I know some higher level copy writers who collect print junk mail, lots of it. What they do not collect is email spam and online ads. This is far more telling a metric than many I could name.

Creative works, for Chiat's "toys" ad it got them an award as Nissan tanked. The problem is the word branding gets used a little too liberally, for anything not directly tracked. The word, unfortunately, has all the ripeness for folly as building self esteem does for schooling.

There is a tendency to see brand recognition as a correlation to product sales (no such correlation exists). There is an often irresistable tendency to mask self absorbed artistic expression at the client's expense as branding. And who is there to question it? Branding is, to a far larger extent than anyone is willing to admit, magical thinking. It has become, in practice, a word devoid of useful meaning.

Posted by: (theother)JS on May 7, 2002 03:32 PM

 

I'm not sure I agree. People who create ads may be pretty bright. They assume their targets are stupid, though. How many companies treat their customers like they are intelligent? Their ads reflect the view of the customer, which is that the customer is pretty dim and needs to be enticed or fooled into buying their product.

Posted by: mcw on May 7, 2002 09:37 PM

 

Brading is more a game of oursmarting clients. The customers are rarely fooled any more. The advertisement is, however, not the product template. A lot of products, including high-tech, need the hype to make up for mediocre product. Branding is not quite the same issue, for it isn't really fooling customers so much as clients. The imprecision of its use promotes a lot of wrong conclusions. But I doubt ad people are stupid, quite the contrary. They've created a quantity which is impossible to measure directly. "Ineffective" has no application in this envoronment.

Posted by: (thother)JS on May 9, 2002 09:28 AM