Beyond Urban Branding

When DJ Hero was announced, I was juiced. But when this ad dropped, I lost bout 50% of my interest. A few posts back I talked about the importance of sometimes just letting an artist do their thing and letting your brand ride the wave. More often than not though, you can't afford to do that. I think ipod squandered an ad with Eminem like that once before. But this ad, it was just mediocre. I felt no connection to the DJ guy, the rappers or the artists (both of whom I really like). I think to tighten things up, they should have not gone the mashup route. They should have went with the "How could Guitar get better?" Then actually using a DJ for the first ad?? (hows that for original?). But alas, I'm sure the creative team asked the question "But WHICH DJ?". Fair question. Here is the answer: DJ QBERT, MixMaster Mike, DJ Kid Dragon, DJ Whoo Kid, DJ Kid Kapri, DJ King Tech- Mike Relm...I could go on...all day actually. But I won't. DJ Hero went out of their...

Beyond Urban Branding opens Tech Week with a true banger of an ad. We'll look at tech ads from time to time on our blog. But this week its gonna be all tech brands, all the time. We will begin with HP's ad featuring Serena Williams. When we did the first soft launch, we reviewed the precision HP crafted their ad with Jay-Z . It's easily one of my favorite tech ads. I actually feel like HP and a lot of other well done ads don't get their proper recognition because Apple gets so much props for their ads. OK, so this ad is actually better than the Jay-Z ad for one reason in particular. Strategic co-branding. In one commercial Serena craftily pitches, her video game (never played it but apparently shes got something going on with EA Sports) her designs with Nike and most importantly- her clothing line Aneres . Now, I don't know why or how Andre 3000 and Uno were able to get shout outs in the ad. Was she just giving them props or did somebody have to pay to get them i...

HP did the thug thizz right there. Jay-Z was just about at the apex of his game when this ad dropped. The hologram effects and the casual conversation gave HP an amazing edge. The ad dripped confidence and coolness like few urban ads have. It also gave Hip-Hop a mature look that was long overdue and it did not looked forced. -Beyond Urban Branding

The most authentic urban ads in the history o f the game, all come from alcohol companies. This saddens me greatly, because, I've always felt that many of these companies used their accurate knowledge of Hip-Hop and urban subculture to target underage kids . This is not something that you can prove, but, its hard not to believe that is the case. The truth is, whoever created these campaigns knew what they were doing. When these ads first hit, I was in love with them and tried to tape as many as I could of the air. These ads did not FEEL LIKE ADS. They felt like rap songs. Any brand that can master that, has a winning campaign. The bottom line is that Puffy and Ciroc Vodka could have never happened, Jay and Armand de Brignac would have never existed without St. Ides paving the way. These are just a few of the ads St. Ides have made. They've made many more than I can list but some of them include Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Geto Boys and many others. St. Ides also got major shouts out on ...