I guess you don´t know any of the following people: Ulrika Stridsberg, Ulrik Nilsson, Mattias Mattson, Anders Strömstedt, Lennart Petterson, Rune Andersson, Kjell-Aker Sjölund, Daniel Gräntz and Bert-Ove Andersson. If you don´t then it is highly likely that you don´t own an axe from Swedish axe manufacturer Gränsfors Bruks. Or, if you do, you´ve missed the best about your axe. Each axe that leaves Gränsfors Bruks is signed off by its smith. Not on paper, but by them putting his or her initials on the axe. This one for example has been been forged by Mattias Mattson.
Why are they doing this? Let me quote from their website ( http://www.gransfors.com/): “Gränsfors axes are forged by very professional smiths. The proof of this professionalism is that they are able to forge axes with such precision that no supplementary work, to hide mistakes in the forging, is needed. At Gränsfors Bruks the forging craft is allowed to take its time. The smiths do not work by the piece. They take care and do the right forging from the beginning. There is no need to stone or grind or smooth or paint the axes in order to hide or eliminate imperfections in the forging. A smith at Gränsfors Bruks has nothing to hide and he is proud of his professional standards. When he is satisfied with his work and has accepted his axe, he marks the head with his initials beside the company’s crown label”. When Steve Jobs launched the original Mac at the start of the 80´s, he did something similar: “Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member's signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew” ( http://bit.ly/goGfBb)
When I started in advertising mid of the 80s most print ads carried a small logo of the agency who created it. Those agency logos are mostly gone now, eliminated by clients who thought they were only a testament to the vanity of “these ad people”. Maybe that is true. And I don´t necessarily want them back. What I would like to see though is an ad that is signed off by the names of the people who did it. Client and agency!! Just a small line, like the publishing information of a magazine. I´d love to see how many of them are actually proud enough of their professional standards to sign their work for everybody to see. No one wants to be publicly related to poor, boring, mediocre stuff. No one wants to justify himself for “same old, same old” in front of his friends. Journalists have to sign their stories. So should ad people. No more hiding. I´m sure it would improve the quality of brand communication across all categories, namely the so called “classic” advertising. Especially since the client would have to sign off as well. Especially since the statement “I work in advertising” or “I work in the marketing department” all of a sudden turns into “this is my work”. Would you sign off your work for everybody to see? (This blog post was inspired by a blog post, that Tom Fishbourne wrote in his blog http://tomfishburne.com/ a couple of month ago)
