Brands Create Customers

Merlin Mann has announced that he’s “shifting gears” at his famed 43 Folders personal productivity site. In effect, he’s reinventing the 43 Folders brand. The site is changing from a brand of personal productivity to a brand of personal creativity. It’s brand deliverable is changing from improving one’s core efficiency to improving one’s creative output—and one’s personal relevance in the world.

The shape of a new brand

The new 43 Folders brand approach is evolving as we speak, but we can glimpse its general shape and direction. It’s RIP for “productivity pr0n.” The new focus of the site, in its own words:

43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.   . . .

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

Right now, 43 Folders is focused on an arc about how to improve the quality of your career and life by managing your attention in a way that allows you to work your ass off on the creative projects that matter most to you.  . . . .

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

The person the new brand will create

It appears that the new person that the 43 Folders brand intends to create will be one who can enjoy a creatively-focused life in the context of a workaday world. This is a trans-cubicle, integrated approach that opens up a lot of possibilities. Defining oneself as a creative individual who articulates a passion can dramatically refocus one’s life; it can actually make certain mainstream “productivity” issues irrelevant. One’s life jumps to a whole new level.

Some questions

1. It’s not clear yet if the new approach will concentrate on workaday people with passionate hobbies, or also lean toward serving artists and creatives. Will this be a new 43 Folders for the “creative class?”
2. The original 43 Folders approach helped spawn a “productivity process” movement where process took center stage. People flocked to GTD and joined the Moleskine militia. However, a strict focus on productivity process can be limiting to an individual’s growth. Will the new approach be more “philosophical,” with less emphasis on process? In other words, will the journey take precedence over the journal?
3. Who might serve as a model practitioner of this new approach? Every new brand should bring to life a new model of customer, someone who incarnates the brand and serves as a reference.
4. A brand “arc” or a brand journey?
5. What are the brand possibilities inherent in a DIY approach? How might these trump factory brands? This might be the basis for a multithreaded brand from the bottom up.

The incumbent challenge

Of course, there’s one dark shadow hanging over this new 43 Folders initiative. The last word on creative productivity has already been uttered, and immortalized, by Father Guido Sarducci, two decades ago. It’s hard to top that.

Illustration: Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook entry for a flying machine. (Leonardo could have used 43 Folders. He was notorious for starting many projects and finishing very few.)

In business, the company that listens best often lasts longest. The brand approach to business teaches that you don’t have to be the loudest, flashiest or most intrusive voice to build the strongest customer base. You simply have to listen to what your primary partners—your customers—have to say.

After all, they’re your brand partners. And they’re saying it for your benefit.

The New York Times has an example: Believe it or not, someone’s listening.

Listening is the province of brands

Listening is the province of brands. While marketers may lapse into sales pitch mode at the drop of a hat (full disclosure: mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), brands listen as marketers never can. That’s because brands are structured as joint ventures with customers, where listening is as fundamental as breathing. A brand is an active collaboration in context, and it is the brand’s ability to listen that keeps that collaboration alive.

Listening is the province of brands because brands are a team effort, a pursuit of shared objectives and mutual goals. Do we listen closely to our teammates? Yes we do—without giving it a second thought. Listening comes naturally to brands because it’s a basic function of teaming and working together.

Listening is part of the brand experience

Listening is a also vital part of the brand experience. Let me clarify that: how you listen to your customers is a big part of their brand experience. A “rich” brand experience is one rich in listening and conversation, where communication flows freely. The deeper the brand, the deeper the listening. (In many respects, the engine of sustainable brand growth is not the big campaign, but the many individual instances of listening and conversation along the way.)

Brands that thrive on listening

The brands that listen best are often bottom-up brands structured as platforms to advance and grow customers. These brands tend to be hands-on, direct and participative. The more they listen to customers the more they can learn, and translate that learning into innovation. While they may utilize surveys and focus groups, the ultimate goal is real-time listening through front-line employees, where company and customer forge the leading edge of the brand.

Such brands treat customers as friends and allies on a shared brand journey. They listen intently, step by step.

Image: Self portrait, Vincent van Gogh — Wikimedia Commons

Every brand is a journey. Through the brand, customers can discover new aspects of themselves, new strengths, new abilities, new ways of being and doing. The quality of that journey—how enlightening, how enriching, how transforming—is a function of the brand vision, and the brand imagination behind it. A superficial brand might take customers as far as the cash register. A deeply engaging brand takes customers to a whole new world.

