Hey there,

I hope our fearless leader Emily, doesn’t regret giving me free rein when she reads this latest piece for you lovely Copy Club readers. If you’re reading this, it means I’ve been pardoned!

I have a hot take on today’s topic of brand partnerships: Almost all brand partnerships make me cringe. The exceptions are mostly small brands and (usually indie) authors, because their voices and brands feel unapologetically authentic to me. When a small brand like Fashion Brand Company does a collaboration like the one they did with comedienne Nicole Byer, I want to pay attention to that brand, to hear what they have to say, to actually support them. I love when a brand is run by people who believe that real art can be part of their marketing campaigns. 

I know that working in marketing, we always have to take the client's brand voice and style into consideration, as well as our intended audience. I also think it is crucial that we not underestimate that audience.

Lady Gaga

I have been a fan of Lady Gaga since high school. My mom took me to the Monster Ball in my senior year, and it changed me forever. As we all know, Lady Gaga was a star in the 2010s, but she is now a transcendent, mega-star household name with record-breaking concert attendance and streams of her songs and music videos.

She’s been mainstream so long, perhaps some have forgotten that she is weird as hell. In that Monster Ball concert I mentioned, she bathed in a fountain of fake blood while singing “Alejandro.” And let us never forget the meat dress and the shocking Paparazzi performance at the VMAs that one year! Or her partnership with Marina Abramović during her Artpop era, or that time she arrived to the GRAMMY red carpet in an alien-like EGG.

Perhaps stranger still than the actual strange stunts she pulls is that despite all of that (or maybe somehow because of it) she has put together jazz albums, including two with Tony Bennett, and she did a jazz residency in Vegas, singing standards much older than herself. What I mean to say is, it is strange in and of itself that her audience always meets her where she’s at creatively, regardless of how weird or vanilla the next project is. I’m not saying we Little Monsters and even the general public don’t have our favorite projects (and least favorites), I just mean that her creative risks and intuitions continue to ring true, and have paid off with her standing as one of the biggest pop stars on the face of the earth today.

Obviously, Lady Gaga pushes the creative envelope and continues to metamorphose, yet we all still recognize her brand. In her earlier days, more than today, she received a lot of flack for it, plenty of pushback, yes, as well as rude rumors that she handled with extreme grace. Still, today she is a household name and definitely mainstream.

Pixar’s “Unifying Theory of 2+2”

Next time you’re working on a piece of content for a brand partnership and you think to yourself, “Will people get this?” I want you to give the public the benefit of the doubt. 

In his TED Talk, Andrew Stanton of Pixar says, “The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail in engaging the audience.” He says that audiences prefer to work for their stories; just think of how satisfying it is figuring out what’s about to happen in a movie moments before it happens.

With this in mind, I leave you to make your own conclusions about what the heck this diatribe on Lady Gaga I’ve written today has to do with brand partnerships, but I will say this: Let us be authentic, and let us never commit the sin of underestimating our audience.