All Of The Brands Suck At Branding

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about salad tossing, Iron Maiden, strutting at the gym, and more.

Your letters:

Mark:

Is marketing art or science, and was it forged in the fires of Mount Doom like the One Ring?

My first ad job was at an agency named DDB, short for Doyle Dane Bernbach. Every morning, I’d walk into the agency lobby and be greeted with quotes on the wall from late creative head Bill Bernbach. Whether you’re running a business, a football team, or a whole country, it’s never good to continually rely on dead people for leadership. But my agency didn’t give a shit, so those stupid Bernbach quotes are now etched into my skull. Here’s the one that popped into my brain again after reading Mark’s question: “I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.” 

If you think that sounds pompous, well then you’d probably feel the same way about all of the other Bernbach quotes I had to stroll past on my way to my cubicle every morning. I didn’t even get to write any ads back then. I was just a lowly assistant account executive, and an unhappy one.

Now it’s 25 years later and I’m the pompous ad prick. In fact, I’m still so attached to the art of the sale that I volunteered to conduct a brand strategy session for Defector Media at our summer offsite this year. I had not written, nor delivered, a PowerPoint deck in literal decades. And yet I still made the offer, because we’d owned this company for five years and it was time to refine our elevator pitch.

To my surprise, my colleagues agreed and took me up on my offer. Shit. Even stranger, they ended up liking the exercise. After I went through the deck, Ray Ratto himself said to me, “That was far more useful than I thought it would be.” That’s the Ratto equivalent of a full kiss on the lips. So I’m gonna give you a condensed version of that same presentation right now. For fun. Lucky you.

For this exercise, please turn your irony switch off. Forget everything you know and hate about the brands, and get yourself into the Peggy Olson mindset. Ready? No? Whatever.

Going by the classical definition (mine), a brand is the public identity of something: a product, a service, a charity, a political campaign, a TikTok user … anything. The most successful brands are ones that put real thought and care into that identity, so that it engenders a deep-seated feeling from their customers. You see a Coca-Cola logo, you see a cold, refreshing fountain soda in your head. You see the Marvel name on a movie poster, you think about all of your favorite childhood superheroes. You come across Jake from State Farm during the game, you want to commit homicide. That’s all a function of successful branding. It’s a commercial relationship, but also a personal one.  

In the analog age, developing that relationship was both art and science. Agencies did qualitative research to see who a client’s customers were, and what those customers wanted. Then they drafted a creative brief that explained how X product solved the customers’ problem. Then they handed that brief over to a creative team to make a cool ad out of the pitch. Then the ad ran and everyone got rich. Or, more often, the ad bombed and everyone involved was fired. A more innocent time.

Let’s use a successful example from that time. It’s the 1980s and Nike is foundering. Reebok is the sneaker category leader by far, pitching their wares almost exclusively to people who are hardcore into aerobics. But Nike has footwear for activities well beyond aerobics: running, walking, basketball, and more. They just have no way to tie all of these products together under a single, unifying brand idea. This is before the sneaker industry as you now know it exists. No hypebeasts. No Air Force Ones. None of that. Sneakers are niche products, and not a lifestyle yet.

Until Nike goes to Wieden+Kennedy, an ad agency out of Portland, Ore. Once they explain their problem to agency founder Dan Wieden, he realizes, "We needed a tagline to give some unity to the work, one that spoke to the hardest hardcore athletes as well as those talking up a morning walk." The resulting pitch was simple: YOU, the customer, are a serious athlete. All of the shit that pro athletes do, you are also capable of. You only think you’re not an athlete; we’re here to tell you otherwise. Here’s the ad that resulted:

That was the first ad to ever use the “Just do it” tagline. It remains Nike’s tagline to this day, and W+K remains their ad agency as well. That’s not just a successful branding campaign, but a genuinely inspiring one. Nike ads fired me the fuck up as a kid. I wasn’t alone.

