S06.EP18 - Transforming Amazon: Behind the Brand Overhaul with Koto (James Greenfield)

0:00I had one of those recently where a brand we worked on eight years ago, someone emailed me and asked for the logo, which I thought was a new record for me. um it's like hopefully someone that works there's got it but maybe not anyway

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1:06Hello, folks. Today on Just Branding, we're diving into the one of the most ambitious brand transformations in recent years, and we're talking about Amazon. Over 18 months across 15 global markets, and with more than 50 sub-brands involved, Amazon worked with Koto to create a new brand system that delivers clarity, consistency and confidence at a global scale. And we're really thrilled and excited because today we're joined by James Greenfield, CEO and founder of Koto, the design studio behind the amazing work. James has spent the last decade building Koto into a globally recognised creative agency with studios in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and Sydney and a portfolio that we would all sore our left arms off to have that includes the likes of Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Netflix and now Amazon.

2:02James, thank you for doing this. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. Great. Well, I wonder if we could just sort of dive straight in if you'd be open to that to kind of ask like, well, what was the brief? What was the challenge from Amazon at the start before your work so i think amazon had done quite a bit of work themselves as you expect of a kind of company of that scale and standing where they'd kind of assessed where their brand was today the challenges they were facing and i think within that one of the things that they really looking at was the architecture particularly within the consumer space i think you know there is probably for many of us in the western world a heavy exposure to amazon and all of us have a different interaction with it you know some people are getting brown boxes to their doorstep and maybe watching things on prime but maybe have never even looked at the grocery products other people maybe are getting you know their pharmacy delivered on amazon but aren't watching amazon prime and so you have to really understand that i think sometimes people can think of amazon as brown boxes and you know go back many years amazon used to be books and actually it's it's a much more complicated and a much more complex multifaceted experience and i think what they was they got to the point where and i think they felt that they could a lot of strategic uh fracturing and we need to be able to help kind of develop something that's much more coherent for the next stage of their growth i don't follow up question you mentioned research by amazon oh they had some things beforehand were you involved in that at all or was there enough did you have to go backwards or like collaborate with them to find any other research or confirm it they'd had they'd had a pretty effective piece of work done there to be honest and you know i think a lot of people are built into i think a company like that i would expect them to have a pretty heavy research function as well themselves you know and so therefore that said I still you know there was things we wanted to go and check out ourselves things you wanted to look at you know there was some areas of the company that maybe we just weren't that familiar with compared to and that you know leads to what I said a minute ago which is we all have different experiences and different relationships with this brand and so therefore for some of us you know for me personally I've never even really looked at the pharmacy products I was well aware that they'd bought pill pack I was aware that that was something they did just what hadn't even passed my consideration and maybe that makes me a very typical consumer and a challenge that they're facing you know i'm also not somebody that at that point i have to admit who'd ever been in one of the amazon stores and so i had to go and quickly rectify that and go and go through that experience so you know from a personal point of view there's things you need to do to fill in your gaps but as a company we generally pull research in in all many different places and it really depends upon you know the specifics of the brief and what we're trying to achieve right and the vast amount of touch points across you know regions you know globally that that must have been difficult to get your heads around as well like you know i guess there's translation issues how did you kind of get your arms around all of that stuff as well i think the thing you need to be aware of as well is is like it's very different in each of the markets as well you know some people are only just getting amazon delivery in the world versus you know some of us living countries that have had that for years and so but those people have been watching prime for for many years and so therefore it's you know it's more akin to a netflix based experience over here or any other streaming platform and so within that actually the biggest thing we really had to get our head around was maturity market by market and specifics of you know what was happening and how people saw it and how it turned up in their lives on a regular basis I think you know they've also got an absolutely humongous digital real estate as well and so we had to expose ourselves to that and really understand what that looked like what it did what it was achieving what was successful etc because you know I think it's very easy for you to think about as a designer it's very easy for you to go like I'm just going to start to put order around all this and start putting everything in neat boxes but actually that can sometimes be oversimplified and sometimes you've really got to understand that complexity exists for a reason and you can't just simplify everything some things have to remain complex and so within that there was quite a lot of work to really do to understand that as well amazing and and in your view was was had they let i mean i don't know if you can answer this but i'm gonna ask it anyway but like do you think they'd let it go too far and splinter in terms of the visual identity or do you think it was a you know was it the right time to do it then or would you sort of thought it would have been better to do it prior to that like what are your thoughts on the timing of the consolidation work that you were asked to do i think if i was really really honest i'd say it's a brand that needed it definitely you know sometimes you work on projects and you go well you know what we're replacing isn't that bad but you can