Experience page on our site to see some examples.

PPMG speaks at BizJam in Seattle on July 10th

Jason Levine, PPMG’s Executive Director, will be speaking to independent business owners about marketing and brand at BizJam Seattle in Seattle on July 10th. His presentation entitled, Marketing Yourself as a Brand and Branding Yourself as a Business, will cover practical and strategic ways to elevate your company as a branded business. You will learn how to build customer preference and loyalty. There will be a discussion about the essential steps and tools on how to represent yourself and your company with a single, clear voice, as well as ways to evolve your brand as the business grows.

Brand loyalty is a critical piece for your business to flourish within the turbulence of fluctuating world economies, weaknesses, and failures.

Jason has spoken on many topics, including brand, information architecture and user-centric design in both the UK and the US. He has also taught these subjects at design schools in both countries as well.

Should the medium drive the message?

For nearly half a century, consumer culture has been influenced by the notion that the “medium is the message.” Superficially understood, however, this cultural truism has become a straight-jacket for digital communication.

In their infancies, new media technologies are short-sightedly diagrammed by their moving parts rather than imagined according to the sum of those parts. Consequently, brand message in the digital world is too often conveyed within a narrow mechanistic world view that prioritizes information over communication. In this world view, the challenge to communicate a brand’s strategic, experiential and fundamentally humanistic dimensions is largely forsaken, displaced by the sterile, safe predictability afforded in uniform site structure sparsely furnished with animated obstacles. When the medium myopically drives the message, the creative engine of brand message is short-circuited.

Or should the message drive the medium?

Against the increasingly formulaic strictures of the existing world view, the emerging imperative for the next wave of digital agencies demands just communication of a brand’s significance. As a complex tapestry of intellectual, emotional and experiential dimensions, each brand message calls for media through which it can be conveyed with equal richness and vitality. Expressing these intricacies in cyberspace requires that the realization of digital media pertain to a new design paradigm. Henceforth, brand message must inspire the design of digital media, shaping the contours of the medium itself to become a means of real communication for the virtual realm.