One more. It’s 1997 and Apple is fucked. Microsoft-equipped PCs have colonized the market, especially in the business sector. As a result, Americans view Apple products less as computers and more as frivolous toys for creative types. Apple could have responded to this by pretending to be IBM. Instead, then-CEO Steve Jobs and ad legend Lee Clow decide to lean into Apple’s perceived differences. This is the campaign launch ad they devised as a result:

In retrospect, this brand reel is so overblown as to be comical. And in 2025, this is also the branding proposition of EVERY tech company: our food delivery app, and its customers, will change the world. But no tech company was talking like this back in 1997. None of them had the unmitigated gall to run billboards with pictures of fucking Gandhi and a tiny brand logo at the bottom. So when Apple said “Think different” to customers, they both noticed it and embraced it. Buying a Mac made them feel like heroic iconoclasts, and thus the Apple cult was born. It didn’t hurt that Jobs’s products really DID go on to change the world (probably not for the better, but this answer is too long already). A good brand gives customers the product they need, and then makes them feel good for buying it.

Most current brands fail in this task. I refer to you Alan Kluegel’s breakdown of Salesforce’s truly baffling ad campaign for its AI offer. AI is a bad product which, unless you consider youth suicide to be a welcome event, causes exponentially more problems than it solves. So Salesforce cooked up a series of ads where Matthew McConaughey runs into a problem that no customer has ever had (Don’t you just hate it when you willingly sit outside in the rain because you forgot to use your eyeballs?) and which AI is barely qualified to solve. Honestly, I don’t even know the fuck I’m looking at when I watch these ads. They may as well have been written in Klingon.

I doubt Salesforce, led by a truly appalling man, gives a fuck. Like other companies, Marc Benioff has taken his branding strategy directly from President Trump. That strategy is: hammer people over the head with your bullshit until they just get used to it. That’s branding in 2025. It has no extra thought behind it. Having a brand just means having a public face, which is why you’re sick to death of every brand. The only feeling these campaigns elicit now is fatigue. So maybe, like old man Bernbach said, advertising is an art. If so, then it’s dying off the same as every other art form currently is.

Michael:

How good does it feel when you can comfortably go down a notch on your belt or bracelet on your watch? I feel like I'm actually losing some weight and maybe getting something accomplished. 

Oh fuck yeah, that’s the best feeling ever. I even had to get my wedding ring resized one time after I dropped a ton of weight. That’s the Super Bowl of weight loss right there.

Because you can obsess over your weight or your BMI all you like, but ultimately the greatest judge of fitness is your personal wardrobe. When your pants start to get too tight, you want to dig a hole and jump into it. But when they feel too loose, you feel like the goddamn homecoming queen. That’s when the weight loss is truly visible, and not just a number on a scale. Then you go on a shopping spree for new clothes and feel like a brand new person.

Then you eat too much pecan pie on Thanksgiving, your new clothes protest, and the internal negative feedback loop kicks back up again. Oh what fun.

Barrett:

Why can't I toss a salad correctly? I'm assuming you will ignore the obvious joke here and answer this most serious of questions. Every time I make one at home, all the good toppings (olives, carrots, nuts, croutons, etc.) gravitate to the bottom of the bowl, even though I've pillowed them with lettuce of various types. I've tried every method, from tossing eternally to try to achieve maximum distribution, to overturning the bowl into ANOTHER bowl. None of it works. 

[Butthead voice] Hehehehehe, you said, “toss a salad.”

Your struggle is real, Barrett. I learned to properly toss a salad back when I was working in the service industry. You put all of the ingredients into a big bowl—really big, way bigger than you need. You season the ingredients before dressing. You pour the dressing around the sides of the bowl. Then you grab a pair of tongs and toss the salad by picking a bunch of it up, putting it back down, and repeating until you have a nice, evenly tossed salad. Let’s say “tossed salad” one more time. Tossed salad.

Anyway, I’ve used this same technique at home ever since and guess what? My salads are still a train wreck. The goodies settle at the bottom. The shredded carrots ball up into a single wad. And the greens taste like they died sometime back in the 1980s. Why can’t I get this right? Let’s pinpoint a few culprits:

1. I am not a professionally trained chef

2. I’m working with grocery store produce, which is usually dogshit unless I’m willing to pay specialty market prices (I am not). In fact, I use bagged salad kits a lot, and those kits use ingredients swept up off of the warehouse floor.

