‘How it was named’ is a series where I explore the creation of brand names that have caught my interest. This edition features Pip Bingemann of Springboards

 

1] Tell us about Springboards; what do you do?

 

Springboards is an AI tool that is designed to inspire ideas instead of give people the answers. It is designed around a typical advertising and marketing process, built for the advertising marketing industry. What we do is work out how to optimise AI models to give lots of variation instead of giving everyone the same answer. I’m one of three founders, and so I do a bit of everything.

 

2] And why do you do it?

 

Why we did it and why we do it are two different parts of that, and for different reasons as well.

 

Why we did it? We did it accidentally. We never intended to build a business, especially a tech business. So Amy and I, who’s one of the co-founders and my wife, have spent like 15 odd years in agencies in Australia and the States and in marketing teams. We were laid off about two or three years ago, were experimenting and playing around with AI when it first came up, and we accidentally created something that people wanted. So then we had to go find a co-founder, a guy called Kieran Brown, who’s the technical mind behind the business.

 

Why we did it was more out of experimentation, play, and necessity, a little bit.

 

Why we *do* it, though, is very different. Coming from a branding and marketing background, one of the first things we did actually was write a traditional brand strategy — values, mission statement, stuff like that. We landed (from a vision, mission standpoint) on the place that it is to keep creative people in the creative equation: to recognise that these machines are amazing, but there are definitely limits to them. They also have the threat of making everything look the same very, very quickly without people realising. And so why we do it is our belief that if you want a more interesting, more colorful world, you need to design these tools around great people, not to replace people.

 

3] What values inform your ‘why’?

 

Play is one — experimenting and playing is so important to us. If I’m honest, we’ve lost a little bit of that as a business, as we’ve gotten busy, as a lot of people do. You get busy and you don’t get time to play and experiment. We find that when we do our best stuff and our most interesting stuff, we are playing. And so play is a really, really important one. And curiosity.

 

The other couple that are important to us is, coming from an agency background, you are taught and you are conditioned to be a perfectionist. In the world we’re in now, there’s a time for perfection and there’s a time for speed. The idea of knowing when to prioritise perfection and when to be fast (which sometimes we call ‘speed over perfection’), is another thing that’s really important. Don’t worry about it if it’s broken or a little bit janky or whatever. They’re the two major things that we focus on — experimentation from a value standpoint.

 

There’s two factors I’ve always judged my career decisions on: one, am I learning? And two, am I enjoying it? And if both of those conditions aren’t met, I will go find something else.

 

4] How did you end up with the name Springboards? (did you work with an agency, undertake trademark searches and registration, indicative costs…)

 

I vividly remember when we came up with the idea of Springboards. The business, at the time, was literally two people (Amy and myself), and was called Trilingual. In fact, when we send contracts etc the paperwork still says Trilingual… people, new employees especially, react with “Who’s Trilingual? I’m working for Springboards” as that’s our registered business name.

 

But Trilingual, where that came from is that Amy and I both worked in agencies before… media agencies, creative agencies, and brand-side. We ‘speak’ the languages of all three industries — media language, creative language, brand language. So we decided on Trilingual, a ‘no matter the thing, if you need people for help, to get anything done in those areas, whatever it is, we can come in and help’ set-up.

 

But we also called it an experimentation studio… this whole thing’s an experiment. One of those experiments was Springboards, which became the company that we run today. Originally, when we were selling the concept of Springboards, we didn’t have a name for it. We simply said, “oh, we’re Trilingual. This is an experiment that we’re doing.” We’d show people and they’d want to play with it. And then we landed a contract and realised we actually probably need a name for this product now, because we’re turning it into a product, and we’re moving away from being a services business into a product.

 

Amy and I were bouncing name ideas off each other while eating sushi at a local restaurant. “Oh, what about Springboard?” Amy pitched and I liked it… kind of like, it’s like what we’re trying to be, not what we are. The process from there was as simple as “is the domain name available?” But it wasn’t, so then we added an ‘s’ onto the end of Springboard and we ended up with Springboards. That was it.

 

We went through the trademarking process retrospectively, which was a bit painful as we had to determine what category we fit into, which is probably not ideal. But we have it trademarked and registered now.

 

5] What did you almost call it before deciding on ‘Springboards’?

 

There were other ones over the conversation. So there’s Trilingual, which obviously was the start of our business. Then as we were riffing over lunch, we threw a bunch out, but none of them stuck, and I don’t remember any of them.

 

6] How important is a business name according to you?

 

Exceptionally. Like, how important is your own name to yourself? And regardless of if you’re a small company or a big company.

 

If you’re a small company, often it needs to be very straightforward and say what it is on the tin a little bit or be tactical from a name standpoint. And then when you get to really, really big companies you can call it whatever the hell you want because you’re a really big company and you’ve established a presence and reputation. There’s different approaches to it, but regardless of the size of the company, names serve the same purpose: to be remembered, quickly and easily, not just for who you are but why you exist and what you do. It has to capture everything so it’s obviously incredibly important.

 

7] What one thing do you wish people were aware of about your area of expertise/industry? 

 

We (Springboards) sit between AI and creativity, so there’s probably two parts to that, there’s two different audiences here; within the creative world, I wish people realised that these models have no variation — people don’t realise that they’re all getting the same answers. And that’s a really, really scary thing. Lots of people don’t realise the repetition of these models because they are probability machines and the probability of the next token that’s going to come out is extremely high. That’s one half of it.

 

The other half of it, for me, is that I wish they (tech industry folk) understood the value of brand and brand advertising particularly, because they come from a world of money in-money out “I want safe, predictable stuff that works”. And the reality is that’s not how advertising works… it doesn’t come with guarantees, and overinvesting isn’t going to solve that. It’s worth investing in, but expecting the same returns and results as other tech offerings isn’t realistic.

 

8] Question for funsies! Fill in the blank: Whatever you do, don’t _____ 

 

Either don’t sit too close to the TV (because that’s what I was telling my child earlier), or don’t work at home all the time because you get little kids that come and visit you in your meetings *said as toddler asks for uppies and gets picked up and cuddled* but they’re so cute, so do it.