"Building Iconic Brands" with Nick Lambesis

Today the San Diego Ad Club was at it again with yet another great event to start out this summer. I just returned from "Building Iconic Brands" with Nick Lambesis; Nick Lambesis is the Chairman and Founder of The Lambesis Agency, highly acclaimed advertising agency known for breakthrough work and the creation of blockbuster international brands, including Bebe, Campari, Hitachi, Skyy and Tacori.
This is a topic that we can all appreciate, advertising and building "cool" advertising campaigns may of us have always dreamed of being involved in. Going into the event i was expecting some personal insight into the world of branding, acouple fun anecdotes and mainly to hear a somewhat self promotional lecture on "focus", "exclusivity" and "consistency". So how way my prediction? Not to far off, but definitely not totally correct. Nick had some great insight and was very entertaining, sprinkling in his experience, some jokes and mumblings of frustrations with clients(something we can all relate to). Unfortunately Nick didn't do the whole presentation himself, about halfway through he handed off the stage to one of his account mangers Elaine, who despite an impressive agency background and a nice long list of name dropping, failed to keep things as fresh as Nick had. She was intelligent and knowledgeable but she continued to spew the same old agency blah blah for the better half of an hour.

Nick's main focus of his lecture was to explain how a "brand" is different than an "ad".
I could take some time and summarize what Nick had to say but in the spirt of representing a brand i am going to list some quotes from him, in order to give you some incite into Nicks "brand"...

"A brand is something more powerful",
"after 30 years, i stall barely understand what a brand really is"
"I'm a marketer so i exaggerate a lot, everyone cool with that?"
"What is the secret to treating a brand? Something Universal, something that creates a deep emotional connection"
"Harley Davidson consistently represents "machismo" and "freedom" which are definitely universal and emotional."[Which was coincidentally mentioned by Seth Godin in his blog just last week.]
"We became a factory for creativity & youth"
[He consistently mentions how target ripped off the Airwalk campaign]
"And said so well by the beach boys, 'You have to stay true your school' or 'You have to stay true your brand' you must be careful how your brand is consistently deployed, you cant get greedy. "
"we're all full of analogies in advertising aren't we?"
"their clients, they are lazy and stupid"
"Its about getting into the mind of the target audience"
"These marketing executive are not willing to talk to their 16 year old kid, let alone go out and get in touch with random kids in their audience"
"We have a labradoodle at Lambesi, we have someone that understands both technology and art"
"San Diego isn't BrandCentral Station"

Another interesting example he provided was..
How the Sky brand started out branded as their production style, their distillery style, but then the Lambesi group was about capturing the concept of cinematic cocktail moments. I personally remember the shift from the "hangover free vodka" to "The blue bottle is there 'during great moments', so quite obviously this transition was effective and created something that was universal and timeless.

...so, all and all it was a great event. BIg thanks to Ad club, Nick & the rest of the Lambesis crew.