Brand builders create the brand journey

It’s the job of brand builders to plot the customer journey that their brand provides. What truths can the brand journey reveal? What frontiers does the journey explore? What depths does it plumb? What’s the spirit? The tone? The texture? All these questions, and many more, dance across the brand builder’s palette.

The brand journey is a creative act: for the brand, and for customers.

Brand journeys are joint ventures

Brand journeys are joint ventures where brands and customers interact to advance one another. They’re dialogs tuned to new experience and to emergent truths. As they unfold they connect customers to themselves, and to one another, sometimes through the brand, and sometimes beyond it. Interesting brand journeys ask questions. Absorbing journeys take risks. Anything is possible.

Develop a “journey reel” for your brand

Thanks to recent advances digital imaging, a brand can now visually represent the kind of unique journey it offers. This takes the form of the “journey reel,” a metaphoric and interpretive expression of the brand journey using the powers of motion video, animation and digital imagery. The journey reel lays out the kinds of adventures and experiences (and mysteries) that await. The journey reel itself is part of that experience.

Not a sales pitch

A journey reel is not a promo or a sales pitch. It’s neither selling nor telling. It’s the expression of a brand’s self awareness, its culture, drive and direction, and where it might take customers. It’s the brand identity set in motion.

Visual elements of a journey reel

What might a journey reel look like? There are some themes and visual cues in this short animation demo reel by Alphonse Swinehart. I stumbled across this by accident, and it is not about brands per se, and certainly not intended as a journey reel. But its creativity is provocative. (A really brazen brand might do a flip book, but that’s another story.)

Journey reels promise to be a new art form, compact and compelling. As I come across expressive elements that might work in a journey reel context, I’ll post them here.

A series of reels rather than one

A journey reel must start somewhere, but a brand that’s going places with its customers will not let the journey reel stop. It will conceive its journey reels as a series, or as sets, building one upon the other.

The journey reel is personal, portable and persistent

I’d imagine that the best channels for journey reels would be those most intimate and personal to customers. That means an iPhone, iTouch, PDA or something similar, downloaded from the Net. A journey reel is made to accompany the customer: portable, personal and persistent. And it’s made to be shared.

Brand journeys mixed and remixed

Of course, customers can record their journeys, too. Brand journeys become customer journeys. All can be playing on digital devices around the world, shared, mixed and remixed in a matter of minutes. When your brand connects, brand journeys mingle.

Map image: Martin Waldseemuller

Brand builders are generally very familiar with the concept of “whitespace” used by designers. In design, whitespace is usually defined as the space between elements in a composition. This is not “empty” space but an organizing force in its own right, one that can add considerable power and emotion to a design or layout.

A related kind of whitespace plays an important role in brands. What I call “brand whitespace” is conceptually akin to the whitespace of designers, but in brands it’s a behavioral space for customers rather than a graphic one for layouts. Brand whitespace is the new maneuvering room that a brand creates for its customers. It can make a dramatic difference in how customers perceive a brand, and interact with it.

Brand whitespace is engagement space

Brand whitespace flows from the brand context that we create for, and around, customers. It forms the “engagement space” of the brand, where customer potential meets brand potential. The larger the brand whitespace, the more freedom the customer has to interact with the brand, to do something proactive with it, and to extend it. With this customer freedom, brand whitespace helps us create customers who can add value back to the brand.

Breathing room

You can think of brand whitespace as the breathing room of a brand. Creative brands offer lots of whitespace because they want the customer to be creative, too. Brand whitespace is that blast of fresh, bracing air that customers inhale in the presence of your brand programs. The more nourishing that atmosphere the more sustaining the brand engagement, and the more new life customers can breathe back into the brand.

Why brand whitespace matters

Brands suffer when they fail to create sufficient whitespace for customers. This can occur when a brand tries to impose a belief system from above, using campaigns of messaging, theatrics and special effects. Such an approach can choke the customer out of the brand. Without whitespace the brand becomes a series of pronouncements about itself: one-dimensional, top-heavy, closed, cloistered and stale. With no space of their own, customers can’t freely interact with the brand or with each other. With a diminished air supply they become passive and dull. The brand itself eventually withers to doctrine and drill, kept alive only by inertia.

Brand whitespace is interaction space

Brand whitespace is brand interaction space. It is where the brand and the customer join to advance their mutual agenda. Brands, of course, are a two-way street. An airy brand whitespace can transform that street from a cramped, one-way alley into a bustling two-way thoroughfare, opening the gates to ideas, insights, innovations and emotions. The more freedom that the whitespace affords the customer, the more the customer can interact with the company, the brand, and other customers to generate new forms of brand value.

