What makes a brand a bland is duality: claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.

If you thought humans deserved at least seven hours free from marketing’s grasp, think again. How a new breed of brands is selling sleep to the exhausted.

By swapping golden-age advertising humor
 for “brandter” — bantz, LoLz and trash talk — companies risk alienating the consumers
they hope to attract.

Is the golden era of humor in advertising over?

Brands have aspired to stand-up comedy for more than 200 years. But advertising may have reached a mic-drop moment.

From bacon-scented dental floss and KFC firelogs to Hummer perfume and aroma-enhanced VR porn, companies are doubling down on the sweet smell of excess.

In an age of technoscience rationality,

brands are relying  ever more heavily

on the attractive power of animals.

“Dr. No” is a simple movie shot on a poverty-stricken budget, starring a relative unknown, based on the sixth book in a series and released 60 years ago to a mixed critical response.

So … how did it create one of the most valuable
 and venerated brand franchises in history?

From sneakers and supermarkets to pop stars and politicians, billion-dollar brands are subverting professional polish to claim a fake authenticity.

Hardened doors, bulletproof backpacks and classroom panic rooms — how companies are filling the school safety void of gun control.

Alcohol brands are thinking outside the bottle to fuel and gratify a new drinking culture.

Millennials are saving golf by rebranding it

Branding wealth management

for the averagely affluent

(… your robo-advisor won’t see you now.)

From Ukraine to Auschwitz,

a single letter can damn or defy.

Is the metaverse a truly novel terra nova — or just the latest way for companies
 to pervade every click and pixel of
your online presence under the
guise of gamified immersion?

Brand partnerships used to be sparing, targeted — special, even. But as subcultures flourish, no new collaboration is too zany.

What the ugly Christmas jumper

tells us about the avalanche of

modern merch marketing.

From Nike and Apple to Target and MasterCard, today’s wordless silhouette brands are tapping into a wider trend of universal symbolic communication.

What to do when haters come
gunning for your brand

A guide to fostering more fruitful collaborations between
corporate canines and creative cats.

Why more and more brands are elbowing their way into your ears

What every company can learn
from the humor and humanization
of hidden gems.

In his 1974 spy classic, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” John le Carré wrote: “Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.” What, then, are we to make of agencies like the CIA rebranding?

The response of the world’s biggest brands to the shocking killing of George Floyd suggests that the corporate social media crisis playbook has yet to be written.

The power of user indulgence lies in its recognition of our whims, weaknesses and inherent contradictions. Indulgent design allows products and services to dovetail with life as it is actually lived which, in turn, enables brands to form genuine and lasting customer connections.

Nostalgia aside, however, the improbable longevity of “Keep Calm and Carry On” owes much to the poster’s messaging clarity and design elegance — two attributes glaringly absent from the current government’s Covid-19 communications.

The deadliest pandemic of the digital age has supercharged the rise of the dashboard, and illuminated the promise and peril of “dashboard thinking.”

The tattered catalog of Trump brand flops, scandals and failures is almost comically absurd: Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Ice, Trump Model Management, Trump Vitamins, Trump Shuttle, Trump: The Game … to name but a few. Now to this list comes “Trump: The Presidency” — a four-year farrago of graft and malice that ended, all too predictably, in insurrection, impeachment and ignominy.