Brands who Stalk

There are a lot of brands out there attempting to reflect back values at their target audience (Koppaberg, Converse, Nokia?). This presentation asks why brands have become obsessed with stalking their audience and collecting information on their likes and dislikes, rather than taking time to discover something about themselves. Interesting thoughts; plus there is a bonus slide featuring Xzibit!

View more presentations from Alexander Chung.

16 minutes of satirical brilliance

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

I finally got a chance to watch the 16 (yep, SIXTEEN) minute Short; Logorama. I'm aware of the irony of publishing it on a blog linked to an ad agency but it is a stunning piece of work which deserves to be seen. Of course there are a lot of messages in it about the commercialization of US culture and the damage it is doing, but it is also a comment on the changing nature of brands. The recontextualization of so many multi-million dollar brands (in transforming them into characters in a film noir), as well being a visual feast, is an approximation of how we all consume brands now: remixing them and finding new meanings within them.
The question is how brands can embrace this new culture.

What Do Piracy and Brand Value Have In Common?

It seems two things happen in a recession. Pirates come out of retirement and brand value increases. At least according to Millward Brown's annual ‘Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands’, released earlier this week. Interestingly “In a year of global economic turmoil, when every key financial indicator plummeted, the value of the top 100 brands increased by 2 percent to $2 trillion.”