see that it could be better whereas in this case i think they had a lot of really big problems and i think over reliance on logo was definitely a challenge that they were facing not necessarily helping people navigate around the fact that there was these various aspects of the b2b and the b2c experience and and how you could collate that not helping people through discovery and i think brand could do a lot of heavy lifting there i think it it kind of speaks to a to a trend we're seeing generally which is i think people used to just advertise heavily and it didn't matter what brand it was advertising was the way to build awareness to build sentiment and in a way it almost excused the challenges that people had with brands but now i think in a world where people are a bit more fractured in terms of how they interact with brands i don't think you can say that everyone's watching the same tv program on a saturday night so you can't just throw you know x million dollars and go i'm gonna put that you know you have those rare moments like the super bowl and other things where you probably have got a lot of eyes which is why there's such a premium on media in those moments but i don't think we can guarantee that we can collect everybody in that kind of universal way even water cooler tv is not as what it was previously you know people are watching kind of shows in very different ways at very different times and so within that i think brand building has really become up the agenda for a lot of people and i think in amazon's case this is me guessing but i think maybe some of the things that they'd launch weren't necessarily getting the traction that you'd expect and within that i think that's the point where you go actually why are people not discovering this why are we why are we not doing this and so you know it's a common challenge we've seen it with other brands okay so let's shift shift on into kind of like how you began to attack the the challenge you've talked about the research and getting at your heads and your team's heads around all of the complexities so after you've done that like kind of what what what did you do next like how did you actually begin then to move move this project forward the number one thing we had to do was to work into a number of cohorts and so therefore really organize the brand through a set number of these cohorts and so so you know within that how do people see the various aspects of the estate how do they navigate around that and so therefore you know the entertainment cohort there's gaming there's shopping there's all these things how do you organize that and within that you know it's very easy to look back on something and then kind of oversimplify it but from our point of view it was really about trying to make you use color in a really effective way and so you know amazon has been for many years orange and so we really lent into that and made sure that you know we really focused on getting that and so it seems like a graphic designer tweak but we we kind of made the orange a little bit more impactful we made sure it stood out so therefore when you know that amazon is advertising to you know you get this very strong orange you've got the smile you know we we tweaked the logo and sometimes i think people tweak logos for the sake of it in our case i think what we really felt was modernization needed to happen you know this was a brand that had a an iconic logo but and as much as it was for an internet store it was you know the mid 90s which is ultimately a pre-internet age whether we like it or not and so therefore the way that graphic design was applied it wasn't thinking about scaling it wasn't thinking about legibility it wasn't thinking about any of these things that we discovered throughout the 2000s and so therefore by revisiting that we felt that we could digitize a brand now that seems a bit funny talking about you know amazon is one of the original internet brands but that is the way that design has had to catch up with the internet over the you know the 25 years we've had of this century so far and so within that i think a really strong use of color and understanding of actually this logo needs to work tiny and needs to work massive it needs to be in time square in the biggest way possible but it also needs to be a few pixels on an icon somewhere and what we found was it couldn't do both those things if you made it really really big it maybe felt a little bit old-fashioned and it felt like it hadn't really been created in the time that we live now and if you really made it really small it really struggled and you had lots of filling challenges and stuff and so therefore you know think about the kind of two extremes of that in terms of the color really thinking about how do we really go you know this is grocery this is what happens here green is a clear signifier you know we always pull on a piece data which is majority of people in most markets are visual first and verbal second and i think many brands think about people you know they use copy lines and clever headlines now we all know that that's important but most people have a visual reaction to things before they have a verbal reaction to it and you know when you're scrolling as we all know a lot of things are going past our brains in a very very quick sensation and so we really need to lean into color within the amazon ecosystem to really be able to use that so color very strong and then the final part of that is we really early on set upon this idea that actually we needed a universal typeface yet again design a habit simplify everything make it really easy make it but ultimately what we found was if we could get a simple singular typeface which had impact which had character which really stood out which made you think oh this is amazon the combination of that with the updated logo which use the same type style and the color we're able to do that and then the other thing is that you know you talked about at the top of the show 50 sub brands those sub brands had all been made in a silo and so some had the you know smile some didn't have the smile some were one color some were two color there was you know it was an absolute wild west and everything had a logo so there's also a question we had to answer which was what deserves a logo because ultimately if you start slapping smiles on everything then everything starts to lose that kind of impact that ability to stand out you know that's a common challenge i've seen on many many brands that I've worked with, which is, you know, this team decided they need a logo, this, and you start putting logos on features, you start putting logos on, you know, little services, internal stuff, external stuff, etc.

