Without Attention, there is No Brand.

With a time-starved audience and attention-starved brands fighting for a fewseconds of consideration, does bringing an overt brand message to the forefront really matter? Probably not when paid intrusion and actual attention become closer to mutually exclusive. Great content doesn't matter for shit if your audience is too busy making a sandwich to care.

We already know that the audience won’t trust our ads. Does it make a difference how many times you say that "we make whites the whitest" or "every kiss begins with kay" or any other questionable statement of position. If no one is likely to believe you, why waste your time saying it when you could be spending your money showing it.

Which brings us back to content. Rather than spend your time attempting to prove bullshit, you can find out what your audience likes, and work to be that, to make them feel understood or listened to. Take these "ads" from Zach Galifianakis, Tim and Eric commissioned by Absolut.

Have I watched those and thought "hmmm, Absolut is the smoothest vodka," or "Absolut is so clear, it must be good," or whatever else you may be able to say about the generic "vodka" brand? Well no, but even if they did set out to make me believe that, I probably wouldn't have given them the pleasure of my time.

Same goes for this Levis viral. There is no logo, no obvious branding message. And if there were, I doubt if it'd have 2.4+ million views on YouTube alone.

The same could be said for Cadbury’s Gorilla ad, or the Diet Coke/Mentos experiment (though not brand created). They didn't waste time proving out a positioning that probably wouldn't have been believed or watched.

I’m not sure where exactly this leaves us. It isn’t time for us to throw out things like marketplace positioning, but we need to prove it in different places. I doubt if television ad breaks are the place for a rational sale anymore. It’s just easier to be whatever you would have said you are. Google didn’t prove their mission statement by making it a tagline. They just went out and did it. And for anyone that says that doesn’t work for companies like yours, you’re probably just making excuses.