Brand communicators, whether of the marketing or public relations variety, continue to focus their messages on how relevant their products are -- or worse, communicating reactively to the problems after they have already developed. Transparency is, for many of them, at best a frightening prospect and at worst the antithesis of what they are used to doing as communicators. As a trend, the call for transparency that started with the financial crisis is going to impact nearly ever arena of corporate communication. As Marc Brownstein put it recently in AdAge, "What they did as an industry is instill a whole new era of mistrust in consumers."

These concepts of transparency and appropriate tools for expanding it have been at the heart of a number of GMD Studios' projects over the last decade. Frequently, moments of crisis and brand challenge are what finally open up a corporation to look to these solutions (since only brands in pain innovate beyond what they've been doing in the past.) For GMD Studios' first public white paper in an ongoing series, we tackle the questions of what transparency means for brand communicators: the essential elements of legitimacy theory, in-depth case studies of how that was applied to the brand challenges of both McDonalds and Ford Motor Company, and detailed recommendations on how increased transparency can be nurtured and managed using brand journalism.

"Transparency, Ethics and the Future of Brand Communications" (697KB PDF)

Which means we'll probably be living with this haircut until 2011, eh? By then we'll have added at least one more page to our new History section.

On either side of the media equation, the core essentials haven't changed: the desire to exchange attention for revenue (or vice versa) remains, and both publishers and media buyers can adapt to the changes. Two quick tips:

1. Who takes on how much risk is what will change the most: media buyers and their clients will begin to expect publishers to take on more of the risk of their campaigns being successful. CPM deals will give way to CPC deals, CPC deals will give way to cost-per-lead deals, and CPL deals will give way to commissions on sales. This isn't new territory: we've been writing about this sliding scale of risk since 1999. Both sides can benefit by anticipating those changes exploring "performance marketing" hybrids to their traditional RFPs and rate cards -- just remember that reducing your risk as a buyer also means reducing your control over how the publisher presents it.
2. Despite that obvious shift to performance, many publishers will respond to softer demand from buyers by slashing their rates in desperation. That, combined with fewer ads per page competing for the same attention, is a buyer's best scenario. If you're already buying media, you should be able to increase the ROI for any of your clients ... and if you aren't buying media, the climate will ripe for you start experimenting with it. Take the advice of a bear market stock trader and apply it to media buying.

Remember, only brands in pain innovate: think of the pain of the marketplace as a chance to innovate you'll see opportunity where others might see only ruin.

Team Detroit

Executive Creative Director: Toby Barlow
Executive Producer: Sam Walsh
Creative Director: Matthew Jacobson

GMD Studios Production
Creative Direction: Brian Clark
Production Direction: J.D. Ashcraft
Story Producer: Jonny Leahan
Producer: Darren Himebrook
Assistant Producers: Robert Wood, Mike Ferraro
DP/Editors: Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, Aion Velie
Camera/Editors: Leigh Jacobson, Jeff Carlson (The Park)
Supervising Editor: Chris Bremer (Element 113)
Editors: Johnna Turiano (Slice Edit), Andres Acosta, Leighanna Rockey (The Park), Diana Gawet (The Park)
Camera Operators: Linda Peters, Steve Witham (Rare Medium)
Sound: Ed Chick (Rare Medium), Burr Huntington (Rare Medium)
Location Support: Doug Netzloff (Rare Medium)
Logistics & Finance: Tammy Kearns, Sue Witham (Rare Medium)
Art Director: Keira Alexandra
Design & Illustration: Jim Rhoades, Chris Campbell

For most of our history, publishing indieWIRE has been part of the regular duties of every GMD Studios staffer. That's going to change, but in every other important way indieWIRE remains exactly the same -- it is just armed with more resources to tackle the issues that face the independent film community. That's the reason why this deal made sense, after so many prior suitors didn't. We're more focused on this as a mid-point, not an ending: the ten-year-olds running around today that decide to go to film school will graduate around 2020, and it is time for the community to start envisioning the independent film movement we want them to inherit from us.

A ton of thanks are in order, though, working backwards from the recent to foundational. We're deeply thankful for the sage advice, counsel and representation of Micah Green of Creative Artists Agency, as well Glenn Adams and John Dierking of Holland & Knight. There have been other critical patrons for indieWIRE through the years that deserve thanks for help making indieWIRE what it is, including the fine folks at Apple Computers, the San Francisco Film Society, the Independent Film Channel, Kodak, the Sundance Institute, Emerging Pictures and BlogAds. There are also a tremendous number of indieWIRE staffers, current and former, who's fingerprints are all over indieWIRE, including folks like Wendy Mitchell, Anthony Kaufmann, Tim LaTorre, Mike Jones, Diane Becker, and Jonny Leahan. At its genesis, though, indieWIRE was a small, passionate and unpaid core of collaborators who spilled their own blood to make it happen: Eugene Hernandez, Mark Rabinowitz, Karol Martesko-Fenster and Ken Tabachnick.

And at the core, the real people to thank are the community that participates in indieWIRE -- indieWIRE's vibrancy is a reflection of the community's passions, and everyone else we thanked are just a subset of that. Collectively, the independent film community can feel proud of indieWIRE's work for the last 12 years and thrilled by what the next 12 might hold. I know we are.