12:09So a massive audit of all of that. And we work with our type partner, Nam, and they made a logo typeface. And what that means is that anyone that works in Amazon can type out the logo, and the logo file auto generates for them. And so it's a kind of clever technological solution which means that you also don't have that really common problem we have which is people going has anyone got the logo you know and these emails bouncing around that we that we get had one of those recently where a brand we worked on eight years ago someone emailed me and asked for the logo which i thought was a new record for me um so hopefully someone that works there's got it but maybe not anyway um and so i think you know early on it was all about working out what the key pillars were going to be so the use of color the use of typography and and this new logo system to really understand that actually if we could get that universally all cracked then we would have a foundation which would allow us to start to express the other things that brands needed because you know if you're selling i don't know groceries you need to be doing a very different story than if you're talking about you know hollywood's leading content within a prime environment and so therefore there's a lot of flex that's required there but also we need that consistency that sits between nice i've got a couple of follow-up questions obviously what you're talking about there it sounds to me like kind of like distinctive brand codes right that you were going to kind of codify simplify and um then use to how much research did you like in competitor markets i guess that would be quite difficult right because say the groceries right you're going to go green and you're going to make it look a certain way obviously you might find that that is quite distinctive in the uk but then when you go over to spain or something you know a competitor that looks a little similar how did you kind of get your heads around the complexity of that on a global scale or did you not worry too much about that and think right we're going to do this and you know stuff stuff the competition kind of thing every brand needs to be competitor aware but not competitor obsessed and i think that is like the number one thing and i think some people become competitor obsessed and what they do is they put themselves in a box because you know the greatest world in the world there is a color wheel everyone in most brand areas where you where you're working in an area of like high concentration has used all the colors and if a color is not not being used it's probably for a reason now you know that's not the case when we're looking at like emerging technologies or certain areas and you know you get those rare moments many years ago i worked on the e rebrand and there was a really nice teal and yellow section that was completely unused by telcos in the uk and so therefore you can kind of step into that but i think in this case here you know because it's such multifaceted brand and because it's probably one of the world's most recognizable brands we weren't too competitor obsessed what we did particularly with things like grocery which you pull up in the question is we did quite a bit of packaging design for their own lines and so therefore really understanding actually in an environment where someone's shopping digitally how can we make sure that whether we're looking at the various ranges that they sell under the amazon brand and actually what that does is that becomes quite a useful thing for you to then compare to leading retailers in other markets and it's the it's the combination of the brand overall plus their own lines and also thinking about the context of the way that that's put for sale so yes competitor awareness but but not in a way of like you know company x's use green so we can't because let's be honest a lot of grocery brands use green and for a reason and so therefore i think it's for me it's it's all about the combination of the elements together um you know we're lucky enough to work on some of the world's leading brands as well and so therefore what you do is you build up a pretty good natural repository of brand awareness as well and so therefore you are aware of when you start to stray into other signatures that other areas have if you're building a brand and want to do it right this is for you join the brand builders alliance for expert coaching live master classes and a crew of brand builders who've got your back get on the wait list now at join bba.com now back to the show another follow-up question as you were sort of developing the creative the colors and all that stuff did you do much in terms of customer research like to get kind of i guess their the response from from the market or again was that something that that that you know you basically lent into your team's experience on i think you have to be really careful about what you're testing in a brand environment i think you can do things like legibility within typography which we did do for this project i think you can do things such as talk to people when you put advertising together and see how they respond to an idea i think if you put a color in front of someone and say is this a nice color i think you're taking them into an area where they're not really actively thinking about those kind of things similarly with