Brand whitespace is collaboration space

We design brand whitespace as a context of collaboration and joint discovery. It’s an open work space where the customer and the brand join forces. This is a space of partners, and of equals. The more stimulating the brand whitespace that you provide, the more your customers are free to grow in new directions, taking your brands with them into potential new markets.

Brand whitespace is innovation space

We need brand whitespace so our brands can fully benefit from the initiative and innovation of the customers we create. In this context, brand whitespace is the customer’s opportunity space, mediated by the brand. I like to think of it as a virtual sandbox, where the brand and the customer are free to experiment, explore, prototype and iterate.

Brand whitespace helps advance the customer

Brand whitespace is customer growth space. It helps advance your customers beyond the reach of competitors. In the process it helps transform customers from lowly marketing “targets” to a living brand resources with value-adding potential. By giving customers the freedom to maneuver in the context of the brand, the brand can elevate customers from passive “consumers” to active brand participants and partners.

The brand goal here is twofold: 1) leverage customer insight and initiative to create new forms of value that competitors can’t match; 2) let customers take the brand into new markets where competitors can’t follow.

From a brand perspective, your customers are your greatest competitive weapon. Creating a stimulating whitespace is one way to build out your competitive arsenal.

The measure of brand whitespace

The measure of brand whitespace lies in the degrees of freedom that the brand makes available to customers, within the brand context. These can stem from the company, the product, the brand and the customer. On an axis, the low end of whitespace would be propaganda, and the high end would be partnership.

How to create brand whitespace

How do we create the brand whitespace that both brands and customers need? The answer will differ with every brand, but here are some general guidelines:

1. Understand that your brand is a method for creating customer value. Brand whitespace is one of your premier tools. It’s a new context of freedom that you deliver.
2. Your brand whitespace will determine how freely your customers interact and interoperate with your brand. The greater the freedom your brand confers, the greater your potential brand drive from below.
3. Conceive your brand as a shared innovation platform with customers. Brand whitespace forms an innovation sandbox where you and customers can tinker.
4. Build your brand as a means, rather than an essence. A brand that enables customers to shape new forms of self and to do new things will have plenty of whitespace where customers can re-create themselves through the brand.
5. Design your brand to deliver freedoms that competitors can’t match. Use your whitespace as a competitive weapon to win customers to your side.
6. Brands designed as messaging campaigns usually offer very little whitespace for customers. They clutter the customer’s world, and are vulnerable to brands that take a whitespace approach.
7. Brand whitespace is customer headroom. It’s a sign that you respect your customers.
8. Create a brand context larger than the company. Share this context with customers. Ask them to help shape it, and to move it forward.
9. Use your brand whitespace to open avenues of collaboration, initiative and innovation between customers and the brand, and between customers themselves.
10. How you present your brand can prefigure the brand whitespace you make available to customers.

In future posts I’ll identity specific cases of brand whitespace and how they help build strategic advantage for the brands involved.

For strategic purposes, strong brands plan out the customers they’ll be creating three and five years ahead. These days, brands are thinking about those customers in a radically different context: after peak oil.

Most brands were birthed in an age of cheap oil

It’s easy to forget that most current brands were birthed in an age of cheap oil. In fact, many brands are predicated on cheap oil. These would include brands of motor vehicles, airlines, travel, hotels, destinations, and fast food, not to mention credit cards and insurance. They also include a whole slew of less obvious retail brands built around car-based shopping—especially in the far-flung suburbs, the American cheap oil nirvana.

The brand ride on cheap oil is over

There’s mounting evidence that we’re now reaching the point of “peak oil,” after which easily recoverable oil is on the decline. Some say we have passed it. With oil currently around $100 a barrel, and the US price of gasoline over $3 a gallon, the brand ride on cheap oil looks to be over. Even if oil prices stabilize, they won’t return to the balmy days of the 426 Hemi and midnight runs to the IHOP.

For brands, this probably means, among other things:

1. Cars become more of a “cost”—and a different lifestyle lever
2. Micro trumps mega
3. “Excess” is decay
4. Brands should take a hard look at their energy assumptions

A brand vacuum waiting to be filled

So, what should brands do? They can’t ignore high energy prices, or look the other way as customers wince at the cost of a fill-up at the pump. Customer wallets are hurting, and many customer lifestyles will soon be riding on fumes. Their world is shrinking—somewhat—and they need new brand contexts to bring it together.

