If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker gang escapee, and were compelled by this post-apocalyptic hipness to inquire of the wearer as to where these pants had come from, the answer you would inevitably receive is that they were made by someone named Cassidy. This would happen so often, in fact, that by the time I finally met Cassidy, out one night at a club on the shady side of La Brea, I actually recognized him by his trousers.

At the time, Cassidy was part of the Ernte design team, but soon thereafter co-founded SkinGraft Designs with partner Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay. Even as the SkinGraft operation was growing with each year, headlining LA fashion week, opening the doors to a flagship store in Downtown LA this spring (no small feat for an indie fashion label in a recession!), and getting their sartorial grafts onto an ever-expanding assortment of celebrity skins, what Cassidy kept yearning to do was sing.

I discovered very quickly after we met that in addition to his fashion career, Cassidy is also a songwriter and performer. At one point, there were even a couple of production meetings held at my house for a show he was thinking of putting together around his music, and involving various performance-oriented friends. That show never came to pass, but after years of false starts, Cassidy finally revived his music focus from back-burner exile and 10 days ago self-released his debut album, Little Boys and Dinosaurs. What happened next is straight out of the viral phenomenon playbook.

On Sunday afternoon, August 15th, Adam Lambert, longtime SkinGraft friend (he’s currently wearing a custom SkinGraft jacket on the American Idol tour, and sported numerous other SG pieces during the show’s run) tweeted to his followers: “My friend Cassidy just shot this great video… http://bit.ly/18FvaM.” Within days, the video shot up to over 36,000 views, and Little Boys and Dinosaurs, sans label, marketing push, or pr strategy, rose to #3 on the iTunes electronic chart, between LMFAO’s “Party Rock” and Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse.”  It didn’t hurt that the video was glam-rock pretty and sexually controversial, featuring some simulated sexual behavior, and a pair of undies slung Sports Illustrated-low. Within hours of Lambert’s tweet, a bonafide minor scandal had erupted over his linking the video, which was, by some contingent, considered inappropriate for his underage following. If you’re thinking this sort of outrage over music video explicitness seems strangely anachronistic in the post-Lil’ Kim / Britney Spears / Lady Gaga era, it should probably be mentioned that the dirty dancing in question here is exclusively male. In any case, the controversy only helped to generate further attention for the music, and by Thursday, Lyndsey Parker, was writing for Yahoo! Music’s The New Now blog:

At this point, Adam Lambert is pretty much like Oprah, in terms of his all-encompassing influence over his devoted fanbase. Just like any Oprah Book Club selection is certain to become a New York Times best-seller, in the pop music world there is perhaps no more ringing endorsement these days than a black-fingernailed thumbs up from the tastemaking Glamerican Idol.

So far the public response to Cassidy’s music, at least among diehard and very vocal Adam Lambert fans, has been hugely enthusiastic. Will record labels take notice? That remains to be seen, but if so, then Cassidy Haley may be the first artist to get signed out of American Idol without ever having appeared on the show.

If you’re a social media strategist, and your friend just so happens to become an overnight internet phenomenon, you’ve basically got no choice but to find the whole thing incredibly fascinating. On Tuesday, as Little Boys and Dinosaurs was climbing the chart, I got a call from Cassidy, and the question on his mind was, “What do I do now? What next?”

Which is a great question for any marketer in the digital age to think about as well.  All too often I think marketers have blinders on, criminally overusing the word “viral” (still!) in the frenzy for buzz and fans and word of mouth and all that. But what if you could get all of it overnight? What if all the promotional initiatives and exposure efforts paid off just like they were supposed to? Is that the extent of your strategy? Or would you be prepared for What Next?

My advice to Cassidy was to take his questions straight to his new-found fans; involve them directly in helping to shape and define the answers together, and keep the momentum going. And he did. The outpouring of ideas that came back to him from this nascent, yet incredibly dedicated, army included everything from ad hoc twitterstorms that got the attention of various media folks, to online community resources created by fans to connect to one another, and to Cassidy’s music. The troops even came up with a seriously cute name for themselves, Comets, (as in Haley’s).

Overnight, Cassidy was handed the sort of opportunity that many marketers and brands are tirelessly chasing after, and yet the most powerful move he made was the one AFTER that happened. He opened up to his fans and offered them the opportunity to be  directly involved with him in the creation of what comes next.

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PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.

The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”

“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”

Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.

Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.