logos if you say to somebody is this a good logo or not you're probably not going to get a really useful answer just because people aren't walking around going that's a logo that's a logo that's a logo because by design we don't want them to be doing that we want them to be looking at whatever the the message or whatever it is and so therefore i think testing has to be really carefully considered in this case here we didn't test the logo particularly because we were evolving a logo that already existed and so therefore we had to lean on ourselves there and where we did use testing we only used it within areas where we really think in our kind of experience as consultants you're going to get a read that's actually useful for for the project as a whole so how did you work in collaboration with the amazon's in-house team you and coder yeah so it's you know obviously a very large company there's a central marketing unit which we were our kind of like direct clients creative directors and designers there strategists various other people a chief creative officer of amazon i work quite heavily with and within there i think you know very collaborative as a company generally co-creation is one of the key tenants of our work we know that our clients are not passive audiences that are going to just sit there and expect us to present to them i think there is this slight misnomer within certain areas of the design world that that's what should happen i think in our area in the kind of brand consultant area we're very much more focused on you know what are you trying to achieve how can we augment your team how can we take your internal knowledge plus our external experience and combine those together because one of the things that i find you know is is a really interesting challenge for internal teams is if they've been successful in their career they've probably worked at a reasonable level along four or five brands whereas us as a company we've worked on hundreds of brands and so we can bring in an absolute encyclopedia of experiences in all areas which can be very additive you know they can say to us oh how did company x do it and we go oh it's such a really interesting the challenge they had there was x y or z or you know they were struggling with imagery or you know whatever the challenge was or in the digital realm they found you know this and so we bring that experience in and and so that kind of multifaceted plus their depth of knowledge you know we always say to our clients is that we're never going to know as much as you do about your brand because you've worked there every day for five years and we're coming in and you know however hard we crunch for like the month or two months of research we're not going to hit that depth and we're not going to understand all the use cases and everything and so it's really about that one team mentality so high interaction so lots of conversations every week people spread all over the world so heavy use of video to do that this project was mainly run out of our new york studio but I was based in London and in various other places while I was traveling while I was doing this and we you know we worked with people globally to really bring this together to make sure we had that global perspective and so yeah it's high high kind of interaction making sure that you're really understanding what the challenges are high preparation of materials to make sure that people that aren't necessarily on the calls can then be updated you know we had to make some materials for you know quite senior people in the business for them to feel like they're updated and so therefore you've really got to make sure that the two teams working together really crack the storytelling there and so someone who's maybe not sat in four hours of meeting that week and is going to look at something for 15 minutes is going to make sure that they're tracking against what's happening and what's important and what we're trying to discover and then you know don't try and attack the whole thing at once really trying to think about it in a much more kind of like incremental piece and just really trying to you know work through each challenge as you go because then you're kind of taking consideration to it and so with an internal team that has the experience and has the background that the amazons did that made it a really interesting now i'm not going to claim it wasn't challenging of course it was challenging this you know a lot of heavy lifting a lot of things to overcome a lot of things happening as well that was the thing you know we're not like working on a fixed asset that you know the first day we sat on it we just everything else paused this was a company that was launching new products launching new services constantly changing things all the time and so for us we kept on having to tweak and adjust that and say internal teams vital to keep us on top of that as well sounds like chaos what were the biggest challenges you know you mentioned a few there like the politics even and keeping people updated but what were the operational or creative challenges you experienced i think the biggest challenge on any project of this scale and this isn't unique to amazon is change and the idea that some things that have previously been very successful it's time for them to change and you And so that's typography, big challenge.

