A New World: A New Way

Just because a brand is doing well today doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay on top forever. While stock valuations and sales revenue were the metrics traditionally used in projecting success, IPG Mediabrands—an agency built with dynamic marketing at its core—developed a new set of measures called the D100 to forecast the success of the world’s largest companies. The D100 evaluated a brand’s dynamism using metrics that exceeded just financials and size. Managing over $37 billion in marketing investments on behalf of their clients, it is imperative they have an accurate grasp on the outlook of the corporate landscape.

Midnight Sherpa worked with IPG’s Global Growth Group to develop an engaging animation to illustrate and clearly explain the D100’s complex methods and evaluations. The D100 was unveiled at 2016 Cannes by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google and Jonah Berger, professor at University of Pennsylvania and was received with great enthusiasm.

Telling the Brand Story

To help explain how the D100 works to a broad audience, we found it was best to reinterpret the complex information into an easily understandable narrative. Using familiarity as a communication device, basic geometric shapes were selected to represent the various players in the narrative. The personification and simplification of these ideas and themes made for a more easily digestible and fun narrative.

Assigning roles to each personified company was the next logical step to visualize a metaphor of the D100’s process and assessments. Viewer engagement was enhanced by way of dynamic motion design and the assigning a de-facto protagonist. The D100 uses four pillars to rank brands; Responsiveness, Innovation, Sociability, and Agility. Using a maze as a framing device, these four pillars were visually transformed to depict how brands are measured in a changing global economy.