It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, Mr. Campbell, [president at Tropicana North America in Chicago] said, because “it was a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”

Rather, the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded…. What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”

What has essentially happened here is that the ultimate fallout from the responses of a “very loyal small group of consumers” has exponentially magnified the exposure for what was originally just your run-of-the-mill packaging redesign:

The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.

“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.

“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”

That’s the thing. Because of this vocal minority of avid Tropicana fans the attention of a far wider audience has been captured. Tropicana has now made a bigger splash by announcing they will be changing the packaging design back, than they did by changing it in the first place. Suddenly the avid Tropicana-fan minority has company.

Suddenly a lot more of us are now talking about orange juice. Thinking about orange juice! And thinking about it in a way that we never did before. After all, for the vast majority of us, just how different is one OJ brand from another? It’s not exactly a lifestyle product category, is it? (The whole organic argument aside for the moment, as it isn’t really specific to orange juice in particular so much as to grocery purchases in general). Do most of us really think about purchasing Tropicana vs. Florida’s Natural vs. Minute Maid because one brand is more relevant to our identity than the others? Unlikely.

So after enjoying its moment of unique distinction, Tropicana is now planning to scrap the new packaging and bring back the old familiar design so that the small loyal group who asked for it can be appeased, and all the rest of us can go back to not caring about orange juice.

But what if you could do something different?

What if discovering that your brand has more deeply passionate consumers than you’d imagined, and being open to to their input and responding to their concerns is just one part of the new marketing equation? What if the other part is understanding when you have an opportunity to get people really engaged. And not just engaged in giving you feedback, but engaged in helping to develop the brand’s identity itself. What if a non-lifestyle product category suddenly had the opportunity to stake out a piece of the cultural landscape? After all, Tropicana spent $35 million on the “Squeeze” campaign Arnell developed, which it now has to partially undo. What other direction could future advertising money be invested towards?

Having worked with various music festivals, I’ve consulted on and helped execute a number of “Battle of the Bands” contests. A proto-”User Generated Content” initiative, it’s always exceedingly popular. Different music acts submit tracks, or sometimes videos, competing for a chance to perform at the festival. This kind of initiative is most effective when combined with a voting aspect, so that it can extend beyond just the music acts, and actually get greater swaths of fans to participate in the process of selecting the winner to be added to the festival lineup.

In a more beverage-oriented variation on this theme, there’s last year’s “DEWmocracy” campaign, which allowed fans to vote on the new flavors for Mountain Dew (incidentally, also owned by PepsiCo), including the product packaging:

According to the PepsiCo press release, “DEWmocracy is the first-ever interactive, story-based online game that will result in a consumer-generated beverage innovation.” The campaign, which consisted of several phases, involved the launch of a website with a massive multi-player game. Once users created a profile they could go into the game’s 7 “worlds,” earning points and selecting different attributes for their ideal Mountain Dew beverage–i.e. flavor, “boost”, color, name, logo design, and so on. On top of all of this, the game/campaign had quite the storyline. As BevReview explains:

Pepsi and ad agency WhittmanHart Interactive tapped into actor/director Forest Whitaker to help craft the storyline. The entire adventure is setup up via a 3 minute short film that evokes overtones of Big Brother and overbearing governmental/corporate control. This has resulted in a loss of creativity….As is the plotline in most of these types of stories, a “chosen one” rises up to rebel against this oppression. Here’s the product twist… he seeks an elixir that will bring creativity and “restore the soul of mankind.” Now if you move beyond the irony that PepsiCo is a huge multinational conglomerate and that Mountain Dew is a top 5 selling soft drink found pretty much everywhere, you can see the somewhat unique spin this campaign possesses.

Not that I’m suggesting something this over-the-top is really appropriate for orange juice, necessarily, but the DEWmocracy site did reportedly have over 700,000 unique visitors, with 200,000 registered users participating in the first phase of the game. And that’s when they had to stir up consumer interest in engaging with the process of defining a brand direction for the Mountain Dew brand from scratch. Tropicana’s already got that one in the bag.

So what could you do if you were Tropicana?

