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This is the campaign intentionally created to debunk traditional mass advertising messages. Were Wieden +Kennedy and Sergio Zyman’s thinking ahead of the time back in 1993?
OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that aggressively courted the Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including endorsements and even outright negative publicity. It did not sell well in select test markets and was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nation-wide distribution. The drink’s slogan was “Things are going to be OK.”
OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X and Generation Y markets, and attempted to cash in on the group’s existing disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns; the concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it.
OK Soda is the real deal. Check it here.
Knowing the culture of your consumers is key to branding. I wonder how it would behave in today’s mid to post-recession markets and if they were tested in major cities, rather than the southwest to mid-western regions in the US that were originally chosen in the campaign?
via nedhepburn
A Revolution in The Process
The State of The Internet by JESS3
An insightful film comparing social media and internet activity around the world. Social media activity has proliferated with 126 million blogs on the web. Facebook has 350 million users and logs in at 260 billion page views per month. Plus, there are 84% more women than men on social networks. The best part (at 2:51) shows the Launch Dates of Social Media Networks, showing an evolution of what we’ve adopted (and abandoned) from 1995 to 2010.
With the recent news that Facebook has overtaken Google as the entry point to the web, there is no doubt that Facebook is a valuable platform to reach billions of people and future customers. Product searches are great, but often leads to Google generated web ads.
Today people experience brands in multiple ways, including built networks that allow for a closer interaction with the brand. It’s how users are trusting peer to peer recommendations or an active brand profile as opposed to a one-click search that is important. The marketing needs to be brand led, and have the capacity to take on different forms in order for the brand to be best brought to life.
[via Paul Worthington]
Brand Thoughts: Fashionista
After publishing with a blackletter logo since 2007, Fashionista decided it was time to reconside and redesign its stoic face as well as swap its back-end CMS from Movable Type to Wordpress.
The old logo was this oversized, domineering, gothic lettering thing that said “spiky, aggressive, old-school news brand.” That’s not what Fashionista is. The editors of Fashionista are excellent journalists who will be critical when it’s called for, but they’re also unashamedly fashion lovers. They might poke fun from time to time, but they’re not spiky or unnecessarily aggressive. And they’re also inherently new-generation when it comes to how they go about their business — they use a blog platform, Flip cameras, smartphones and various social media to deliver their content and engage their audience — so unless we were being very ironic with the gothic, old-school newspaper font thing it just wasn’t really appropriate. I’m also a big believer that the logo and furniture on the site should be a little subservient to the content — it’s the content that engages and the content travels well beyond the site too — so we also needed something a little less imposing.
— Jonah Bloom, CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Breaking Media
More treatments of the new logo at Brand New.