Ten of us crowded into my friend Dana's living room in Sellwood on Sunday night for the premiere, with a pan of nachos and one couch built for four. Before the episode even started, somebody counted the brand tie-ins out loud. Adidas had a sneaker collection. Johnnie Walker had a White Walker bottle that reveals its message when you freeze it. Oreo had rebuilt the title sequence out of cookies. Mountain Dew had a can that goes blank until you chill it. Bud Light had already sacrificed its own mascot to a dragon in front of the Super Bowl audience in February.
The room reacted to exactly two of them.
The Oreo title sequence got an audible reaction because somebody had clearly spent weeks stacking cookies into a working clockwork Westeros, and craft is legible even to people eating nachos. The Bud Light spot got a reaction because killing off a mascot you spent two years building is an actual decision with an actual cost. The rest we scrolled past.
Borrowing a cultural moment is a loan, and the interest is paid in credibility, which means the only brands who should take the loan are the ones with a reason to be standing there.
Here is the test I keep coming back to. If you removed the property and kept the idea, would anything remain? Oreo without the show is still a company that will spend absurd effort making a thing out of its own product. That is who they have been for years. A sneaker with a house sigil printed on it is a sneaker with a sigil printed on it, and next spring it will be a sneaker with something else printed on it.
Cultural moments are borrowed attention. Attention is easy to rent and impossible to keep, and a rented crowd notices immediately when you have nothing to say to them. Everyone in Dana's living room already knew which brands had a stake and which had bought a seat.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Somebody says we should be part of the conversation, and nobody in the room asks the harder question, which is what we would contribute to it. Being part of a conversation you have nothing to say in is called standing near people.
Attention is easy to rent and impossible to keep, and a rented crowd notices immediately when you have nothing to say to them.
The show ended, the couch emptied, and four of us walked to a food cart pod on Division because the nachos had not survived contact with ten people. Nobody mentioned a single one of the tie-ins. We argued about the episode for forty minutes. That is the thing everybody wanted a seat next to, and the seat was never the point.