Yes, peak oil doesn’t have to mean “peak brands.” Peak oil is a brand opportunity. It’s a brand vacuum waiting to be filled. To provide customers with new forms of meaningful living, a brand might develop new contexts of energy and lifestyle as part of its competitive strategy, with the brand as a new customer ally going forward.

Every brand needs an energy strategy

Brands that ignore the rising cost of oil do so at their own risk. In other words, every brand now needs an energy strategy. At a minimum, every brand will eventually become a brand of energy conservation and energy efficiency, in some unique context, with appropriate brand programs. Brands that lead decisively in this new context will fare better than those who stubbornly cling to yesterday’s assumptions.

Brands as energy producers

There’s much more to it than that, however. After peak oil the nature of brands will change. Brands will have to create customers who can prosper in a universe of less oil. Better yet, brands will need to become energy producers.

Yes, that’s correct. Brands will need to become energy producers.

Observe the electric meter to the left. Imagine that meter attached to your customer. The dials and wheels spin to indicate energy usage. The mission of your brand will be to add energy into the customer so that the meter moves in the opposite direction, meaning that the customer gains energy from the brand. This will be a creative, cultural energy that offsets the rising price of oil and oil-based products.

Brand energy is customer energy

So, how does a company produce such brand energy? It’s a creative process that taps into multiple customer needs across multiple dimensions. Brand energy is customer energy. Use your imagination to find the context that’s best for your business, and your customers.

Some potential avenues:

1. Your brand 1) creates customers, and 2) creates the customer energy to help customers lead uniquely rich, fulfilling lives. Your brand makes up the shortfall in fuel with an abundance of carefully-crafted cultural steps.
2. Redefine energy. It’s not what a customer “burns,” but what a customer creates.
3. A brand’s energy strategy is not “doing more with less.” It is a different kind of “more.”
4. A rising cost of oil need not impede a rising level of living. The brand maps out new riches, and helps the customer change gears.
5. Make oil (largely) irrelevant.
6. Create high performance customers who achieve more for themselves via the creative auspices of the brand. Change your customer metaphor from “consumer” to “creator.”
7. Through your brand, enable customers to “forge independence,” not just “save energy.”

Post-carbon brands for post-carbon cities

Professor Gregory Clark has outlined a quality of life scenario in the post-peak oil era. Today’s energy rich societies won’t necessarily be any poorer. They’ll just have to rearrange their priorities so they can be wealthy and prosperous while using far less energy.

Along the same lines, Denmark has taken the lead in developing post-carbon cities, workplaces and environments. Post-carbon brands are sure to follow.

Denmark does seem to be a happy place.

Photo: CoreBurn — Flickr

The new Adobe AIR platform (Beta) promises to be a boon for brands. If AIR delivers on its potential, brands may soon burst forth with new drama—and relevance—in new digital dimensions.

You can think of Adobe AIR as a feature-rich way to connect your brand with customers via computers and digital devices. AIR has been developed to combine the immediacy of the Web with the power and graphics of desktop applications. Potentially, it’s a “best of both worlds” platform that brand builders can use to extend their brands into new contexts, and to create many new levels of customer experience and interaction.

(AIR is Adobe’s new brand name for its updated rich Internet platform previously code-named Apollo. I’ve written about Apollo and brands here and here.)

Realizing the dream of “rich” brand applications

Adobe AIR represents another step toward realizing the brand-builder’s dream of “rich” personal brand applications that can act as a “second skin” to customers. AIR may enable your brand to act as a digital sidekick, personalized to the customer, always on, timely, deep, trustworthy, engaging, interactive and portable.

Potentially, AIR’s multimedia and functional capabilities open up vibrant new avenues of brand/customer interaction.

A new world for brands

From my perspective, it’s not an exaggeration to say that AIR opens a new world for brands. If your brand has primarily existed as a name or a symbol, AIR can make it come alive in new (digital) customer context. In effect, AIR lets you transform your brand into a customer-focused application to do something fundamentally useful, or something astonishingly cool. This can be anything that connects you and your customers around a shared passion. It’s a way to bundle the customer to the protean meme that’s you. You may not think of your business or brand as a meme, but AIR may well change the game in this direction.