Now that there’s already quite the buzz about Tropicana’s openness to fan-feedback in general, and about its packaging design in particular, why not create a platform for people to submit their design ideas? Yes, ok, clearly they discovered that people are deeply connected to the original design, but that is in response to just one other, radically departing, yet not particularly dynamic option. How might Tropicana lovers re-envision what that OJ carton could look like given the chance? It could just be a fun exercise in creativity, but then why not consider the possibility that the new design direction could emerge from the fans? Perhaps some new designs would remix the beloved orange-with-a-straw-poking-out image, but put a new spin on it with additional design elements or layers. Perhaps others would reinterpret the iconic image in totally new ways. Maybe others would find new ways to recreate the Tropicana logo in an unexpected style. Who knows?

What is definitely certain is that a small group of avid Tropicana fans clearly have deeply feelings about the brand and its design, and that a whole lot greater audience now cares that Tropicana cares about their input. So why stop the train there? Why not see how far it can go? In fact, why pick just one new design? How about different winning carton designs printed in “limited editions”? If it’s art, suddenly there’s a WHOLE new reason for choosing one OJ brand over another. In that case, why not deliberately set out to discover and promote emerging artists? Giving them their first break of mass exposure through orange juice cartons in grocery stores across the country. Nike’s doing it. So has Mountain Dew, for that matter. Suddenly it’s not just about a “campaign,” it’s an opportunity to create culture.

It’s like that scene in the Mad Men pilot episode where Don Draper suddenly realizes that if all the cigarette companies are facing the same limitations on what claims they can make in their advertising, then it’s “The greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal.” When you’ve got a bunch of pretty much identical companies, making a pretty much identical product–in this case, OJ–you can do anything you want to create distinction. The possibilities for what you could do are pretty limitless, if you were Tropicana.

Right after writing about how cool I thought it would be to bring fictional characters to life on social media, I discovered that the employees of Sterling Cooper, the Madison Ave. advertising agency where the characters on AMC’s series Mad Men work, were all up on Twitter. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitter.com is a social networking site that allows users to communicate with their friends online and via text messages using posts of up to 140 characters in length (a.k.a. micro-blogging.) The characters’ profiles linked back to the AMC site, and they communicated with one another, and with their followers, “in character” and even in speech true to the show’s 1960’s-era time-period. So while it was never explicitly evident, it seemed only logical to assume, as many did, that AMC was behind this progressive and endearing move to use social media to enable its show’s characters to communicate and coexist with its fans. And then, not two weeks after first discovering their appearance on Twitter, the Mad Men characters’ profiles began being systematically suspended.

AMC, it turned out, had in no way authorized their existence on Twitter, and their very presence there apparently constituted a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, so Twitter was forced to comply with a take-down notice, and suspended the accounts. This, of course, instigated a major online backlash, fueled by both the personal disappointment (“Why has Twitter hijacked my beloved @don_draper (and friends)? Looks like i’ll be drinking alone 2nite.”) and professional indignation (“thinking that AMC using the DMCA to kill off the Twitter characters is a huge FAIL.”) of people who related enough to a show about communications professionals to befriend its characters — wOOOPSIE!!

At the urging of Deep Focus, AMC’s marketing group, the profiles were un-suspended. “Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts,” said a Deep Focus spokesman. (Not to mention all that free, fan-generated promotion.) To the legal dept. these actions were perceived as a hostile menace, and yet to the marketing side, this was exactly the kind of fan behavior AMC should support. The manifesto on wearesterlingcooper.com, which came into existence shortly after the reinstatement of the profiles, speaks to the this kind of emergent disconnect:

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.

All along, whenever fans have climbed a little too far, or gotten a little too close, or somehow managed to gain an unauthorized degree of power, they have always been treated like criminals. The difference in the digital age is that this kind of power is now within reach to more and more fans. Our capacity to affect that which we fancy is now, in many ways, as accessible as the internet, and suddenly it means that the rules that once applied to the dangerously overzealous can now be a response to all fans. This contention in the line between fans and criminals is perhaps nowhere more heated than around music.

A few days after the Mad Men Twitter profiles were back in action, the LA Times business section headline read: “Blogger Kevin Cogill charged with felony in leak of Guns N’ Roses songs.” Having “waited half his life for a new album,” Cogill posted nine not-yet-released tracks from the 15-years-in-the-making album, Chinese Democracy, streaming (not for download) on his website. Because of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 he now faces felony (vs. civil) charges, which if he is convicted mean $250,000 in fines and three years in prison. Asked for comment, Slash, former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist, said, “I hope he rots in jail.“

I mean, “I hope he rots in jail,” is an epithet more applicable to, like, a rapist or something, but here it is, nevertheless, being flung at someone motivated by a desire to share his love for a band, and increase that love for more people. Even just in writing this post I am noticing that it’s gotten kind of hard to say pretty much anything sympathetic about the actions of music fans these days without it sounding like a defense of music piracy. Which is more than a little problematic, because what does it mean for any entity that thrives on the support of an engaged fan-base, when its most avid enthusiasts can be just a matter of perspective away from its greatest threat?

