Eugbrandstrat's Considered Chaos 01

Welcome to issue 1 of Considered Chaos. These eDMs will come out monthly-ish: deeper dives into the cultural insights I’ve been deciphering in my video content.

I’m still working this one out. Is the length feeling too long, or just right? What are the topics or formats you’d like me to get deeper into? Let me know.

Quick sidebar before I launch into the main event:

I’m taking on a limited number of clients for brand strategy consulting beginning in the back end of October. Get in touch via this email if you’d like to do something together.

Post-millennial culture and brand-as-mosaic

I suspect most of you have found yourself here via my ‘post-millennial trends’ series which has gone (unexpectedly) viral. As I write this, my video on ‘death of the millennial brand’ has just crossed 1 million views on TikTok.

The series began as a desire to better link past and present. Trends don’t come out of a vacuum. They are formed in response to the culture and attitudes that come before them. And so much of what we find ourselves in now can be discovered by poking through the ruins of millennial culture.

Millennials were alive to witness the setting sun of the golden age of capitalism. There was a promise made to us which we saw conclusively broken in 2008 (although Big Tech ensured precious few of us still made off with enormous riches).

Gen Z was never granted that promise. Their entire lives happened post-9/11, their adolescence post-GFC. In a few short years the zeitgeist moved from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games - a profoundly cynical piece of media characterised by disillusionment with authority figures, each revealed to be either deeply flawed or outright fraudulent.

Both scenarios are characterised by a deep mistrust in institutions. This is the bedrock of several of the post-millennial trends I’ve commented on.

• Identity is too rigid a concept for a worker constantly being asked to transform themself to avoid being made redundant by technology.

• Sincerity became read as naivety - the millennial generation tricked into hustle culture only to still fall behind their parents, and as such gave way to lie-flat culture and a penchant for nonsensical chaos (seen best as Dan Harmon’s Community → Rick and Morty pipeline).

• The craft movement was swallowed whole by multinationals, our collective disgust with its misappropriation driving a pendulum swing towards ironic ugliness where, for a brief moment consumers have been able to find respite.

And of course accompanying all this, we’re now drinking from a media firehose that edges closer and closer to terminal velocity.

Information is presented to us in such a volume and in such a fragmented fashion we are hardly able to make sense of it. We are under assault from images, ads, brands, entertainment, news events, scientific breakthroughs, art, all delivered in a single unbreakable stream. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Our stolen attention has been individualised and medicalised via the ‘ADHD epidemic’. It should come as no surprise. This was as much as confirmed by a Zoomer I befriended at the pub a few weeks ago, describing his dexamphetamine prescription:

“Whether I have ADHD or not is irrelevant. Do you really expect me to be out here raw dogging life like this?”

It’s in this chaos a more effective metaphor for brand building is to shift thinking from ‘brand as story’ to ‘brand as mosaic’.

Associations are now formed as the composite of a million different fragmented moments where the consumer experiences your brand. The more moments you create, the stronger the eventual composite.

They are picking up an energy, a vibe, not a linear narrative.

Under this model the ‘big idea’ TVC is no longer the centre of the universe, and yet many big agencies (at least in Australia) are still playing catch-up to this mentality. A friend of mine recently expressed frustration that their ad agency refused to even begin working on social until the 30’ TVC was approved.

Let me say the quiet bit out loud: they do it that way because it works for their process, not because it’s the most effective way to brand build.

Vibe is what’s currently driving the discourse around the US presidential race.

US politics has traditionally been dominated by cults of personality but what is interesting to observe is that for the moment it’s not Kamala that voters are buying, nor the story being told through her policy platform, it’s her vibe. The decision is being framed as one of energy. Joy and exuberance vs. vengefulness and spite. Your goofy mom vs. your weird uncle.

Whether they can maintain this brand energy until November remains to be seen but early signs are good. The 2016 Clinton campaign, the 2024 Biden campaign, and her own first run at the candidacy present a perfect triangulation of exactly what not to shoot for.

The full post-millennial trends series to date:

• Fluid brand identities

• Life under consistent chaos

• Cost-of-living and little treat culture

• The death of craft

• Branding amongst brainrot

• The liberation of brand feminism

• Failure of the algorithm and the return of gatekeepers

Good attention, Bad attention

In an environment where attention is such a difficult commodity to come by, it’s easy to make the mistake that all attention is equal.

TikTok is effectively channel-surfing as entertainment. Its users are constantly being fed new content regardless of what they like or follow. It makes it much easier for new profiles to get attention (which is how you found yourself here), but it leave you in a constant state of insecurity (returning audiences make up less than 30% of my views).

This creates a perverse incentive to make a particular genre of ‘viral’ content - which TikTok is more than happy to coach you on via their creator insights, trending audio, stitches, etc. The same goes for content agencies who are usually dialled in to the formats that are performing at any particular moment.

But in doing it is too easy to find oneself trapped playing TikTok’s game, not yours. Since you don’t own your audience, TikTok appropriates the lion’s share of value from the attention you have captured.

I’ve had clients complain that whenever they put their logo in videos their views drop dramatically. What they often leave out is that those logo-less videos with 100k+ views result in almost zero attribution back to their brand.

This is bad attention.

On their own, views, likes and followers are effectively vanity metrics. I’ve experienced this first-hand.

I have been running my own experiments on virality the past month. What I have observed is that beyond around 100k views, there is at best a weak correlation with the right type of attention, which I am measuring as email signups and work-related inquiries. That attention also comes with a cost, including a range of personal insults which range from the relatively benign (why do you look like John Lennon going through a K-pop phase) to the surgical (your clothes look like they’re bought-to-return). Babe, ouch.

Good attention is the type which builds specific, attributable, favourable brand associations. Finding this type of attention relies, ironically, on relearning the fundamentals.

You need a brand strategy. A simple one, not some ridiculous proprietary framework with purpose, mission, attributes, benefits, brand archetypes, or whatever the hell this is:

If it can’t be explained without you in the room, it is not going to work.

One clear brand positioning. A few pillars to support and build out that positioning. And a personality to shape tone for that positioning. That’s all you need as an anchor to understand what you are actually trying to say.

Alongside that you need a distinctive set of brand codes you can use to make your content universe identifiable even in absence of the logo.

You need to use this strategy to brief more succinctly and more consistently. This is a skill that’s moved up from a nice-to-have to essential when the media landscape is so fragmented. You could get away with bad briefing when it was 1 agency, 1 TVC. You can’t when it’s 50 content creators, 100 pieces of content and half a dozen platforms.

The final piece is a political one: building a culture of content in your business so you are trusted to make, approve and release things at pace. Getting here requires your social media team to have the type of freedom that most big corpo’s are uncomfortable with.

To accomplish this you need to build the business case for this chaos as if it were something as dull as new procurement software. Structure the argument like it’s being delivered in a board paper. Provide industry-specific case studies. Make the actions they can take simple, straightforward, and contained. Your business loathes uncertainty. You need to sell them confidence.

Now you have what you need to get there and build your mosaic. Good luck.

Thanks for tuning out. I’ll see you next month.

Eugene