Proof of concept applications

You can check out the first blush of AIR applications at the Adobe AIR showcase gallery. Many of these are in the “proof of concept” stage, but observe how Anthropologie uses AIR in an online retail setting. There are some nifty features here, but they only scratch the surface of AIR’s creative brand potential.

For instance, your brand might use AIR to create a free soft phone for customers. Let them call each other during a prime-time event, such as the Super Bowl or March Madness. Add whatever features you want to the phone to make their interactions with each other, and with you, more compelling.

Another potential brand application using AIR

I can imagine visiting an art exhibit with AIR on a digital device, and downloading an exhibit guide on entering via Wi-Fi. Now the guide is on my device, along with a map of the museum. It provides me with audio, music and visual analyses of the art on display, plus layers of background detail. If I want, I can add notes as I meander through the artwork. I can shift back and forth between artists, and even compare works on the screen. Or I might select the different works I want to see and have the guide plot a course for me through the halls. One part of the guide is a retail shop, so as I’m traipsing around I can order prints, which will be waiting for me at the museum shop at the end of my tour. Later, I’ll transfer the guide to my laptop, where it will be a detailed memento of my visit, possibly with a live link to the museum for news on upcoming exhibits and events.

The museum may provide this guide in support of its own brand, or it may be co-sponsored by a brand that shares common ground with exhibit visitors. With AIR, what starts with an event may become a long-term connection.

Widgets

AIR is tailor made for widgets, and AIR widgets may eventually rule the widget and gadget class. They can include so much more of the customer than other current widget/gadget approaches.

Our brand needs a lift: let’s AIR it

AIR is scheduled for formal release later this year. The AIR platform holds such promise for digital brand connections that brand teams may soon be discussing which new brand applications deserve the rich features of an AIR treatment. “Let’s AIR it” may become a brand mantra in 2008 and beyond.

Photos: Wikimedia Commons

The Wall Street Journal and other sources report that Ford is exploring the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover units as a way to trim money-losing operations. Ford spent billions of dollars to acquire the two car makers in 1989 and 2000 respectively, spent hundreds of millions more to upgrade and market them, but never figured out how to create new customers for the famed marques.

Why didn’t these expensive and highly visible acquisitions pan out for Ford? Here are some thoughts from a brand value perspective.

Brands are married, not “bought”

Brands flourish as shared passions between maker and buyer. Customers marry a cherished brand more than they “buy” it. It’s an emotional plunge. If a new corporate owner doesn’t have a deep and abiding passion for what makes the product and its customers tick—the living connections that infuse every aspect of the brand relationship—the new corporate brand marriage may be dysfunctional, or even sterile. Brands are a joining, from top to bottom. So, perhaps Ford’s biggest mistake was its approach to “buy” the brands in the first place, when a more physical relationship was called for. It arrived with spreadsheets instead of silk sheets.

Intensify the brand, or lose the brand

Great brands like Jaguar and Land Rover live by their own logic and passion. They create customers in their own image. This is a process of brand intensity, a reduction to pristine elements of heightened existence. If a new corporate owner makes a brand more of what it is, unleashing potential locked within, then the brand can thrive anew, as in BMW’s glorious resurrection of the Mini. But if a new corporate owner believes that buying a famed brand is nothing more than buying a selling point, the brand can lose its vision—for itself and its customers. Customers—always the brand canaries—will sense this in a heartbeat.

The interior feels low rent and, insignificant as it might sound, the electric aerial is a joke on a car costing in excess of £60,000. Jaguar needs to look forward and to change its focus. I know many point the finger of blame firmly at Jaguar’s Ford parent company, but the Blue Oval has poured money into the firm but the excuses always seem to be the same – ‘wait until you see what’s coming next’. Jaguar has tantalised us frequently in recent years with concepts promising new directions, svelte styling and innovation like the R-D6 concept . . . a big diesel GT four-door coupé. Did they build it? Nope.

Brand dilution dilutes customers

When you marry into aristocracy, as Ford did with Jaguar and Land Rover, you join the world of dukes and duchesses. You leave Dearborn far behind. This means producing marques that are extravagant in what they do, at a price to match, rather than diluted, entry-level lines churned out for sorties to Wal-Mart. Even though Ford made tremendous improvements in Jaguar quality and reliability, one of its lasting legacies will be its platform sharing strategies that put drivetrain and suspension components from mass-market Fords into the Jaguar brand. While this was highly cost-effective, it was hardly brand-effective.