21:12I think a lot of people are very used, particularly within the product team, to typefaces that they've been using for many years. And we're coming in and saying, we're going to change that. And so therefore, out of the day-to-day evolution of those products, that's a big question. I think obviously you've got a lot of people utilizing their digital realm on a daily basis. And so everyone's very concerned that you're going to see some kind of down lift or you're going to break something or something's going to go wrong. And so therefore, you've got to be really, really careful with that stuff and then I think really making sure that you didn't get sucked into like individual challenges and lose the overall vision of what you're trying to achieve which is consistency basically you know and I think consistency is an interesting thing because everyone knows they need to be consistent but people probably don't get out of bed in the morning and go like oh today I'm going to be consistent you know it's not it's not necessarily the most motivating factor and so therefore in that I think our job very much was to kind of have discipline to that and not get distracted and keep on kind of go like you know what we're trying to achieve is x and this is why it's important and to do that you have to keep on making the case for it it's funny you mentioned typography as being one of the biggest pickups or things of change yeah i've experienced that many times in my career you know some poor product team and we turn up and go oh yeah by the way we're going to change all the fonts and they go like i'm right okay and you know it depends how things are coded how things are built all that kind of stuff you know in Amazon's case they've got a lot of signage to work through as well because they've got a lot of stores around the world so they're going to now go through that thing which is really difficult which is spot the old logo it's changed again since but many years I worked on a PayPal logo change and for about six years later I was still watching seeing old logos everywhere so you know it's a big thing it's a tough one and an investment right and as you say unless you're making that kind of business case I guess for efficiency and you know recognition and you know and and and that side of things that it's gonna it's gonna always kind of frustrate someone in the in the finance team somewhere that they're paying for signage you know still uh so yeah so it's a tricky one when you had started to get traction on this and decisions had started to be made around the brand the colors the fonts and so on were you asked to get in and to kind of help them understand it or get their arms around it different teams across the world and how did that kind of work that kind of internal buy-in or or education of the new system yeah they brought us into many things and that's like a classic thing again you know road showing work it's really important when you've got a lot of teams that you need to talk to and and kind of get in and so you know some of our teams went to seattle and did some sessions there we had very you know many many zoom calls and the equivalent and really a lot a lot of that kind of work and you know interacting with a lot of people and really trying to understand their particular part of it and and what the challenges were i think like all things it's all about communication you know and we were lucky we were working with a client who communicated heavily internally and so we weren't dealing with the problem that we do have in other cases where you turn up on a call and people go what's this about and so then you have to go right back to the beginning and so yeah everyone turned up with context which is the most vital thing amazing and now and now it's been done let's sort of talk about the impact like have you heard from them in terms of how helpful successful useful it's been what sort of uh i guess growth any anything you can share on that like in terms of yeah i think i think the heaviest thing is they've seen a double increase on um recognition and recall and it's really strong brand sentiment which for us is you know the kind of be all and end all for this stuff as we want people to recognize this brand we want people to have increased sentiment we want people to be able to recall it it's a very interesting common challenge we find all the time which is we'll see a lot of marketing work put out there and then it's put in front of people and people misconstrued who was advertising or what the product was or whatever and you know i'm not going to reveal who the client is but there was one i heard recently about a super bowl advert where they spent a lot of money on this super bowl advert and 90 of the people that watched it thought it was for their biggest competitor you know and as someone who's creative i cannot even begin to understand how that happens because you see the end and there's a big logo and so therefore I don't understand how someone does that but you know that's the that's the thing it's like just because I live in this awareness bubble which is you know irritates my wife massively as I everywhere I go look at that look at that brand that's a bit weird don't like that color and all the other things that I'm constantly pointing out day in day out that's not people's live reality and so therefore you know us getting that uplift is the most important thing there is also as well I think hopefully going to be in the long run a cost saving piece to it as well because when you have a fractured brand you're having to roll it out in all these different ways and all you know So unification will lead to that.

