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[by Todd] Who created the concept of brand personality? Seriously, I'd like to know.
For years now advertisers have assigned personality traits to their brands like parents watching a children come into their own. But while kids naturally grow, and hopefully mature, we seem intent on hold brands back in kindergarten year after year. How else do you account for the rote processes agencies have developed for advertising?
I kept coming back to brand personality while talking to Larry O'Flahavan over at Boxer Films. Boxer Films worked with Team One Advertising, on extending the Lexus ES 350 campaign, "Is it possible to engineer desire?"
Rather than asking for a series of films hyping the car's bells and whistles, Team One and Boxer Films explored where that question might naturally lead. What emerged was a brilliantly simply series of two-minute videos focusing on fine chocolate, champagne and fragrance. They called it the Science of Desire, and offered it as a viewer showcase on TiVo. (You can find them on BoxerFilms.net under Jeff DeChausse's director's page.) Odds are you haven't seen the end of this content.
But the Lexus showcase is far more than a few extended-format videos. It was built around the understanding that the videos weren't for a commercial. They were shot with an understanding that consumers may ultimately play them on a cellphone, or years from now in Google's video player.
And that's where brand personality steps in. These aren't some over-the-top exploit like we've come to expect from CP+B. Instead this is a body of work that will speak as much to the value of Lexus five years from now as it does today. How many so-called viral videos will be worth the bandwidth six months from now, let alone six years?
Not that every brand can support doing work like this. But far too many will never consider it. As Larry pointed out,
"We've all become very good at pounding out the 30-second commercial, in part because we know what the box looks like. To do work like this you have to reconfigure your thinking. What will it look like on a computer, on a cell phone, what about PSP? It changes everything about how you shoot."
It would be a safe bet to blame weak creatives for the pablum we see. But Larry suggests the directors, who have made small fortunes doing television commercials, are as much to blame.
Sooner or later someone has to break the chain of co-dependence. And it ultimately may fall on the clients, Larry said.
"Agencies are scared, production houses are scared. They know they aren't offering what the client needs. But they have no idea how to do anything else."
There are some examples of other brands taking similar steps. Coke has embraced the lifestyle approach with it's music and blogs content at MyCoke.com. But the examples are few and far in between.
Which makes you wonder, how many brands, years from now, will look back and wonder what they could have been, if only...
What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory. 