3. My wife prefers her salad underdressed, whereas I prefer my salad to be floating in a lake of Ken’s Lite Caesar

Most important: I am LAZY, and I find making salad a tedious process. I’ve already put all of my sweat equity into making the meat and starch when my wife is like, “Did you make a salad?” Then I roll my eyes and, in two minutes, whip up a salad that would be laughed out of a Burger King kitchen. If I really gave a shit, I’d get up at Zero-dark thirty to hit the farmers market, stock up on olive oil that arrived just off the ship from Palermo, and reserve two hours of prep time exclusively for salad making and tossing. But I don’t. I’d rather give up and let someone else do it. This is why Sweetgreen has a market cap of nearly $750 million.

Back to Barrett. Just try using the really big bowl and see if it works. It probably won’t. You and I are but mere salad mortals.

Will:

What is one sporting event you wish you could have witnessed live?

The kick-six, mostly for the after party.

HALFTIME!

Brian:

My kid’s first concert is Iron Maiden (hell yes!!), and he’ll be nearly 18 when it happens. Family members are acting like I’m sending him into a warzone. How do I handle the helicopter parent brigade without starting a family war?

Are your family members all Tipper Gore? Do they know that rock music isn’t the tool of the devil anymore? That it isn’t even popular anymore? Who the fuck is clutching their pearls about Iron Maiden in 2025?

Lucky for you Brian, you won’t be the only one at the stadium treating that concert as a family outing. My brother is huge into Iron Maiden, so he took my nephew to one of their stadium shows a while back. My nephew was even younger than 17 at the time, so this could have been incredibly dangerous. The poor lad might have grown up wanting to be a WWI flying ace had things gone sour that night. They didn’t. Maiden put on a killer show, and 80 percent of the attendees were older than Bruce Dickinson is right now. Then everyone in the crowd went home peacefully. I myself have yet to see Maiden live. It’s an oversight that I plan on correcting, and I could take a school group with me if I wanted to and not suffer any incidents.

I know this because I’ve gone to my fair share of other rock shows. I saw Motley Crue live and there were a ton of families. Same deal when I saw Metallica, and GNR, and Oasis, and you get the picture. Every time I see Bob Mould live, I have a hard time picking myself out in the crowd. That’s the live rock experience now. It’s a chance for grown adults to safely relive their dirtbag years for a few hours, sometimes with their children in tow. Your kids are, quite literally, safer from harm at one of these concerts than they are going to school every morning. This is why we need to bring the Department of Education back, and why we must appoint Slash to head it.

Andrew:

Theoretical rule changes are usually trite, but I think the new kickoff rules are good. So here is my idea: no more "half the distance to the goal" for penalties. Just take that ball to the one yard line. It makes the area closer to the goal line more important, like the penalty area in soccer. Also more plays running from your own one yard line, which means more safeties, which are undeniably fun plays. 

That would be true if refs ever called a safety. But if the ballcarrier has so much as a stray eyelash reaching out of the plane, they never award one. You have to bring that guy down in the back of the end zone, shoot him dead with a gun, and THEN Bill Vinovich will be like, “After review, the play was indeed a safety.”

There’s an offensive advantage to Andrew’s proposal, by the way. Just as an offense can get backed way the fuck up in its own territory, so too can a defense. In fact, offenses operate from inside the other guy’s 10 far more often than from inside their own 10. And we already have balls spotted at the one if a defense commits PI in the end zone. So Andrew’s rule tweak would actually give offenses more help, in an age where every rule has already been modified to jack up scoring and yardage totals. I don’t want that. I want offenses to suffer, and not by having J.J. McCarthy quarterback them. This is why I will again stump for OPI to be ruled a turnover. It’s the rule change that dare not speak its name.

By the way, Andrew is dead on about the kickoff return. At this point, anyone who is still complaining about that rule is complaining just to complain. They’re also clueless. Right, Dave Toub?

