I joke around that I make paper for a living. Paper strategies. To the creative people fall the exciting deliverables: the TV spots, magazine ads, websites and iPhone apps. Me? I just make the idea starters and the idea guard rails.

Good strategists, with their briefs, provide thought-provoking stim, context, and imagery to help the makers and doers create motivating selling schema. The paper containing said stim is two dimensional. Brand planners are great at bringing those two dimensions to life, yet there are still only two.  I came across a new file format today called .STL.  It stands for stereolithography or Standard Tessellation Language. It’s a format for 3D printing and one which, no doubt, we will be seeing a lot more of in the future.

This new format is one brand planners should use as inspiration. A format with an additional axis. I dimensionalize my paper strategies with a little playacting, voices, miming — anything to help the creative process along — but at the end of the day the paper is the paper and it sits on a desk or inside a Mac. We need a new format. Any idea?

Peace.