No wrapping paper required

With the holidays just around the corner, we’ve been thinking a lot about our favorite gifts we’ve received. Naturally, toys and treasures came to mind, but leave it our visual storyteller, Jo, to get beyond the materialistic and consider the gifts that really matter. Not the ones that you find wrapped under the tree, but the ones that don’t require a ribbon and last a lifetime (unlike that one year we were all obsessed with slap bracelets). So, we’re turning the blog over to Jo to tell us about that kind of gift.

My mother did all the good-mom things: She put notes in my lunch box, nurtured my self-esteem and supplied all the marker colors Crayola ever made. She entered me in every art contest for children, preserved every — EVERY — memory on film and dutifully rented my French horn from the school every year. She opened the door for me to be anything I wanted, but the door that got me here was far more unexpected, as mom-things go.

Every school day at 6 a.m., my mom would rouse my little sister and me – usually by singing, sometimes with tickling and occasionally with brute force. But one day a year, it was all worth it. Because after piddling through breakfast, ponytailing our hair and cramming our feet into scrunchy socks and double-knotted tennis shoes, we were told to abandon our backpacks and run to the van. Today, we were not going to school. Today, we were going to Six Flags.

Oh, that glorious day of rebellion. I had the carousel at the entrance all to myself, and so I rode the tiger, the giraffe and the zebra all in one turn. Operators let their rides go and go with no one else waiting to climb aboard. We stayed on the roller coasters as long as we wanted, because every other unlucky child that could have formed a line was at school being made to write in cursive. They were eating Salisbury steak while I had funnel cake, and I laughed gleefully, powdered sugar on my nose, at the misfortune of those rule-followers. If they had a mother like mine, they too could be reveling in this splendid, sunny day.

Mom is a master at the unexpected (sometimes to the extent that she deliberately avoids buying Christmas gifts that she knows I want), but she has been an excellent teacher. For it was in those rare, wonderful days that I learned of the stories that come from a well-executed rebellion and the power of the unexpected. And while my mom probably didn’t realize it at the time, she was teaching me a lesson that prepared me for my then one-day career in marketing.

As you may have heard the Black Sheep Agency preach before, relying on the unexpected can make a huge impact when it comes to public relations. It’s what attracts attention and gets a brand noticed. It’s what transforms mere marketing into memorable experiences — as memorable as a day of playing hooky from school.

As a visual storyteller, I’m constantly balancing the rules of design and brand standards with the elements of surprise. It’s not a skill that I learned in school, but one that I know I picked up from my mom — the one who truly has it perfected. And that’s better than anything I’ve ever found under the tree.