Ryan:

Am I wrong to be annoyed at the guy who takes four to five laps around the (small workplace) gym between his reps? It feels "look at me," and the pacing makes me uncomfortable. But maybe I'm supposed to be walking around between reps instead of typing Funbag emails.

Oh that’s a total peacock move, and it has been ever since Gold’s Gym was founded. If you’re about to lift 300 pounds over your head, you need to get fired up for it. You pace. You cinch your weight belt tighter so that everyone else can see that this is no ordinary set of reps you’re about to do. You beat your chest like Tarzan. You crank up the Halen. You draw in a crowd anyway you can. Then you let out guttural wail after every rep, like you just got an anal probe. And when the set is over, you cry out in triumph and parade around the gym like it’s the canyon of heroes. It’s a whole performance. Very gratifying.

Does this performance annoy everyone else at the gym who’s just trying to work out before they take their kids to a Scorpions concert? Yes. But if you’re like I was back in my playing days, you don’t acknowledge that. In fact, you arrive at a mindset where you believe that everyone is blown away at how big and strong you are. Weaker men in the gym cower in awe. Hot women nearby instantly want to hump you. You have mastered the pump, and by extension life itself. It’s a delusion, but by god is it ever a fun one.

(I maxed out at 235 on my bench; only one other guy was in the free weight room at the time.)

Timothy:

Am I suffering from a yet-to-be diagnosed degenerative condition or are products these days becoming increasingly near impossible to open? You unscrew a cap, only to face this extra seal with no lip to get your fingernails underneath. All of the “tear here” markings are just red herrings. Either there is no tear to be had, or you wind up with this minuscule sliver of plastic that provides no mission accomplished dopamine rush. Attempting to open a bag of chips has become akin to trying to rip a phone book in half.

Products are harder to open now because manufacturers are cheaping out on packaging costs to help boost revenue. Not to linger on my ad days, but I was working on the Kit Kat account back when Hershey’s, the parent company, decided to get rid of its foil wrapper. If you’re my age, you remember that wrapper well. You slid off the paper sleeve, opened up the foil, and then broke yourself off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. It was nice little unboxing ceremony, plus you got a Kit Kat at the end of it. But plastic wrapping was cheaper, so Hershey’s changed it. Customers complained, but the company ignored them. Now there is no paper sleeve, and your Kit Kat has a 30 percent greater chance of having melted in transit. I would’ve raised a hand in protest at that meeting, but I was too busy thinking about sex instead.

Every other company has cut corners in that department ever since. Resealable bags don’t reseal. Foil Corn Pops liner bags have gone extinct. And the Trader Joe’s knockoff Cheeto bag will not open without tearing right down the side. Awful. I hate the word “enshittification,” but here’s a glaring example of it.

Email of the week!

Thomas:

One Friday night, many years ago, my friend Rowe got into a fender bender during rush hour on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Because of that, he got to my apartment later than expected. The plan was to get up at dawn and head to Berkeley for the Big Game, as Aaron Rodgers looked to clinch a Rose Bowl for the Cal Bears (the Bears won, but did not get the Rose Bowl). Our friend's little brother was also in Berkeley on an official recruiting visit and we were hoping to party post-game with the team (we got too drunk during the day and headed home).

As I waited for my friend to get there, I watched the Malice at the Palace live. I howled with laughter. If my friend hadn't gotten in that fender bender, he'd have been there, too. But when he did arrive, I told him we'd need to watch the Kings game later because he needed to see what happened in the game before. His phone, of course, had no internet connection and he had received no notifications. He had no idea what he was about to see. I had the TiVo ready and pressed play. I got to see the joy on his face as he experienced that madness for the first time. We rewound and slow-mo'd over and over, laughing and high-fiving. We were 22 years old. We didn't have a care in the world. Life was great.

That was 21 years ago today. A baby born that evening, whose dad was maybe sneaking peeks at a TV to see replays of Artest climbing into the stands to fight a fan, can now legally drink alcohol. I don't feel that old, but I am. In that same blink of an eye, I'll be 64. Time is a bitch.

That it is.