The Wall Street Journal just published an article about how various companies are dealing with negative domain names such as ihatestarbucks.com or boycottwalmart.org. Some companies, like xerox, pre-emptively buy up negative domains before some disgruntled customer can, and then leave sites like ihatexerox.net and ihatexerox.org blank. Southwestsucks.com, on the other hand, redirects to a customer service page on the actual Southwest Airlines site, where people can then submit their complaints. And Bank of America apparently even goes so far as to solicit feedback and address consumer concerns on bankofamericasucks.com–which it does not own. None of the strategies mentioned in the post involved pursuing any kind of take-down notice or legal action. God bless the haters, and all, but when fans’ freedom to express themselves is considered a bigger threat, seems like maybe it’s time to reexamine the situation.

For the US government–which has no plans to stop using taxpayer money to bring more cases like Cogill’s in the future–there isn’t really a difference in the way that it would go about treating individual music fans vs. big commercial piracy rings. Craig Missakian, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said, “Prosecution like this makes others think twice.” I’m thinking, anyone for whom success and fan support are inextricably linked (governments need not apply) could stand to think twice, or three times even, about the changing nature of this relationship.

“Every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked,” Thom Yorke said in a Wired piece on The Real Value of Music. Talking about the motivation behind Radiohead’s groundbreaking release strategy for their latest album, In Rainbows, he continued, “So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.” Months before the CD was available in stores, fans were able to download the tracks online via Radiohead’s site, and pay what they wanted for them–even if it was nothing. There are different ways to interpret the results and successes of this, the first experiment of its kind, but what it was unequivocally effective at is making strides to address the new dynamic between fans and music. Rather than dictating that “you are not our fan unless you’re one like WE say you can be,” this approach was designed to give fans, as Pitchfork put it, “the freedom to pay actual money for what amount[ed] to an album leak.”

Whether you’re a cable network or a music act, or anything else that develops content whose success depends on your relationship with your fans, understanding the freedoms that your fans now demand is the key. You might even discover you can appreciate their involvement.

And on that note, check out the youtube response video that Electronic Arts and Tiger Woods came up with a few days after a fan named Levinator25 posted a video of a glitch he’d found in EA’s new golf game:

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HBO has created a monster with the promotional campaign for True Blood, a new TV series from the creator of Six Feet Under, set to premiere September 7th.

AdAge (which has a nice little video about the campaign here, but no way to embed it elsewhere) explains:

While they’re only one part of the larger campaign launching HBO’s “True Blood,” viral promotions by New York’s Campfire agency for the vampire series are a real stand out. Among other things, a message written in ancient language symbols was mailed to prominent bloggers and science fiction geeks known to be interested in vampires. When a few with language degrees cracked the code, they found an address for a vampire website.

That would have been kinda neat on it’s own, and whatnot, but things have progressed far beyond that one vampire website now. If you start following the True Blood trail, it becomes a bottomless pool of content.

You’re more likely than not gonna see a billboard for Tru:Blood, “Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage” somewhere. It’s gonna look something like this:

or this:

and by the time you’ll have come to this one:

you might have started thinking that perhaps this is just the latest niche energy drink to hit the market, targeting a demographic with some sort of really spectacularly alternative lifestyle . Which is precisely the point. HBO’s particular vision of the dead-end of mass culture involves the undead too, apparently. Just another niche in our united niche culture, with their own kind of lifestyle needs. According to HBO’s official website for the True Blood show:

Thanks to a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood, vampires have progressed from legendary monsters to fellow citizens overnight. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu, many remain apprehensive about these creatures “coming out of the coffin.” Religious leaders and government officials around the world have chosen their sides, but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the jury is still out.

Local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), however, knows how it feels to be an outcast. “Cursed” with the ability to listen in on people’s thoughts, she’s also open-minded about the integration of vampires — particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a handsome 173-year-old living up th–

Uh-huh. Whatever.