25:50But I think we're a bit early for that. We're still doing work today on the brand refresh because there's a lot of things it has to touch and get to. Yeah, yeah. So when did you start the work, if you don't mind my asking? I think it was about 18 months ago, I heard. Yeah, I think we're almost at two years now. Yeah, yeah. How long do you imagine it's going to be? I mean, you mentioned, was it PayPal? It's still eight years later. Do you think that you'll be spotting old Amazon logos for the next few years, do you reckon? I'm sure we've probably got a little while longer yet. Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of things that people need to work through.

26:25And, you know, change is hard. You know, it's an absolutely massive organisation. Someone once told me that either directly or indirectly, one in 17 people in the world works for Amazon. I can't qualify that statistic, but it sounds kind of right. And so, you know, even if it's not right, it's the kind of thing that makes you go like, yeah, that's a pretty big company. yeah i heard i heard somewhere they're trialing drone deliveries like that would be cool to see your logo on a drone right like that would be amazing yeah the nicest thing that's happened so far is two things was the first time someone handed me a box with the logo on at my front door and i just absent-mindedly my kids were running around and i got the box handed to me and i thought oh okay that's nice that's something real yeah and then the other one was uh we designed some van liveries as part of the kind of testing to see how it went and i was walking through new york on a very rainy day and the van drove past with delivery on and i was like oh there we go that's real and it was something i've looked at so many times and then suddenly there it was in brooklyn driving past me so they're the nice little moments where you let yourself kind of take a moment and congratulate yourself definitely and we're and you know very well deserved as well because uh yeah challenging to deal with all those moving parts what what lessons do you think perhaps other large really complex maybe splintered brands could take away from from your work like have you got any advice or thoughts based on on what you've done at amazon that you think are other brands should should consider these things i think you know to kind of build on something i said earlier which i think doesn't matter whether you're a big brand or a small brand or whatever consistency is hard and i think too many people fold on it and what i think happens is the need for uplift whether it's using marketing whether it's social whatever means that people throw the consistency out really quickly and so what you see is as a kind of viewer of consumer of that which we will have all experienced is as as a kind of individual let's think let's kind of talk in the consumer space i can feel when they have an agency change when a new marketing director or a new like agency comes in you can kind of say oh they've changed though i don't think you should be able to feel that as a consumer i think you know if you look at great brands whether it's guinness or whatever you you have the same codes that appear again and again and you know the adverts can be really really different but they have tonality they have hearts they have something about them which people really associate with and i think too many brands will go through some change and then something else happens whether it's a business factor an environmental factor a political factor or whatever and they just quickly go like oh and like run away from it and what happens is it maybe helps them in that minute but over time you're not building a brand and i think you know the big example of that in recent times is we saw nike get obsessed with d2c it aligned at the moment that covid was happening and so it hit it but for me as like a brand expert i could see that there was no innovation coming in that brand they were selling the same shoes which were historic shoes and you know they were making good money out of it and so everyone's like this is all great this is all going to be good this is the future etc but in doing that what they failed to realize was actually you really have to think in decades for brands and too many people can move away from that and so I think what's great for us with Amazon is having done the work with them I can see that they're being really consistent in the way that they do that and the way that they really go actually you know we've evolved what we were but we're also still doing the same things and consistently branding ourselves in the consist way and that's turning up in their marketing it's turning up in all the other things they do and so for me whether you're a small brand whether you're a big brand as boring as it is discipline and consistency will will get you there in the long run i think brilliant advice and and to leaders specifically within those businesses like you know is there anything you would say to them like you know if they're thinking about a rebrand like is is it around that be careful don't kind of just have knee jerk like have a good considered thought pattern before you just kind of commission this or like what are you what would you say to a leader who's who's thinking about a rebrand at that scale i think the most common mistake that i see people make is don't get everybody on the bus at the beginning which is if you decided that change is going to happen you need to build that consensus and you need