Maybe “luxury brand” was the wrong category

Ford bought Jaguar and Land Rover to gain share in the automotive “luxury brand” market, but I’m wondering if categorizing these two marques as “luxury brands” may have been one of Ford’s strategic mistakes. It landed Ford in a nest of “Red Ocean” conundrums, from which they never really escaped. In their glory days these marques were high performance brands that originally appealed to high performance customers—unmistakable individuals who were going places with verve and energy (on-road and off-road). They were expansive brands. Dragging in the feather bed “luxury” label led Ford to aim the vehicles at the early adopter Geritol set. No wonder movers and shakers stayed away.

These are brands that under a different charter might have reinvented a high performance context, with a new breed of high-performance customers to match.

Not enough Dylan Thomas

Brands are the poetry of products, and poets can give us insight into the workings of brands. Dylan Thomas’s line, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is a wonderful metaphor for a brand at work, with the customer as the flower. Ford might have read up on Thomas, and worked on a new force and fuse for Jaguar and Land Rover, to create a new customer flowering. Instead they seem to have spent their money on bouquets at the florist.

Photo: Jaguar XK 150 by evercool — Flickr

As brand builders, we’re sometimes tempted to believe that our brands are linear, that they’re straight-line beams of context and meaning that we project upon the world, with the power to bind customers to them. In this view, customers themselves become a linear function of the brand, perfectly aligned and predictable. They’re a blank slate that we illuminate, and guide.

A dialectic of meaning that’s gloriously non-linear

Of course, that’s not the real world at all. In the real world brands are a dialectic of meaning that’s gloriously non-linear. They derive much of their energy, imagination and innovation from customers, in ways that are perfectly unpredictable. You may plot your brand roadmap as a row of brightly colored cones, but non-linear customers will carve their own routes over, around and through them, creating new brand realities (and value) as they go.

(more…)

A visual feature of the new Rolex website is so stunning in its elegance and simplicity that it sets a standard for brands on the web—and especially for widgets that wish to convey brand meaning with a single graphic device.

Brand quality expressed as graphic quality

Go to the Rolex website, let it load (Flash) and then admire the gorgeous oblique view of the Rolex GMT II as it adjusts itself to your time—and then keeps time as if it were on your own wrist. It appears uncannily real. Everything you experience is of the utmost authenticity, right down to the minute hand passing beneath the trademark Rolex magnifying lens.

Without a single word, this tour de force visual defines the Rolex brand for what it is: uncompromising quality. Rolex could have settled for less, but didn’t. It’s Rolex. It’s not just “different,” but in a class by itself.

I’ve never seen anything like this before on the web. Have you?

Widgets must rise to the level of brands

If you’re creating widgets with brand aspirations, Rolex has set the standard. Your job is to do no less, and preferably to take it to the next level. The last thing you want to do is to reduce a brand to the level of a widget. It has to be the other way around.

Thanks to: Scott Weisbrod

Here’s a clever YouTube video that’s making the rounds. A guy (in Norway) can’t play the drums, or the piano, yet he crafts an amazing video where he’s a whiz at both. He makes it happen through stop motion and a massive number of video and audio edits, using his home PC. Quite fun, and eminently watchable.

His YouTube video was posted in November and has been visited over 1.5 million times, referenced by the Wall St. Journal and discussed to the Nth degree on Slashdot. Don’t be surprised if you soon see ad agencies copying the look and feel. (They know where their future lies.)

Creativity from the bottom up

While YouTube has its share of self-indulgent debris, it also hosts some fairly creative video productions (like the one above), generated at the grassroots level. These shouldn’t be arbitrarily dismissed as low-end, “user generated content.” They’re creative works from creative people now freed from a system once geared to big budgets.

The result will be more creativity, not less.

A creative challenge for brands

So what does all this mean for brands? Where’s the brand imagination to carry these new formats to the next level? What can brands do to make them better? (Please, please, please, not that ultimate kiss of mediocrity: product placement.)

It’s time for brands to move beyond the broadcast advertising paradigm and to reshape themselves as a creative force in their own right. In the world of online everywhere, there’s no reason brands can’t be allied with customers in creating and promulgating new forms of expression.

Waiting for the next Absolut

Thus, if you wanted your brand to be the next Absolut, you might tie it, ever so subtly, to the creation of a whole series of quirky/clever/charming and recursively over-the-top videos made by people with a fresh slant on life. Forget product placements. Just place the videos in the hearts and minds of hip people like you.

And yes, that also means your brand is the new network.