I’ve been thinking a lot about lines lately: The Mason Dixon line, the picket line, the line drawn in masking tape in the middle of a room shared by siblings. Lines are borders between countries.
Lines are also unseen. Jackie Robinson crossed a line with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942. The female rabbi at my temple crossed a line simply by becoming a rabbi – after all, women are not supposed to be rabbis. Michael Jordan crossed a line when he decided to play baseball – after all, he was a basketball player. Joe Lieberman crossed a line when he became an independent and was no longer a Democrat. Porsche crossed a line when it went into the SUV market.
When we feel someone has overstepped his bounds, we comment, “You’ve crossed the line.” We use the saying in debates or arguments.
And yes, in our chosen field of communications, we talk famously about the line: above the line, below the line, thorough the line. My goodness – we are flat out obsessed with the line. The question I can’t seem to answer in a way that satisfies me is this: Why are we so obsessed with lines?
In July of 2009, the company I work for, Sapient, acquired an advertising agency, Nitro, and gave birth to what is now SapientNitro. I was a big part of that process. And I distinctly remember thinking at the time how natural it felt to be doing this. After all, the core of what we do as a company is represent our clients brands in the marketplace. Whether we represent the brand through deploying our skills as digital marketers or as technologists through interactive vending, mobile apps or as commerce experts – either virtually or in-store (yes, another line) – we simply needed to get better in a certain medium – in this case television – and determined the highest impact way to do this was through the acquisition of another company.
It felt totally natural to us – and still does – like a band that adds a string section to yield a different sound. In this case, the band is not seen as crossing a line. It is seen as being artistically expressive and even potentially relevant given the music scene. When Bob Dylan went electric, he was seen as crossing a line. But when Eric Clapton plays on “When My Guitar Gently Weeps” on the Beatles White Album, the Beatles are praised for including Clapton – applauded for adding him to the team so to speak.
So here again, we are in the psychology of lines. Some are more easily crossed than others. In Sapient’s case, we felt more like the Beatles and less like Bob Dylan. We were not crossing a line to enter the world of traditional advertising; we were simply adding an instrument to become a better band. And now that the band is approaching it’s 2nd birthday, I look admiringly at the music we’ve been playing, meaning the great work our teams have been producing for the past 2 years.
As the company’s Chief Marketing Officer I am often asked about how we did it. It seems such a strange question to me. We expanded the range of music we play simply by indulging our curiosity about creating a new sound by adding a new instrument. It’s as simple as that. To those who still ask, the answer to the question about how we did it is rooted in attitude, and culture – not in process, or integration.
In fact, when I am asked the question, it is often framed as, “How is the integration going?” And my reaction is that I can’t believe people are that interested in payroll systems. Because after all, that’s what integration is really about for us – integration is itself a function of line psychology. Getting people to connect, to create great work, to “make new music” has been easy. If you don’t orient your thinking in terms of lines, then you actually don’t obsess with crossing them.
After all, lines exist for one reason and one reason only – to keep others out. That’s all. It’s nonsense. In a world where brands need new stewards and new thinking, where they need an explosion of creativity, an injection of technology, and a hint of new attitude, I think the world of communications, a world famous for throwing around the concept of the line, should heed advice from Cee Lo Green and “Forget the Line.”
Success comes not in crossing the line, but in just ignoring it. If you see the line, you have no business being in a profession that touts creativity as core to success. I don’t see the line. I simply do not see it. Please stop trying to point it out to me.
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Elewis