to make sure that you know now that doesn't mean that everyone might agree with it but you have to give them awareness and what i've seen happen a number of times is a brand or a marketing team will go off do stuff in their own and then won't necessarily have considered the rest of business won't have considered everything else and yes they'll have like belief and strong credibility and and then it gets put out in the world and if there's any kind of pressure on it everything folds because they didn't get everybody in the first place there isn't consistency there isn't that consideration about why we're doing this and what it's going to lead to and i think you know that's getting accelerated in this unfortunate situation where we find ourselves where marketing teams have very high turnover and so you know there's that stat that the average cmo is only lasting about 18 months at the moment that is terrible for brands because what that means is each cmo comes in has to do change because that's the expression you know expectation on them and when they bring that change in then typically throwing a lot of what's just been done out and so therefore what you have is you have this kind of high changing and what happens is most audiences will survive a couple of changes within a five-year window but if you start to change again you've lost people they're no longer interested in what you're doing they just see this thing that's that's all over it's all over the place and so for me i think building consensus and building momentum is all about making sure that everybody's aware they understand what's happening and you bring them in and the trouble is that's hard work for a lot of people very wise good advice good advice jacob any any any sort of uh questions as we start to come to the end thinking about the future is there any any wisdom you want to share about what the future of like global brand systems look like i think the really really hard thing for a lot of brands which we haven't even begun to see really come through yet is getting attention is going to be really really tough you know in a world where you know search is suddenly an llm interface you know i'm not necessarily turning up in that channel and because it's not owned by me in the way I want to and so therefore when you've got you know and this is more from a consumer point of view but if I'm doing search and thinking about it in that way that gatekeeping means that I don't have the ability to be able to build the brand that I want in that way I think the second thing is in the social space people seem to think that if you put logos on things it's not successful you don't get likes you don't get interactions etc and so they've got rid of all of that which is fine which is you know i'm not a social expert i don't understand what gets traction and what doesn't but in the area where you do own it you're not building any recognition all you're building is memes and clever stories and things that people interact with but how does that translate to get people in there and so you know good example at the moment is curries in the uk seem to get loads of love for their social and isn't it clever and if it what isn't it amazing yeah great but if you go into a curry store it's an absolute binfire of a place and so it doesn't matter how great their social is if they can't convert it into people actually wanting to go and spend time in a retail environment and so i think the challenge that we're going to see for brand systems is really understanding where they have impact and how they can have impact there and so it's going to be the real world it's going to be experience it's going to be those spaces i think advertising is going to continue to lose its luster in the biggest way possible we will struggle to have you know meaningful interaction with advertising unless we really get new innovation and thinking there and so to do that brands are going to have to work out how they turn up in people's lives and how they get there and so that's going to have to be quite clever but when they do they don't want to be trying to create the first awareness they want people to already know a bit about them and so therefore that's going to really really put pressure on the brand system to make sure that when i see something from that company wherever i'm seeing it i recognize it and i have a relationship with it because otherwise it's going to be very very tough for people to build any kind of meaningful traction with their customers.

34:35Right, right. Well, look, James, thanks so much for taking some time out, your busy schedule, and for coming on our show. We really appreciate it, and I'm sure our listeners will be so thankful as well. If you haven't yet seen Koto's work on Amazon, jump into Koto's website where there's a whole case study where you can kind of see the actual graphics that we've been discussing. James, is there anywhere else that people can kind of follow your work and your team's work and yourself, like any sort of URLs you want to drop or social links? Yeah, follow us on Instagram at Studio Koto, which is S-T-U-D-I-O-K-O-T-O.

35:11We're pretty heavy updates over there. So that's a good place to check us out. And if you're so inclined, you'll find us on LinkedIn as well. Amazing, amazing. Well, thanks so much, James. It's been an honor to have you on and super thrilled to kind of have a little peek into the work that you've all done there. Kudos to you and your team. thank you so much and have a good rest of your day folks cheers