Cuz at this point, how could any storyline the show’s creators might concoct compete with the multi-dimensional online world that’s been developed around the premise of the first paragraph? (Unless they know something Lost doesn’t, maybe.)

So, there’s the True:Blood beverage site. There’s BloodCopy, a news blog which “chronicles the amazing days we live in as vampires attempt to integrate with humans.” There’s the American Vampire League, an advocacy group “Leading the fight for equal rights for vampires,” cuz guess what? “Vampires were people too.” As you’d expect, there’s obviously a religious opposition group, Fellowship of the Sun. And, of course, no party to which politics and religion are invited would be complete without sex. Which you can now find, with a vampire, at Love Bitten, “The world’s best Human/Vampire dating site,” Are there runner-up Human/Vampire dating sites? Considering that half the merch on the Tru:Blood site is already sold out, there ought to be.

Meanwhile, the series hasn’t even premiered yet!

What people are buying and participating in has pretty much nothing to do with a TV show, and to look at it as just a “viral marketing” campaign is a complete misunderstanding of what’s going on here. This is a full-on Alternate Reality Game:

An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.

Notable prior forays into the ARG world  have included promotions for A.I., HALO 2, and Nine Inch Nails’ latest album, Year Zero. But why stop at a campaign, when you can create a culture? In a sense, this kind of “narrative” that takes place in the “real world,” and involves various media to tell a story–which the actions of “participants” certainly do affect–is probably an effective way to think about the contemporary fate of any brand. Every brand. This just happens to be an opportunity to turn the brand itself, and its narrative, into a new form of 21st  Century-compliant entertainment.

HBO could be the first network to take the leap. Even the TV series itself could really just function as part of a larger narrative. Perhaps they’re already planning something that prescient. Who knows? If not HBO, then no doubt that line will be crossed by someone eventually. And when it is, there’s no going back.

In popular music, independent music, often abbreviated as indie, is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing.

Similarly then, indie brands are independent from major publicly-traded companies, and reflective of a do-it-yourself approach to lifestyle symbol creation. Both indie and major brands appeal to consumers for the same reasons–as expressions of identity, and community belonging–but the indie side functions very differently. Indie brands can often take risks that the major ones wouldn’t know how to were they even interested, they are able to maneuver more deftly in a rapidly changing consumer landscape, take advantage of new opportunities more swiftly, and now more than ever before, they are blazing the trails and creating the models that many major brands are starting to emulate.

As someone who’s been intimately involved in the development of several independent brands I thought I would share some suggestions both from my own experience, as well as from insights synthesized with various examples from Buying In, of what ad agencies (and major brands) can learn from the indies about staying competitive in contemporary culture.

1. INTEGRATE DEPARTMENTS
Agencies talk of integration like it’s the latest buzzword since “viral,” (which, incidentally, before it was a buzzword, was also first tested by independent brands) but most are still set up to approach marketing in a compartmentalized, paint-by-numbers way that doesn’t fit with how any of us in the digital era actually interact with media and messaging. In a time when we update our facebook status while watching TV online, and google something we’ve just seen on a billboard we drove past, all media overlaps. As natives of this environment, indie brand creators don’t think “Print” vs. “New Media” or “Creative” vs. “Media Buying.” Of course, a variety of skill sets is necessary, but when a “media channel” can now basically exist anywhere that people are playing attention, it’s counterproductive to continue enforcing separation between all the various departments of messaging development and dissemination. Without the imposition of this bureaucratically segregated setup, indie brands approach marketing as an inherently integrated process, dealing with the way the different channels at their disposal feed into one another as part of an interconnected system.

2. HIRE DIFFERENTLY
None of the indie brand creators I’ve ever worked with majored in marketing–and that goes for me, too. Marketing majors end up at ad agencies, indie brand creators, on the other hand, end up creating culture. Music, fashion, publications, events, blogs, graffiti, whatever. If it’s a genre of DIY expression, that’s where indie brand creators can be found, and it’s where strategies that take on new marketing options are going to be developed. I’ll admit, I did take one Marketing 101 class, though, and it’s probably because marketing is taught as a segregated process that its students are primed to continue thinking within the same kind of box once they graduate. Indie brand creators think outside the marketing box because 1. They were never taught there was a box to begin with, and 2. They couldn’t afford to try out the box anyway, so developing “alternatives” is their default. This is who you want to be hiring to help develop progressive marketing strategies.

