Great marketing disrupts the clutter of our collective attention spans. The creations of Conference 2015 speaker Scott Thomas, AKA SimpleScott, disrupt a deeper kind of clutter – the kind that inhibits progress itself. His first taste of groundbreaking innovation was a feast, when he served as design director for the 2008 Obama campaign. From there, he launched Simple.Honest.Work, a design and technology company that uses a highly iterative approach to get to the core of brands and build their products and technologies from a place of authenticity. The company’s projects have included overhauling Fast Company’s digital platform into an evolving network of sites, and streamlining Nike.com into a searchable, frictionless experience as smooth and sleek as its running shoes. At his Conference session “The Brand Deck—Are You Game?” Thomas will expound on Simple.Honest.Work’s recent Kickstarter-enabled launch of a literal deck of cards that helps companies quickly and playfully assess the core tenets of their brand.

Brief caught up with Thomas after his recent trip to Europe, where trips to sites like the Centre Pompidou allowed him to indulge another of his passions: architecture.

Brief: You actually went to school for architecture before you formally studied design, at the University of Oregon. How did that experience shape the work you do today?

Thomas: One of the things that architecture school placed in me was this notion for heightened involvement: longer duration, more in-depth projects. Architecture school forced me to think about what I was doing in graphic design and thinking, ‘what are the longer-term or the bigger problems here to solve?’ And that’s stayed with me. Most of the projects that I work on span the course of many years whereas many traditional graphic design firms or graphic designers get very tired of a project after 3-6 months.

I imagine you’ve told this story more than a few times, but how did you become design director for the Obama campaign in 2007?

I got an email on a Sunday afternoon… the deputy director of new media, Michael Slaby, emailed me and said, ‘we’re looking to hire a designer.’ A big difference between myself and a lot of people at the time was that I not only did design but I did programming so I could work in both worlds. I understood technology and I understood how to write an application in PHP and work with databases and I also knew how to do type design and type layout and layout some tickets or whatever.

You went on to help create one of the most effective individual branding campaigns… ever. What was the secret sauce that made your team so successful?

We were brought on early in the campaign. There was no outside advertising agency other than a couple video crews that were attached to David Axelrod. We weren’t an external agency, we were an internal agency working for this mission with only one purpose, and that was to get him elected. It wasn’t to keep the account or to grow our business. It was to get Barack Obama elected president. That was a very, very different mechanism than what we see even in today’s campaigns. Like Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which used an external branding agency to develop the logo and will continue to do so throughout the campaign.

You would go on to build your own business on the tenets of simplicity and honesty, and yet I feel as though the realm of politics is the very opposite of those values…

You know what, I would actually say the Obama campaign was one of the places where things were a little simpler and a little more honest. It’s a surprise to hear probably, but the reality was that from a simple standpoint, everyone knew exactly what we were striving to do and there wasn’t that traditional sense, like when you get into a corporation or company, of side-swiping or positioning or working your way up the proverbial ladder. And on the honesty front, if you felt honestly about something, it was a place where being vocal about it was encouraged and hoped for. The level of honest conversation that was occurring was much more than any corporate place I’ve ever worked for.

What does it mean to have true honesty in your company’s workplace and approach?

Honesty in the process is one that allows you to ask the difficult questions and get to a more creative solution… It’s not necessarily honesty in that everything we put out into the world has to be 110-percent honest. If you’re marketing something, there’s no way it can be 110-percent honest. But it’s a matter of ethos and having a philosophy and having a name that bakes the philosophy into everyone that we hire and every project we take on and every client that we work with. That level of honesty forms a certain level of respect.

Does it impact who you choose to work with?

At the end of the day you’re running a business and sometimes you take on a client because you need to, and sometimes you may not believe in them or in what they’re doing. But you can at least be honest with them and they can be honest with their consumers. And if they are, I think they are going to more authentic and more genuine. The brands that are the most successful in the world are those that are authentic and real and honest with themselves.

How does the Brand Deck help companies be more honest with themselves?

I don’t think it matters if you’re building a website, launching a new brand or building a television ad, there are certain characteristics you’re trying to achieve and having a process in getting from the moment of inception to the moment of realization is one which is, especially in larger organizations, incredibly fuzzy. I think that a lot of the frustration that comes from that is people who are working in groups not really having aligned visions and aligned thoughts as to who they are and what they are. Oftentimes in creative projects we just need that North Star and the brand deck is one of the very first exercises that we conduct with all of our clients. It’s a way to get down to the core of who someone is and who they’re not, trying to establish the five or six adjectives that define who you are and what you are. It creates a certain level of simplicity to ask a lot of the questions that you’re going to need to ask throughout the creative process.

Check out Thomas’ PromaxBDA: The Conference session “The Brand Deck—Are You Game?” Thursday June 11, 9:00am, at the J.W. Marriott LA Live.

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