Week five of working from my living room, and I have started watching broadcast television again, which is its own kind of confession. Thursday night, four ads ran back to back. Solo piano. A drone shot of an empty street. A voice saying the word unprecedented. A promise to be there for you.
I could not have told you who a single one of them was.
So I ran the thing I run in workshops, except alone, on my couch, with a cat on my leg. Cover the logo. Read the headline. Name the brand.
Nothing. Four times in a row. Nothing.
Differentiation is not what you say about yourself, it is what survives when your name is taken out of the sentence.
The test is embarrassingly simple and almost nobody runs it before launch. Take your next piece of work, hide the logo, and hand it to someone outside your category. If they cannot land it in three guesses, you did not make an ad. You made a category artifact.
Some brands pass cold. Cover the logo on an Oatly carton and you still know, because nobody else writes like a person arguing with themselves in a very small font. Cover the can on Liquid Death and the joke identifies itself. Trader Joe's hand-lettered signage. Patagonia's photography. The specific unhinged flavor names at Salt & Straw. All of it legible with the name removed.
I have watched this get sanded off from inside brand strategy rooms, and it is never one decision. It is three.
One, category conventions get mistaken for category requirements. Every insurance ad has a family in a kitchen because every insurance ad has a family in a kitchen. Two, research optimizes toward the mean. Test five routes with a hundred people and the least objectionable one wins every time, because objection is the only thing that registers. Three, approval. Each reviewer quietly removes the one element that could be argued with, and the one element that could be argued with was the brand.
Right now the pressure is worse, because the prevailing mode is caution and caution looks identical on everybody. Sincere is not the same as distinctive. You can be genuinely careful about this moment and still sound like yourself, and the brands managing both are going to be the ones people remember in the fall.
Sincere is not the same as distinctive.
Truffles can identify which of six identical cabinet doors contains the treats. She is not reading labels. She has learned the exact sound that one hinge makes, and she is never wrong. Your customers are doing the same work with far less motivation, and most brands have not bothered to give them a hinge.