3. INVEST IN CULTURE NOT MEDIA
In a consumer landscape niched up into various lifestyles, “mass marketing” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Indie brands have never had the luxury of a mass marketing budget, so they’ve instead focused on building and sustaining meaningful relationships with the communities that nurture them. In Buying In, Walker talks about Pabst Blue Ribbon’s strategy after discovering that their brand, whose history was essentially as a staid Midwestern working class beer, was experiencing an unexpected popularity surge among the pierced, tattooed, bike messenger alterna kids in Portland Oregon. Clearly this was not a demographic that PBR had sought deliberately (the brand just happened to become quite eagerly adopted by a young culture in need of a cheap beer), but once they noticed what was going on instead of buying up a ton of media targeting this demo, PBR began sponsoring community events such as “bike polo” matches. In fact, a particularly ardent PBR fan that Walker talks to specifically noted he appreciates that he’s never seen a PBR ad of any sort. It shows that “they’re not insulting you,” he says. If advertising AT a community can be perceived as an insult, supporting it can make a brand an integral part of the community’s culture.

4. A BLANK SLATE IS THE BIG IDEA
Ad folks think it’s their job to create advertising. Indie brand folks think it’s their job to make sure their product sells. The disconnect between these two perspectives is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the ad agency reticence towards “user generated content.” This is not to say that ad agencies shouldn’t create branded content, by any means, but rather to point out, as Walker does, that some of the most potent brands are ones that have allowed people to project their own meanings onto them. His two biggest examples of this are Hello Kitty and the Live Strong bracelet. One benefited from an inscrutable expression, the other from a statement that allowed innumerable personal interpretations. Neither sought to define what specifically it was supposed to mean or stand for, and thereby each allowed people to cast their own relevance onto the brand. Unequivocally cementing a brand into a “big idea” couldn’t accommodate that. Creating a brand that functions as a “platform” for consumers to create their own meaning (whether it’s as literal as UGC or as ephemeral as a personal projection) is now just as crucial as messaging.

5. COMMUNITY FIRST, BRAND SECOND
It is tempting to think that a brand creates a community. In fact, many brands, realizing the power of community as a resource, strive to create their own, and brands such as Apple definitely have a cult-like following. But the reality is that brands do not create communities from scratch, they become symbols of communities. Brands can reflect a community’s values and lifestyle, but I don’t think it’s possible to brand a lifestyle before it actually already exists. Was Apple as hot before the rise of the creative class? (The trend itself, I mean, not just the book about it.) Of course, the Apple technology certainly helped facilitate the expansion of the creative class, but the bottom line is that the societal predisposition that can come to constitute a community has to be there, and a brand does not invent it, it reflects it. Indie brands are spawned out of the very communities that they represent, so it’s not like they need to conduct massive amounts of consumer insight research, and their understanding of this community first, brand second dynamic is deeply intimate. For many major brands, however, the focus shouldn’t be on fabricating their own “community” but on developing a more significant understanding of the needs of the communities that buy and endorse them. (Then, see #3).

6. THINK BEYOND THE QUARTER
The relationship between a culture and a brand, like any kind of relationship, takes time. That it can’t always be statistically documented after three months does not necessarily make the relationship unsuccessful. My favorite example of a brand thinking “beyond the quarter” is Scion integrating it’s cars into Whyville, an online community for tweens. Pretty much the coolest thing you can buy in Whyville is a Scion, and its added bonus is that then you can drive all your other friends around in it in the game. They start at 15,000 “clams” (Whyville dollars), but for 20,000 you can get it all customized. The most fascinating thing about this whole strategy, however, is that the Tween demographic is between 8-12 years old. It’s gonna be a while before they even have a driver’s license at all, let alone be in a position to be buying a car in the real world, but when they are, owning that virtual Scion will no doubt be an experience they draw on when making the purchase decision. This is thinking five, ten, fifteen years beyond the quarter, and it’s how indie brands think. Ok, maybe they don’t necessarily have the forethought to think that far ahead, but they do have the luxury to not have to think of success as based on proving something to shareholders every season. After all, just ask Starbucks about how rampant growth can even undermine success in the long-run.

The trend of more and more kinds of facilities cropping up to support DIY creative endeavors means that more and more kinds of indie brands are getting created. The evolution of marketing that doesn’t look anything like what it has before is only going to continue. Might as well take a cue or two from the side that’s plowing head-first into the changing the landscape.