Lorem Ipsum: Empty branding, and the new philosophy of on-brand.

Except, of course, they hadn’t. Like any good advertising campaign, we’d spent weeks strategizing, conceptualizing, and creating these billboards, choosing locations with care, and combining them with an online campaign and other OOH activations. And the whole time, our Lorem Ipsum headline sat there proudly as the hero of the concept.

Why, I hear you wonder?

Firstly, as a sly wink to get the attention of our tribe of brand-builders - all those perfectionists who can’t help but raise an eyebrow at a glaring mistake like this or feel a shiver down their spine at the thought that they might do something similar.

Secondly, as a shameless marketing stunt to highlight the strength of our brand-building platform. Helping you to stay on-brand is what we do. A sort of reassurance that, while you handle the message, we’ll handle the brand coherence.

But more than being a stunt or a wink, what we really wanted to do was draw attention to something that’s been really bothering us lately: empty branding. Those marketing campaigns which imitate the form of branding but lack its essence and intent. In essence, to all the things that are on-brand, yet somehow not really building brand.

We want to start a bigger discussion about what being on-brand means today. So, let’s get to the method that motivated this mystery: the brain-thinking behind this blunder. We’re going to share three important insights on how to approach the future of brand-building.

• On-brand is no longer enough
• Mistakes can be beautifully useful
• The future of branding is like jazz

First off, don’t get it twisted. We have a strong stake in things being on-brand. After all, we’re a brand-building platform that helps brands organize their brand assets for maximum usefulness. In a world of too much content moving too fast, we’re all about helping brands be more consistent.

But over time, we’ve noticed that the absence of mistakes isn’t necessarily the same as the presence of quality. Things can be technically on-brand and still be empty. Meeting the right surface requirements, but still not performing to purpose.

Why is this?

Precision and technical consistency in content and marketing assets used to be a sign of quality. It showed which brands really cared about quality and craftsmanship, and helped great brands stand out among their competitors. It was, ultimately, a signal from maker to buyer about the amount of care that had been put into any given piece of branding and, by association, into the product they sold.

Then along came that age-old culprit, social media and its sidekick, “instant” marketing. The associated democratization and increased accessibility of design tools raised the bar for compelling, stand-out design, as more companies could easily reach higher levels of adequate design. And what was once a quality signal just became more noise.

Now, we stand on the brink of another evolution in marketing, this time in automation and AI.

It’s easier than ever to look and feel like a traditional brand at first glance, without having any of the substance. For better or worse, AI is delivering a world where anything can be quickly copied, mimicked, or mass-produced on an algorithmic scale. Consistency at scale is still a quality signal, but not differentiating enough to help you stand out. Once a sign of effort and care, now it’s just the expected bare minimum.

And so the target for what makes for “impactful, on-brand marketing” shifts again. Now, the future of being on-brand is less about rigid consistency and technical flawlessness and more about relevance and surprise.

This brings us to insight number two: the beauty of mistakes.

We’re professional marketers. Our job is to avoid mistakes. Right?

Well, yes. But also no. Today’s marketing world calls for us to also embrace our mistakes, and be more purposeful and intentional about how we use them. The hidden flaw in rigid brand consistency is predictability.

In the recent past, unchanging and perfect consistency made a certain kind of sense. In a pre-digital world, where touchpoints were scarcer, media was slower, and consistency was a benchmark rather than a pillar, looking the same everywhere every time was a key determinant of recognition and sender identification for a brand.

Content back then was a message in a bottle thrown into the ocean. You created your content, threw it into the metaphorical sea of physical media, watched it float away, and waited for a reaction later, with the content largely having passed beyond your control. Obviously, you wanted to make sure the signature of your brand was clear and legible for whoever found the bottle.

But now, in a dynamic, digital, meta-tagged, searchable, and lightning-fast media world, other rules apply.

In our current landscape, the key challenge for brands is earning attention in competition with infinite content while also responding appropriately to the constant changes, input, and feedback from the world around them.

Branding has always been about standing out, of course, but now, the ability for people to quickly respond and talk back to whatever a brand is doing disrupts many of the older power dynamics of branding. Brands today must have a plan for backlash, cancellation, customer complaints, and unexpected viral stories, both positive and negative.

Many brands these days engineer stunts, fails, and purposeful “leaks” to get attention. They campaign by reacting to mistakes (made by themselves or others) or purposefully engineering mishaps to give their communication more impact. Mistakes are theoretically the opposite of design—accidental instead of intentional. But now, seemingly mistakes and fakeouts can actually help communication perform better. Why?

Simply this: in a more technical and algorithmic world, people long for and react more strongly to genuine humanity. The sense of a genuine purpose, or just a real, flawed human being in the driver’s seat of the branding. Call it authenticity, humanity, or whatever you like.

Not only that, it’s also a desire for branding that doesn't always play it safe. Ultimately, marketing is about risks. To leap far and high, you have to be prepared to stumble and fall occasionally, too. Low-risk investments often yield low returns, so to maximize marketing impact, you need a number of high-risk, high-reward projects, too.

In short, if you’re creating branding completely without mistakes, there’s a big risk you’re doing it wrong.

So what’s the fix here? Should brands act as inconsistently as possible everywhere for clicks? Are all mistakes good? Should we make as many as we possibly can? Should every brand just have “Lorem ipsum” as its headline copy?

Of course not.

The balance for brands lies in being both unpredictable and consistent, surprising yet recognizable. This means combining the surprise of mistakes used with creative intent with a more flexible and varied toolbox of recognizable elements. There will always be room for great, technically precise, and perfectly consistent branding. But cutting-edge branding now lies elsewhere, beyond the traditional bounds of consistency.

But how do you stay on-brand when rigid consistency is no longer the solution? Let’s look at that in our final point.

If the future of branding lies beyond the old model of consistency and on-brand, where exactly does it sit?

Let’s talk about jazz.

Think of the old model of branding as classical music: a technically detailed performance in which experienced professionals strive to play the music as exactly as possible to the original composition. It's creative and collaborative, but ultimately, it's a closed process. The composition is always the same, no matter what the audience does or what happens around it. The result is undeniably great music, but that doesn’t interact with its surroundings.

Now, to continue this analogy, the new model of branding is more like improvisational jazz.

In improvisational jazz, the musicians react to each other or even to things that happen accidentally. They use their deep, instinctive knowledge of musical theory and the piece they’re playing to improvise, react, and create something new every time they play.

(If you want a more contemporary analogy, the new branding model is like one of those TikTok music memes, with each creator adding their own lyrics, instruments, and reactions to an original starting tune that sets off a whole chain reaction. But let’s stick with jazz.)

The collaborative, living, and re-interpretative nature of improvisational jazz makes it such an interesting model for modern branding. It ultimately encapsulates a fundamental truth of branding that has grown even more apparent in our fast-moving present (and one that might seem like an unexpected take from a brand-building platform that offers customized templates and unparalleled brand coherence):

Branding is a process, not a product.

It isn't something you perfect, finish, or create a rigid golden formula for. If you try to refine, rationalize, or mechanize branding too much, you kill its spontaneity and relevance and lose the connection to your audience. Not only that, if you lean too far into standardization, you’ll also handicap yourself if you’re trying to create the kind of branding that works better in today’s competitive world.

Branding that's magnetic and magical in its ability to create emotional, hair-raising, goosebump-inducing moments.

Branding that's more unpredictable, raw, strange, personal, beautiful, or just plain fun. Like Latin placeholder copy on a London billboard.

As mentioned above, you don’t have to abandon your classical music branding. It still has a role to play. But now would be a good time to start learning how to play jazz.